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Settler colonialism of accountants: Dalia Alazzeh, Shahzad Uddin, ‘Accountability and sovereignty: Financial controls in the Palestine-Israel Indigenous-settler relationship’, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 101, 2025, #102784 »

Transnational antisettler solidarities: Benjamin Schreier, Review of Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality by Zahi Zalloua, symploke, 32, 1-2, 2024, pp. 477-480

15Dec24

Excerpt: Zahi Zalloua’s Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause (2023) is well worth reading. In chapters on identification and surveillance, occupation and colonization of thought, ressentiment and paranoia, and sovereignty, the book offers an urgent, vitally intelligent critical-theoretical take on “Palestine”—I scare-quote the word to mark its overdetermined multivalence, its simultaneous signification as subjectivity, ethnicity, conflict, political-cultural cause, national struggle, etc.—that avoids the common identitarian traps. Zalloua explains that the book is a sequel of sorts to 2017’s Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question, where he takes on postwar philosophy’s embrace of an idealization of “the Jew” as the paradigm for ethical inquiry. In that earlier book he incisively argued that while intellectuals imagined “the Jewish question” as accessing the universal in figuring Christian Enlightenment’s Other, this guilty phantasm was in its exceptionalism ideologically cognate with Zionism’s “exclusionary” settler colonial project; in response, Zalloua elaborated the “Palestinian question,” “forclose[d]” by Zionism, as a way of rendering conspicuous “the others” of that idealized “Other” (Zalloua 2017, 7). Here he extends that discussion. Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause begins with a discussion of “Indigenous Reason,” an adaptation of Achille Mbembe’s “black reason” (2017). Mbembe provides Zalloua a way to analyze Palestinian indigeneity without relying on the same zero-sum historicist concept of identity that Zionism relies on for its project to legitimize an exclusivist Jewish claim to the historical land of Palestine. Zalloua emphasizes the biopolitical core of Zionism: that Palestinians’ “sheer presence is an existential threat and an offense to” Zionism’s setter-colonial “demographic advantage” and supremacist “right to belong.” This is the phantasmatic force supporting Israel’s vast machinery of Palestinian population control. As he sharpens the point, “In the Zionist order of things, for Jewish life to matter, Palestinian life must un-matter” (11). Evading this biopolitical trap and the pissing match between historical subjects presumably bearing opposing rights to belong that it inevitably entails—and which has issued in Oslo’s legitimation of the two-state solution’s “ghettoized sovereignty” (134), a “cynical tool” (131) that “ideologically rebrand[s]” the “racist” status quo as an “ideal” (135)—Zalloua pursues a critique of indigeneity that does not demand allegiance to, or rely on the conceptual security blanket of, the chimerical purity of an imagined “pristine time before the settler,” a construction he borrows from Frank B. Wilderson III’s Afropessimist challenge to ideological insularity and separatism (2017, 3; of course it’s worth noting that originalist historicist fantasies are central also to Zionism’s own legitimation project). 


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