Racing Religion in the Palestine-Israel Discourse

Race is a Western political project. Religious freedom is a Christian political project. The linkages between the two enabled European nations and their settlers across the globe to condemn natives, slaves, and non-European immigrants to inferior status, and in turn legalize control of their lands and bodies.1 The consequent race-religion systems of power and privilege, which inform Rabiat Akande's thesis, offer valuable insights into the racialized boundaries of contemporary Palestine-Israel discourse in the United States.2 Specifically, the racialization of Muslims and Arabs as terrorism supporters and presumptively anti-Semitic subjects them to censorship, harassment, and discrimination when they advocate for the human rights of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This essay argues that infringements on Muslims and Arabs’ dissenting speech and political activism is another way in which the racialization of religion produces a mutually constitutive form of discrimination.


The Social Construction of the Racial Muslim
In the Middle East, Europeans' race-religion political projects arose from a purported "clash of civilizations" between Christian and Islamic societies. 6In contrast to Africans, Indigenous Americans, and Far East Asians where physical distinctiveness from the European phenotype is dispositive in the racialization process, religious identity is determinative in the racialization of Muslims.Thus, for Middle Easterners such as Turks, Syrians, or Palestinians, who may appear phenotypically European, their real or presumed Muslim identity imputes upon them inferiority, which in turn justifies myriad forms of violence and material harms.I describe this process as the social construction of "the racial Muslim." 7he transnational reach of Western racialization projects ties the experiences of non-European immigrants in the United States to foreign policy with their nations of origin.From the 1970s to 1990s, for example, Arab Americans were collectively blamed by the public and U.S. government for the Gulf countries' oil embargo. 8dditionally, the American media frequently portrayed terrorists as Arab, and more specifically Palestinian, while, in sharp contrast, the domestic terrorism of white males such as Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, and members of the Weather Underground has been treated as individual criminality. 9he 9/11 terrorist attacks expanded racialized collective punishment to all Muslims, most acutely in the case of Middle Easterners and South Asians. 10Anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia became normalized in political discourse, media, legislation, national security practices, and executive actions. 11At the same time that anti-Semitic or anti-Black racial slurs are no longer acceptable in mainstream forums, Muslims continue to be frequently called "terrorists" in workplaces, schools, political campaigns, and public spaces without negative repercussions. 12 Worse yet, conservative politicians compete for votes based on who can be more Islamophobic in opposing the construction of mosques, supporting mass deportation of Muslim immigrants, shutting down Muslim American charities, and outright banning Muslims from entering the United States. 13dopting the "civilizing mission" that legitimized British and French colonization, the founders of a European Jewish settler colonial project-taking the land of the native Palestinians for purposes of creating an exclusively Jewish homeland-intentionally framed it as a civilizational conflict to obtain European nations' support. 14What made this racial project particularly salient to Americans after World War II is its Judeo-Christian political framing.Anti-Semitism and anti-Catholic bias in the first half of the twentieth century sparked interfaith civil rights efforts, which coupled with American sympathy for Jews after the Holocaust, expanded American identity from Protestant to Judeo-Christian.This in turn expanded the top rung of the racio-religious hierarchy to include Jewish and Catholic Americans of European origin as socially white.It also conspicuously excluded numerous religions indigenous to Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Middle East-despite growing numbers of immigrants from those regions after immigration national origin quotas were removed in 1965. 15cing Palestinians as Terrorists and Presumptively Anti-Semitic Adopting the clash of civilizations cultural script, U.S. media portrayed Palestinians as irrational savages and terrorists when they defended lands on which they had lived for centuries.The European founders of Israel, in stark contrast, were depicted as industrious and brave.Americans compared them to the Puritans who founded "God's American Israel" fleeing religious persecution, further justifying Israel's disproportionately violent response to Palestinian resistance.That Americans were already socialized to accept forceful quashing of rebellions by Indigenous people made them amenable to the Israeli claims of moral superiority. 16eligious political projects, established in the form of Manifest Destiny, not only expanded colonialist missionary work, as shown by Akande, but also animated Christian Evangelicals' support for Zionism.Racism mixed with Christian theology underpinned Americans' support for Israel; specifically, the requirement that Jews must return to Palestine as the precursor for the second coming of Jesus. 17Just as Muslims were the antagonists to Europe's Crusaders, so too were the Palestinian natives to contemporary Christian Zionists' desire to establish Israel.Tellingly, Muslim identity has been erroneously ascribed to the sizeable Christian Palestinian community until the present day, demonstrating the predominance of Islam as a foil in Western nations' (and by extension Israel) race-religion projects in the Middle East.
A telltale sign of racism is collective punishment of a group for the wrongful acts of individuals who share the same racial identity.In the case of the 2.3 million Palestinian civilians completely blockaded by Israel in Gaza since 2005, Israeli President Isaac Herzog expressed this racial logic five days after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack: "It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved.It's absolutely not true.They could have risen up.They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d'état." 18If Herzog's reasoning was invoked to justify collectively punishing all Americans for the U.S. government's killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, Western nations would categorically reject it. 19Yet, these same nations supported Israel's violent collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza.
After the assault on Gaza, news headlines in U.S. mainstream media were replete with euphemisms and the passive voice when referencing Palestinians, downplaying their immense suffering at the hands of the Israeli military. 20When reporting on Jewish Israelis, however, journalists were careful to describe with specificity the atrocities committed by Hamas both in the use of words and active verb tense. 21Two contrasting racialized narratives simultaneously dehumanized Palestinians and humanized Israelis: by February 2024, (1) thirty-three thousand Palestinians had died in Gaza with no connection made to the political context of a brutal, decades long Israeli occupation compared to (2) Islamic Hamas and the collectively responsible 2.3 million Gazans brutal murder of 1,200 Jewish Israelis in an unprecedently violent terrorist attack. 22ntransigently refused. 34Despite international condemnation, 35 the U.S. government continued to provide Israel with political and military support. 36his manufactured, and thus preventable, humanitarian crisis begs the question: why did the Biden administration, Congress, and most American elites support policies that resulted in the killing of nearly three hundred Palestinians per day for over six months?Why did the majority of the American public accept their government's nearly unconditional support of a nation that engaged in war crimes in plain sight every day? 37o be sure, the answers are a complicated interplay between domestic special interest politics, regional politics, and U.S. geopolitical interests.But an analysis that does not incorporate the racialization of Muslims in the United States legitimizes a foreign policy grounded in the dehumanization of non-European native populations.The racialization of Muslims has been essential for the success of a Zionist-led strategy of censorship in the United States grounded in two stereotypes: Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims are presumptively anti-Semitic and terrorism supporters. 38No amount of explaining, contrary behavior, or evidence showing otherwise is relevant because long before October 7, 2023, American society had been primed to believe Arabs (incorrectly assumed to all be Muslim) and Muslims (incorrectly assumed to all be Arab) were inferior and dangerous.The only rational response, therefore, is repression. 39alestinians and Muslim Americans are smeared and censored when they criticize Israel's war crimes while Jewish Americans who defend Israel are viewed as reasonably exercising their free speech rights. 40Congress, universities, and mainstream media have made notable efforts to condemn and combat rising anti-Semitism, all the while paying lip service at best or denying at worst the parallel rise in Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism. 41alestinian, Muslim, and Arab students engaged in collective action calling for a ceasefire have been doxxed, harassed, and subject to frivolous administrative complaints by pro-Israeli students, faculty, and special interest groups. 42Palestinian and Arab professors are subject to McCarthyistic witch-hunts by Congress and blacklisted by pro-Israeli organizations such as the Zionist Organization of America, the Brandeis Center, and the Anti-Defamation League, among others, that are intent on silencing criticism of Israel at universities. 43Even the first and only Palestinian American member of Congress, Rashida Tlaib, was formally censured by the House of Representatives for speaking to over three hundred thousand people gathered to protest U.S. financial and military support for Israel's violent siege on Palestinian civilians. 44

Conclusion
The stark disparity in treatment by the U.S. government, universities, and media in the Palestine-Israel discourse demonstrates how religious identity racializes Muslims as the dangerous "Other" while racializing Jews as in-group members of American Judeo-Christian identity, corroborating Akande's claim that race-religion is hierarchical not binary. 45The precarity of racial minority status arises from the prospect of moving up or down the racio-religious hierarchy, as whiteness secures permanent privilege.
While the increased vigilance against anti-Semitism is a welcome change after centuries of discrimination in the West, Muslims (and by extension Palestinians) remain outsiders to white Judeo-Christian systems of power and privilege in the United States.U.S. imperialistic objectives in the Middle East are perversely pitting anti-Semitism against Islamophobia through America's unconditional support for Israeli colonial practices grounded in the same racial logic that justified centuries of European anti-Jewish violence.Thus, Akande's call to incorporate into law mutually constitutive discrimination on the basis of race-religion applies beyond "imperial histories" to the present day realities of Muslims in the United States.