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Confronting Zionism

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Drawing on the history of global anticolonial movements and a rich Palestinian intellectual tradition, two leading legal scholars demonstrate that justice in Palestine cannot be realized without co...
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  • 10 November 2026
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Drawing on the history of global anticolonial movements and a rich Palestinian intellectual tradition, two leading legal scholars demonstrate that justice in Palestine cannot be realized without confronting the problem of Zionism

For over one hundred years, Palestinians have struggled for liberation in their homeland. Confronting Zionism takes direct analytical aim at the ideology and institutional structures animating Israel’s brutal rule over Palestinian lives.

With cutting precision and comprehensive evidence, Noura Erakat and John Reynolds argue that Zionism is colonial and racist in essence and practice. Tracing the history of the Zionist project, the establishment of the Israeli settler colonial state and development of its apartheid laws and institutions—plus the damning failure of diplomatic efforts, including the Oslo peace process—this book provides the concepts and tools for understanding the horrors unfolding in Palestine today.

Erakat and Reynolds also provide a clear-eyed assessment of the role of international law, in a world where its relevance is increasingly in question. Taking lessons from ongoing inequalities in South Africa as well as anticolonial and socialist policies across the global south, Confronting Zionism argues that at this crucial historical juncture, decolonization in Palestine predicated on redistribution, reparations and refugee return remains the only just way forward.

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Price: $55.00
Pages: 288
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Imprint: Haymarket Books
Publication Date: 10 November 2026
Trim Size: 7.79 X 5.10 in
ISBN: 9798888907436
Format: Hardcover
BISACs: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Human Rights, POLITICAL SCIENCE / World / Middle Eastern, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Cultural & Ethnic Studies / Middle Eastern Studies, HISTORY / Middle East / Israel & Palestine
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"Noura Erakat and John Reynolds's Confronting Zionism arrives just as many in the West are waking up to the reality of what Israeli apartheid, occupation, and genocide have wrought. It is a learned, cutting, and eminently readable text that guides its readers through the immoralities of Zionism and sketches a post-Zionism drawn from the struggles of the Palestinian people and the global struggle at large. This is an essential book for our era."
—Ta-Nehisi Coates

“One of the historical mistakes committed by the PLO leadership and many intellectuals after the 1970s was failing to center the struggle against Zionism, ending up entangled instead in geographic compromise and an illusion of state formation. This book takes a crucial step in undoing this misguided focus for the movement. Tracing the history of the Palestinian liberation project, this book demonstrates with principled clarity that Zionism is incompatible with justice and freedom.”
—Ghassan Abu-Sittah

“Confronting Zionism is a searing indictment of the Israeli apartheid state and the international legal and political institutions that sustain and normalize this regime. Sober and clear-eyed in their analysis of settler colonialism, yet hopeful about Palestinian resistance and anti-imperial solidarity, Erakat and Reynolds are steady guides in these dark times.”
—Adom Getachew

"Erakat and Reynolds offer useful and provocative suggestions regarding how settler-colonialism can be challenged or eradicated going forward, suggestions that will be completely ignored until there is a major shift in the power balance between the Israeli government and its opponents (globally and locally).  In that sense, Confronting Zionism reads like an excellent prequel, that is, laying the foundation for the refounding of a global strategy to confront the settler-colonial system of oppression and open the possibilities for an emancipatory reality that frees the Palestinian people from the boot on their necks and the ideological subjugation they have suffered."
—Bill Fletcher Jr. for ZNet

"Brimming with rage, hope, and strategy, Confronting Zionism offers an insightful history of ideology, intellectual traditions, popular movements, and law that equips us to act at the crossroads where we now stand. Erakat and Reynolds chart a radical path forward through Zionism’s genocidal present and toward the necessity of Palestinian liberation."
—Sherene Seikaly

"Anyone still not convinced that Zionism is a colonial and racializing project must read this book. Drawing on prodigious historical research and legal analyses, Noura Erakat and John Reynolds show precisely how Zionism was the ideological justification for seizing land and eliminating the indigenous inhabitants—by dispossession, physical annihilation, and historical erasure. Zionism, in other words, was genocidal from its inception, and the consequences of its violent subjugation of Palestinians extends beyond Palestine itself. But they also document more than a century of Palestinian resistance and make the case for the only viable solution: decolonization, a return of the people and the land, and Zionism’s demise."
—Robin D. G. Kelley

"With international recognition of a subservient state of Palestine and the resuscitation of normalization efforts with Israel amid an ongoing genocide, this powerful book by Noura Erakat and John Reynolds offers the clarity that we all need to confront and dismantle Zionism and settler colonialism everywhere. Rather than liberal human rights and international law frameworks that domesticate Palestine, this precise and unapologetic opus definitively argues that the struggle for Palestinian liberation is an anti-=colonial, anticapitalist, global struggle that liberates us all. This book is a must-read for this pivotal time against colonial fascism."
—Harsha Walia

“Both a history of Palestine under international law and a history of international law from the standpoint of Palestine, this book makes the all-too-crucial case that there can be no understanding of Palestine (legal or otherwise) without centering the power dynamics emanating from empire and colonialism. A book you will wish everyone would read.”
—Hazem Jamjoum

“While exposing the coloniality of international law, Erakat and Reynolds argue that it is still a terrain of contestation, not a fait accompli. Through the agency of mass movements and broad anticolonial coalitions fighting for justice, legal tactics can bolster transformative, emancipatory strategies, including in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. This valuable and timely book contextualizes Israel’s genocide, apartheid, and illegal military occupation in the decades-old regime of Zionist settler-colonialism, which has consistently sought the elimination of the Indigenous people of Palestine—piecemeal or wholesale, depending on the circumstances. Only decolonization, then, can end all these manifestations of the root cause.”
—Omar Barghouti

Noura Erakat is Professor of Africana Studies and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), which received the Palestine Book Award and the Bronze Medal for the Independent Publishers Book Award in Current Events/Foreign Affairs. She is a co-founding editor of Jadaliyya and an editorial board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Erakat has served as legal counsel for a Congressional subcommittee in the US House of Representatives, and as legal advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights.  Noura has also produced video documentaries, including "Gaza In Context" and "Black Palestinian Solidarity.” She is a frequent commentator in television, print, and radio media.

John Reynolds is Associate Professor of Law at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. His research and writing focuses on the relationships between international law and colonialism, racism/apartheid and political economy. He is the author of the award-winning Empire, Emergency and International Law (Cambridge University Press) and a member of the editorial collective of the Third World Approaches to International Law Review journal.