A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America by Keith P. Feldman

Abstract

A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America, by Keith P. Feldman. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2015. xi, 314 pp. $24.95 (cloth). A Shadow over presents an analysis that is at times revelatory, exasperating, and--ultimately--provocative. The work interrogates the Post-Civil Rights period, which the author delineates as spanning from i960 to 1985, and the conjuncture that emerged during these years struggles over hegemony in the United States and the transformed relations of rule in Israel and Palestine (2). A Shadow over is a work of discourse analysis. Feldman, whose background is in Ethnic Studies, deconstructs American understandings of Palestine/Israel and its peoples, and deploys these perceptions to examine larger issues of power, international order, and race relations. The book commences with a chapter that scrutinizes the United Nations' 1963 Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which avowed that Zionism represented a of racism and racial discrimination, and the contested discourse that enveloped it. As Feldman reveals, the declaration's explosive statement concerning Zionism opened a fracture between the US and representatives of the Third World, particularly the Research Center (PRC). The PRC defended the declaration by advancing the notion that the Israeli state constituted a form of settler colonialism, which employed racial discrimination to advance and secure expanded settlement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the US representative at the UN, countered the PRC contentions. He posited that like the US, Israel constituted an exceptional pluralist democracy that assimilated minorities into a dominant sociality, which secured freedom and individual rights. The book uses this debate to frame a far more expansive argument. It asserts that the positions expressed by Moynihan reflected a hegemonic US order that delegitimized Third World perspectives and aspirations by equating them with movements within the US (such as the Black Power movement), which resisted the assimilationist paradigm by demanding equal outcomes. The comparison legitimized the use of racial security apparatuses at home by drawing parallels between US domestic race relations and Israeli settlement and normalized Palestinian exclusion, dispossession, and dehumanization (57). If conceived of in Hegelian terms, the book is structured so that the first chapter delineates the thesis (the US sponsored order) and the majority of the remaining chapters elucidate several anti-theses, or what Feldman characterizes as (borrowing from Edward Said) contrapuntal narratives, which challenge this hegemonic thesis. The exception to this is the third chapter, which explains American Jewry's increasing attachment to the state of Israel in the wake of ascendant threats to the Jewish community within the US and abroad. …