Rethinking the Palestine Question: The Apartheid Paradigm

The primary purpose of this essay is to argue for a shift from the "occupied territories" paradigm to an "apartheid" paradigm as a way for antiracist intellectuals, especially in the United States, to analyze the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine. Such a paradigm shift has the potential to help set in motion a process that could ultimately circumvent or dislodge the apparently "immovable object" of unconditional U.S. support for Israel spoken of by Helena Cobban. The secondary purpose is to urge Arab Palestinian intellectuals to drop ethnically exclusive Arab Palestinian nationalism as the basis for the liberation struggle and replace it with a territorial Palestinian nationalism analogous to the non-ethnic South African nationalism of the African National Congress during the struggle against apartheid.

Mark Marshall is a Ph.D. candidate in Middle East and Islamic studies at the University of Toronto.