Confronting Zionism: Decolonizing Palestine and Building the World Anew

by Noura Erakat, John Reynolds

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.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

Published November 10, 2026

About the author

Noura Erakat is a is a Palestinian-American activist, university professor, legal scholar, and human rights attorney.

Her research interests include human rights law, humanitarian law, national security law, refugee law, social justice, and critical race theory.

She is the author of Justice for Some: Law as Politics in the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019).

She is currently an associate professor at Rutgers University, specializing in international studies and is a Co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya, an electronic magazine on the Middle East that combines scholarly expertise and local knowledge.

Erakat earned her J.D. and undergraduate degrees from the University of California at Berkeley (Phi Beta Kappa) and a LLM in National Security from Georgetown University Law Center (Distinction & Dean’s List).

She currently serves on the board of the Institute for Policy Studies; on the board of the Arab Studies Institute; is a Policy Advisor to Al-Shabaka; serves of the Editorial Committee of the Journal for Palestine Studies; and is a founding board member of the DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival.

Erakat has appeared on CBS News, CNN International with Becky Anderson, CNN with Don Lemon, MSNBC’s “Up With Chris Hayes,” "All In With Chris Hayes," "Ronan Farrow Daily," Fox’s “The O’ Reilly Factor,” NBC’s “Politically Incorrect,” PBS News Hour, NPR, BBC World Service, Democracy Now, and Al-Jazeera America, Arabic, and English. Her publications have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The LA Review of Books, The LA Times, The Nation, USA Today, The Hill, Foreign Policy, Jezebel, Al Ahram English, Al Shabaka, MERIP, Fair Observer, Middle East Eye, The Interdependent, IntLawGrrls, The Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, and Jadaliyya.

Erakat's scholarly publications include: “US v. ICRC: Customary International Humanitarian Law and Universal Jurisdiction” in the Denver Journal of International Law and Policy; "New Imminence in the Time of Obama: The Impact of Targeted Killings on the Law of Self-Defense" in the Arizona Law Review; and "Overlapping Refugee Legal Regimes: Closing the Protection Gap During Secondary Forced Displacement," in the Oxford Journal of International Refugee Law. Her multimedia productions include the Black Palestinian Solidarity video and website as well as the Gaza In Context Pedagogical Project, featuring a short documentary.

Reviews

[AAO · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are books you read and already know, before you even finish, that you want to re-read. They are loaded, packed, with information and detail that you want to take in very slowly, and analyze bit by delicious bit. This is one such book. It is going to be a classic, God willing. I want to congratulate its authors on this excellent achievement. I wolfed it down even as I paced myself. #MustRead #NonFiction

If you ask for a summary from an LLM it may tell you this is an anthology of essays. If you read it, you’ll discover that it is not. Not a book for the faint of heart. You have to read it with the same level of attention to detail as the authors seem to have employed in its writing. I thought it was, in a word: superb. I always say good writing is good thinking, and the authors evince what I thought was very good #LegalStudies thinking. Obviously, I think at least one is a law professor. It made so much sense to me.

Here’s a summary: The book is written in six chapters—nine if you count the intro and epilogue.

Introduction: The authors define Zionism as an exclusionary racial and #SettlerColonialism project premised on territorial accumulation by dispossession and native elimination. This isn’t simply Jewish communal existence as its proponent propaganda pretends. They indirectly establish the case in the very intro, but then spend the book establishing the legal facts. It sounds like they are arguing, but they are really just letting the facts kinda build the case, fact by hard fact. Successfully, I should say.
Chapter 1: It Is Something Colonial — Details early colonial land theft, labor exclusion policies (replicating the apartheid model), and mass ethnic cleansing. Entire books have been written about these, but here it’s really treated from the legal, #MiddleEastHistory perspective.
Chapter 2: Anti-Zionism as Antiracism — Talks about the intellectual history of approaches to expose Zionism as masked racism. They show that #AntiZionism is organically an antiracist praxis aimed at dismantling settler-colonial supremacy.
Chapter 3: Scaling the Oslo Fortress — In this chapter they argue that peace was never about that. It was rather, and for all intents and purposes and outcomes, a "sovereignty trap" that simply disarmed international diplomatic critiques of Zionism, allowing it to go on with its steady racist enterprise. In this chapter, the authors outline how Israel leveraged this framework to accelerate settlement expansion, construct the annexation wall, impose a permanent siege on Gaza, and pass the 2018 Nation-State Law. #PoliticalScience
Chapter 4: The Crime of Apartheid — I’m finding I’m just kinda re-explaining rather clear chapter titles, and truly that is what the book is like; it’s well structured like that. In this chapter the authors evaluate how #HumanRights organizations seem to have adopted the apartheid framework. They critique narrow liberal legal analyses decoupling apartheid from settler colonialism and racial ideology, linking the “cold violence” shortcomings to “hot violence” and genocide.
Chapter 5: We Charge Genocide — It is the hardest of the historical chapters to revisit because of the subject, even though it is a mere primer of the topic. Very obviously about the post-October 2023 assault on Gaza and South Africa's landmark 2024 application at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). What happened in Gaza is sickening and the mere suggestion of calling into doubt what it was, I found revolting. “If the campaign against Gaza is not genocide, then what is?” Indeed. And as hard as it was, I would read it and read it again if it meant that one never forgot the imperative of demanding justice for genocide now and forward. #InternationalLaw
Chapter 6: Spoon by Spoon: Decolonizing Palestine — This chapter’s title echoes a prison break by six Palestinian prisoners from one of the worst Zionist torture dungeons. Spoon by spoon, and in this chapter, the authors outline a vision for material, political, and ideological #Decolonization that goes beyond superficial legal equality or two-state partition models. #Palestine #FreePalestine
Epilogue: The authors’ call to action.

My more general reactions:

I thought the authors were so right about “peace processes” in general. It’s not cynicism; they’ve really repeatedly been little more than a sovereignty trap. Palestinians give something up only to realize that the other side hasn’t—indeed, the Zionism machine keeps even increasing its resources and grows worse than ever.

Also, things fell into place for me as the authors got closer and closer to the issue’s history I had witnessed. There were a lot of moments where I thought, “oh, so that’s what that was,” the authors are right. It was satisfying in that sense.