Edward Said ends his introduction to Orientalism with a plea for “unlearning”: “If [Orientalism] stimulates a new kind of dealing with the Orient, indeed if it eliminates the ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ altogether, then we shall have advanced a little in the process of what Raymond Williams has called the ‘unlearning’ of ‘the inherent dominative mode.’”[1] Unlearning Orientalism, exposing and dismantling its racist grammar, is tantamount to destroying the meanings of “Occident” and “Orient,” since the “East” is at its core nothing more than a phantasmatic projection of the “West.” Unlearning as a critical pedagogical practice holds the promise of liberating us from ontological segregations and the most persistent of binarisms, that of the civilized (the European) and the savage (the non-European).
In my essay, I want to expand on unlearning Orientalism by focusing more precisely on Zionism, on the many challenges of unlearning Zionism in fascist times. The new McCarthyism that has emerged in the United States as a brutal response to the pro-Palestine solidarity movement must be seen as a child of Zionism, as an accelerated effect of an institutionalized Zionist learning. For over a century, Zionism’s sanctioned settler narratives have mediated if not overdetermined the representation of Palestinians as lesser than humans, as violent creatures and nomads with no claims to the Holy Land. Learning the grammar of Zionism is learning to see a Zionist Israel as an unimpeachable authority, one that rightly controls the bodies of Palestinians and the flow of information on everything and anything related to Palestine/Israel. The consequences are chilling and deadly (for Palestinians). In colonial parlance, Palestinians lack ontological credentials; they do not qualify as human beings, let alone credible subjects of knowledge. That is to say, they must be narrated because they are untrustworthy, incapable, beyond the pale.
Palestinian journalists covering Gaza—witnessing and reporting on their people’s struggles under an ongoing genocide—become key targets for Zionist cruelty precisely because they dare to narrate. Making a mockery of the Geneva Conventions, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declares journalists to be militants without any credible evidence, naming Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif “the head of a Hamas terrorist cell,” for example, thereby sealing his fate, his assassination by airstrike on his media tent (murdering 5 other journalists in the process). When it comes to Palestinians, Zionist knowledge production puts the ends before the means, resorting again and again to ghastly lies. Or to put it more pointedly, Zionist fabulations serve a necropolitical, fascist agenda. They kill Palestinians—epistemically and biologically.
In today’s fascist times, Israel’s brazenness knows no shame; its impunity meets no limits. We get “milestone after milestone of cruelty.” The situation is utterly absurd: You bring up genocide as a colonial problem—and a problem for humanity (as construed, at least, by Western powers and epistemes)—and you become the anti-Semitic problem, made into a problem for Jews (even if you’re Jewish and standing for Palestine). The same manipulative Zionist/Western gaze that judges and condemns you also covers over the criminality of Israel’s deeds, suppressing the colonial situation from public purview and scrutiny. The indefensible genocide is not on trial, but you are. It is your disposition that requires transformation and clearing. Your speech for Palestinian safety, dignity, and liberation is disfigured and converted into hate speech. And it is safe to say that committing to unlearning Zionism puts you in the crosshairs of any institution brandishing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism as a standard of judgment (this IHRA definition—which, among other egregious missteps, conflates criticism of Israel with criticism of the Jewish people—is probably one of the first things to unlearn).
Rather than recognizing Palestine as a state without connecting statehood to the total dismantling of the illegal settlements, the right of return, and reparations, it might be more politically generative for France and other Western countries to explicitly rebuke the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, so that anti-Zionism no longer functions as Israel’s boogeyman, what is imagined as laying the grounds for an uber-Auschwitz. Undoing Israel’s dishonest conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism would be a game-changer in unlearning Zionism. The IHRA definition is as much about making Israel less vulnerable (to principled objections) as it is about making its detractors more vulnerable (to outlandish objections). Troubling or suspending the IHRA definition would remove from Israel’s linguistic arsenal the world-cancelling charge of anti-Semitism, which it deploys to control and bludgeon its multiplying foes, silence anti-Zionists committed to justice in Palestine, and justify its right to self-defense as a divinely mandated right to commit genocide in Gaza.
We can see the new McCarthyites as the gatekeepers of knowledge production about Palestine/Israel. The fact of this new McCarthyism attests to the reality that Palestinians have been, by some measure, successful in narrating the ferocity of their colonial situation since Said’s 1984 essay “Permission to Narrate.” The Zionist framing of Palestinians is losing its hold on Western populations; stereotypes of Palestinians (as intrinsically backward, fanatic, violent, homophobic, patriarchal, etc.) are fooling fewer and fewer people, especially among the global North’s younger generations. Zionist groups are unable to maintain the anti-Palestinian hegemony on their own. A philosemitic McCarthyism comes to the rescue. It enjoys the full backing of the anti-Palestinian political class and craven corporate media. Wining back support for Israel is the collective objective.
Mainstream press is a disaster. Rather than speaking truth to power and speaking truth “about power,” journalists and pundits cozy up to power, recycle their talking points, and amplify the Zionist vision of Gaza coming out of Tel Aviv. For example, rather than treating prime minister Netanyahu skeptically, as you would any wanted war criminal, media across the political spectrum shamelessly cover him as an honorable head of state and welcome guest affectionately referred to by his nickname, Bibi, not as a genocide denier, a starvation denier, a “pathological liar,” an abomination for international law. Learning Zionism makes this gesture appear “facile”; unlearning Zionism makes it appear “difficult.”[2] We have to unlearn (the lies of) corporate media. We have to make their lies more difficult to admit into our collective unconscious.
As US polls repeatedly point out, Zionists are losing the symbolic battle over Palestine. Witness the global civil society’s outrage at Israel’s crimes—whence the use of physical force coupled with the charge of anti-Semitism. But there is a clear display of impotence in the brutality of the Western governments’ crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters (who were warning about Israel’s genocidal campaign, warning about everything that has in fact come to pass since October 7). And here the insult is greater than the injury. This point cannot be overstressed. The weaponization of the anti-Semitism charge is world-cancelling: it can get you doxed, ostracized, humiliated, fired, deported, jailed, or even murdered. In politics, opposing Israel—positioning yourself against Zionist expansionism—is career suicide. The Zionist lobby-group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) plays an integral role in securing near cross-party unanimity when it comes to Israel. If you’re pro-Palestine, you’re plagued ab initio by defamation.[3] You’re anti-Semitic if you criticize Israel; you’re anti-Semitic if you criticize the Zionist lobby whose mission is to target detractors of Israel from the Democratic Party. Such bogus charges leveled by pro-Israel advocacy groups were never meant to protect Jewish lives from the scourge of anti-Semitism but to subdue pro-Palestinian voices and render the anti-colonial Left toxic (because it has a “Jewish problem”); this tactic of intimidation constitutes a rhetorical form of counterinsurgency. And Trump can’t take full credit for this anti-Palestinian fascist program. We cannot forget that it was the Biden-Harris administration that helped normalize such anti-Palestinian sentiment in the political class toward conscientious objectors to this fully American-sponsored genocide. Resist Palestine, by any means necessary, is the Zionist lobby’s motto. Unlearn Zionism is our cri de guerre.
But what does it really mean to be winning the symbolic struggle (the struggle over ideas) while undergoing a genocide with no actual mobilization for ending it coming from Western political leaders? The answer lies, I believe, in determining what we are exactly fighting for when we agitate for the Palestinian cause and jam Zionist ways. Are we crying and raging for a cessation of war—that is, an end to genocide? Are we also clamoring for the liberation of the Palestinian people, for a decolonized Palestine? Is the latter question a natural extension of the former? Or does addressing the former question in a liberal fashion risk occluding the necessity of decolonization and Palestinian liberation? Toward answering these questions, I want to think Edward Said’s pleas for unlearning and permission to narrate together, as part of a double logic. Unlearning is crucial for Palestinian counter-narratives and counter-knowledge to take hold and produce material change. New narration/knowledge without the labor of unlearning hits a wall.
This is why pro-Zionist forces in the US and across the world consider unlearning a greater threat than learning. Unlearning provokes a greater fear insofar as learning, the eruption of and exposure to the new, can always be neutralized by disavowal, or, to be more precise, by the logic of fetishist disavowal. We can see this logic at play among college board members—of the liberal stripe, at least—when they confront with utter amazement their students’ call to divest from Israel and/or the military-industrial complex, which is blatantly profiting from the total destruction of the Strip: We (liberal board members) know very well that Palestinians are suffering, that Israel may be committing genocide, but all the same we don’t believe that divesting from Israel or military companies is conducive to the economic well-being of our institution. Justification: there is no consensus that genocide—this genocide—should trigger an action from the board, and, by the way, it might be anti-Semitic to single out Israel (the gift of IHRA). The evocation of anti-Semitism secures a surplus-jouissance; We’re not only good stewards of the college’s endowment (not even genocide can distract us from the bottom line), we’re fighting the good fight against a new wave of anti-Semitism. Students are misled, caught up in the moment; we’re the adults in the room. For these figures of relative authority, submitting to the Zionist frame provides moral enjoyment—even a hint of courage.
“Fetishist disavowal” is also an attempt to deal with anxiety. Talk of divestment—and the national attention that it might bring with it—is anxiety-provoking. Fetishist disavowal comes to the rescue. Fetishist disavowal splits the ego between knowing and not knowing; new information has been admitted into consciousness but its symbolic impact has been minimized and not fully integrated into the individual’s symbolic reality. As Slavoj Žižek observes, there is a willful ignorance in fetishist disavowal: “‘I know, but I don’t want to know that I know, so I don’t know.’ I know it, but I refuse to fully assume the consequences of this knowledge, so that I can continue acting as if I don’t know.”[4] Board members or trustees refuse to fully assume the consequences of Palestinocide—the colonial erasure of Palestinians—so that they can continue acting as if they don’t know.
Very few are willing to assume the consequences of this terrible knowledge. College boards are of course not unique in their disavowal. Edward Said draws a sharp contrast between the trauma of the Jewish people and the traumas of non-Europeans that never mark the collective psyche of the West in any significant manner: “We allow justly that the Holocaust has permanently altered the consciousness of our time: Why do we not accord the same epistemological mutation in what imperialism has done, and what Orientalism continues to do?”[5] This by no means requires that we minimize, trivialize, or relativize the horrors of the Shoah (another favored accusation by the anti-Palestinian camp). The Holocaust, and the “Never Again” injunction that it provoked, rightly affected public consciousness; but slavery, colonialism, and the endless wars in the Middle East have not. And this is a problem. We address the problem not by diminishing the importance of the Shoah and its consequences on our collective psyche, but by scrutinizing a racial logic that extends moral outrage to some while denying it to so many others. Gaza sits at this threshold, pointing to an ethical injustice, to a political failure in the Western cultural imaginary.
The scandal: an ongoing Palestinian genocide hasn’t altered the consciousness of most of America’s political leaders, its liberal and economic elite, along with the vast majority of its journalists and pundits in corporate media. And, contemptibly, Holocaust memory is actively deployed by pro-Israel groups to prevent such alteration from taking place.
Though liberal Zionists don’t speak in unison, polls show that many don’t want Palestinians as neighbors inside or outside the Green Line. In the words of Ilan Pappé, “their basic wish is for Jewish citizens to live in a democratic and pluralist society from which Arabs are excluded.” They’ve accepted the government’s goal of ethnic cleansing, euphemistically referred to as “transfer” or “free choice.”[6] Humanitarian reason provides these liberals a lifeline (it’s a humanitarian crisis, not a colonial crisis), a way to differentiate themselves from the criminal Zionism of the Netanyahus, Ben-Gvirs, and Smotrichs of the world. This differentiation (between Ziofascists and liberal Zionists) is ideology at its purest. All Israeli political candidates who could vie for the prime ministership (including Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid) champion the illegal practice of annexation and share the dream/nightmare of a Greater Israel. Liberal Zionists writ large are getting the prime ministers that they want, at least when it comes to Palestinians.
Two fetishes—first, that of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state that must be protected, and second, that Israel’s problem lies in its far-right rot (incarnated by Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich)—help the liberal Zionist cope with the horror happening on the other side of the Green Line. So we are not only dealing with the classic scenario of fetishist disavowal, in which the object/fetish of self-defense protects me against this knowledge of the “traumatic reality” of the genocide (i.e., I know very well that Palestinians are suffering, but nevertheless I believe in Israeli security). Another scenario unfolds. The fact of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich’s Ziofascism makes the knowledge of the Gaza War less traumatic. Acknowledging their “bad” Zionism helps me secure my “good” Zionism. Alenka Zupančič astutely unpacks this mutating logic of disavowal, “I know well [about Netanyahu’s cabinet unsatiable desire for the Gaza War], and that’s why I can keep my belief and enjoy this belief [in a liberal Zionist Israel] undisturbed.”[7] Consequently, liberal Zionists avoid a reckoning with the raw reality of the genocide.
Unlearning Zionism means learning to challenge Zionism in all its manifestations and dimensions: Zionism as a colonial ideology, as a form of cognitive mapping, and as an anti-Palestinian libidinal economy. I am not describing aspirational Zionisms (ethical Zionism, cultural Zionism, progressive Zionism, etc.) but actually existing Zionism: the ferocious Zionism of the Occupation,[8] of settler colonialism, of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Pace Jacqueline Rose, I understand this belligerent Zionism as an “insult,” a “dirty word.”[9] I can fully sympathize with the Jewish desire for safety and belonging (what Zionism powerfully and authoritatively speaks to), but not Zionism’s fantasy of exclusionary sovereignty and its eliminationist logic. Understanding Zionism (the passion for Zion) doesn’t invalidate my anti-Zionism but explains it. Anti-Zionists are not indifferent to Zionism’s appeal—we repeatedly speak up for Jewish security and against Jewish hatred—but we take issue with Zionism’s phantasmatic redemption narrative (which is reliant on the notion that the ends justify the means).
Unlearning Zionism takes stock of what a Zionist Israel does. Actually existing Zionism embraces all of its oppressive tools and technologies of domination. The term Ziofascism describes the deep affinity between Zionism and fascism, attesting to a system whose modus operandi is the oppression of the Indigenous Palestinian population for the benefits of a colonial body, who dreams of, and actively works toward, a Greater Israel—a Zionist Israel from the river to the sea, cleansed and eradicated of Palestinians. Unlike liberal Zionists, Ziofascists are more honest about their rapacious and murderous ambitions—to push Palestinians further and further into the Fanonian “zone of nonbeing,” where asphyxiation of the enemy is the state’s default mode of (non)relationality.[10] Immersed in Blut und Boden ideology, Ziofascists don’t bother with a Greater Israel with a humane face. Their right-wing politicians run on apartheid and carceral logics. Indeed, the cruder the violence (a violence uninterested in hiding itself) the better.
Unlearning Zionism involves a set of anti-identitarian practices—radical self-criticism and self-reflection. Zionism obviously affects Jewish people (since it purports to speak in their name, whence the anti-Zionist Jewish rebuttal, “Not in my name”) but also concerns Christian Zionists like Mike Huckabee, US ambassador to Israel—who infamously said in Zionist parlance, “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian”—and anyone touched consciously or unconsciously by Orientalist lenses, tropes, and logics. The ontological ramification of unlearning Zionism for anyone initially committed to it (at varying levels of intensity) is not to be minimized. George Yancy captures the process I have in mind with what he describes as “un-suturing,” an undoing of your racist habits of mind and rooted being.
Zionist suturing entails a denial of relational ontology, a mode of being-with Palestinians. You close up and close off identities: the Zionist settler is the measure of all things. Through its Orientalist framing of the Palestinian problem, Zionism teaches the Jewish people and the Western public at large to be comfortably sealed in their identity and align themselves with the (pro-Israel) status quo, with no interest in being otherwise, in thinking otherwise (if that otherwise entails less privilege, less priority in the existing racial order of things). The ontology of actually existing Zionism is fundamentally narcissistic, not relational.
There is no care for the Palestinian other, no affective investment in the liveability and grievability of Palestinian life, without a care for self-un-suturing, without fully committing to a de-Zionized identity and a de-Zionizing of the world. What needs rejecting is Israel’s state-sanctioned form of mourning—a politicized mourning, an overdetermined relation to Jewish grief. As Gabriel Winant rightfully warned at the outset of Israel’s merciless retaliation, Hamas’s victims are “pre-grieved,” pre-interpreted to justify Palestinian elimination. Zionism continues to tell the Western world how to grieve Jewish lives, how to do so by systematically dis-privileging Palestinian losses: how to un-mourn Palestinian lives. “Israel’s grief machine” instrumentalizes Jewish pain, turning it into colonial power (enacted as genocidal violence). It interpellates the Western public as anti-Palestinian grievers, setting the psychic and ideological grounds for (the enjoyment of) the revenge genocide. To grieve democratically is to unlearn Zionism, to upend Zionist operations. Unlearning Zionism creates the conditions for declining that murderous interpellation (the making of “Jews, of all people, into genocidaires”), for not recognizing Israel’s authority in matters of Jewish grieving and Palestinian un-grieving. It alerts us to the horrific politics of this neglected relationality.
When, as Yancy observes, “the body trembles in its contingency, responsibility, and restlessness,” a relationality that was previously foreclosed and denied can now be had and nourished.[11] Yancy’s language bears a resemblance to Jacques Derrida’s musings on hospitality: “To be hospitable is to let oneself be overtaken [surprendre], to be ready to not be ready, if such is possible, to let oneself be overtaken, to not even let oneself to be overtaken, to be surprised, in a fashion almost violent… precisely where one is not ready to receive—and not only not yet ready but not ready, unprepared in a mode that is not even that of the ‘not yet.’”[12] While Derrida does not use the word habitus, the paradoxical injunction to be ready to not be ready is all about training the body and mind to feel something, to desire for a certain kind of relationality.
But unlike a “typical” habitus, as Pierre Bourdieu delineates it, which is more concerned with self-protection, a Derridean habitus is marked by a traumatophilic sensibility, geared not toward familiarizing the unfamiliar, but toward making us feel less comfortable, more like a “fish out of water,” more receptive—and by implication more vulnerable—to unforeseeable and potentially deroutinizing encounters. To be hospitable to the Palestinian other is not to remain the same but to let yourself be un-sutured, so that you welcome the possibility of being altered and put into crisis by that unapproved other, and by extension the possibility of becoming less whole, less sovereign, less rooted.
Today, to be anti-fascist—or less fascist—is to unlearn Zionism, to push through its many layers and deflections, and take a position against genocide in the name of Palestinian survival and liberation. It is to call out Zionist doublespeak. We must jam the operations of Zionism’s most cherished sayings, which proclaim the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) and the state it supports to be “the most moral army in the world” and “the only democracy in the Middle East.” We must be the mirror that reflects them back to their propagators as “a most sadistic army like every other sadistic army in the world”[13] and “the only fake democracy in the Middle East.” This is relearning speaking truth to power and about power.
To become hospitable to the Palestinian cause is life altering, an ethos that cuts through ethical, political, aesthetic, and epistemic considerations. Unlearning Zionism as anti-fascist practice of the self is to affirm an unsettling hospitality, to un-suture myself (the self who is rewarded economically and libidinally from living a Zionist-friendly life) and take up the Palestinian cause as a beyond the pleasure principle. Living in fascist times, when genocide denialism is rampant, this disposition will you make unpopular with power, subject you to greater risks, and keep you hypervigilant, compelling or prodding you to reset or reaffirm your priorities.
Notes:
[1] Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 25th anniversary edition (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 28.
[2] Michel Foucault, “Practicing Criticism,” trans. Alan Sheridan et al. in Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 155.
[3] Ironically, it is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Zionist organization, that works tirelessly to defame Palestinians and their supporters in the US.
[4] Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 53.
[5] Said, Orientalism, xxii.
[6] Witness Benjamin Netanyahu’s grotesque double-speak: “President Trump had a brilliant vision. It’s called free choice. If people want to stay, they can stay, but if they want to leave, they should be able to leave. It shouldn’t be a prison. It should be an open place, and give people a free choice.” For this pair of fascists, giddy on imperialist power and belligerence, Palestinian freedom takes the path of Palestinian erasure: the freedom to become a (refugee) problem for/of another state. The only way to jam Netanyahu/Trump’s perverse logic is to overidentify with every part of that statement. Yes, Palestinians should be allowed to freely choose their course of action: they should be able to choose between staying in Gaza or exercising their international right of return. They can stay where they are under safe conditions while Israel and its genocidal enablers rebuild every inch of the annihilated Strip. Or Palestinians can choose to return to their ancestral homes in what is now Israel proper, from where many Gazans were criminally dispossessed and displaced during the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba. Yes, Gaza shouldn’t be a “prison,” or, more precisely, a Zionist concentration camp. So let’s work to change this colossal injustice by collectively agitating for devastating economic sanctions against Israel until it lifts its illegal siege of Gaza.
[7] Alenka Zupančič, Disavowal (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024), 80.
[8] The more “radical” liberal Zionists insist on dealing with the Occupation as did hundreds of Israeli and American public figures, in August 2023, with an open letter titled, “The Elephant in the Room,” calling for the Israeli government to address the reality of the illegal apartheid. But what an exclusive focus on Israeli apartheid flagrantly ignores is the Zionist settler-colonial framework, what I argue is “the bigger elephant in the room” (Zahi Zalloua, Fanon, Žižek, and the Violence of Resistance [New York: Bloomsbury, 2025], 93–95). A settler-colonial analytic casts apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide as strategies of elimination built-in the Zionist project ab initio. There is no unlearning Zionism without unlearning the meaning of 1967 (the Six-Day War) as the problem to be resolved. Before October 7, many liberal Zionists argued that Israel should end its Occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem and should also grant equal rights to the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Unlearning Zionism reorients us to 1948: the problem is 1948, the Nakba, the creation of a Zionist Israel (with the Balfour Declaration already hinting at this problem to come). The liberal misdiagnosis of the problem is part of the problem that unlearning Zionism must return to.
[9] Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 11.
[10] A March 2025 poll in Israel bears out the reality of this normalized fascism. As Haaretz reports: “A majority of 56 percent of Jews supported the ‘transfer (forced expulsion) of Arab citizens of Israel to other countries.’ And when asked directly whether they agreed with the position that the IDF, ‘when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, namely, to kill all its inhabitants?’ nearly half, 47 percent, agreed.”
[11] George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America, third edition (New York: Bloomsbury, 2025), 337.
[12] Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 361.
[13] As reports from human right organizations documenting the unprecedented level of Israel’s carnage in the Strip multiply, we might be tempted to say, “the most sadistic army in contemporary times.” This formulation, however, would reinscribe Isael in a dubious exceptionalist discourse. The ferocious levels of cruelty and sadism displayed in the IOF’s military operations and practices are undeniable, but they are worldly in nature, as Said might say, not evidence of an indelible evil. We must stay clear of the kind of colonial grammar that a Zionist Israel has mercilessly deployed against Palestinians. Metaphysical hyperboles, which remove us from the earthly, historical, and dynamic field of power, don’t serve the cause of unlearning Zionism. I owe this point to Nicole Simek.
The Author
