The newly published Palgrave Handbook of Racial Injustice and Resistance is not a fringe publication. Palgrave handbooks are used as sources in university courses. They carry institutional weight. They signal what the academy considers serious scholarship.
So it matters what they say and how they say it.
The first substantive chapter, immediately following the introduction, is by Ronit Lentin, retired professor at Trinity College Dublin. Most academic biographies in the book start off with "he is a professor of..." or "she is a senior lecturer at..." But Lentin's biography starts with "Ronit Lentin is a Jewish anti-Zionist woman."
The title of this chapter is "Genocide Is Not a Metaphor: Reflections on Gaza and the Denial of the Crime of Genocide."
That title tells you something. The first words of the article, after several quotes from Palestinians accusing Israel of genocide, are even more telling:
The Zionist entity responded to the October 7 2023 act of resistance by the Gaza-based Islamic Resistance Movement—Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, Hamas—by launching a massive air bombardment of the besieged Gaza enclave, followed by a ground offensive.
If a massive pogrom of murders, burning families, rapes and kidnapping is referred to as an "act of resistance" we can see that we are not going to be reading anything remotely resembling objectivity.
We can see that Lentin refers to Israel as "the Zionist entity." That alone should be disqualifying for a serious academic press. But within the article we see a far more egregious misuse of both language and a twisting of academic standards.
Lentin does not refer to the Israel Defense Forces. She refers throughout to the "IGF" — the "Israeli Genocidal Forces." She uses this term deliberately and consistently, embedding the legal conclusion inside the noun so she never has to prove it again. Genocide is no longer a charge to be established — it is an identity, built into the name. Just as in the paper's title, Every subsequent sentence that uses "IGF" inherits that verdict without argument.
In an activist pamphlet, this would be polemical but at least honest about what it is. In a Palgrave academic handbook, it is a pre-verdict dressed as terminology — a rhetorical move that forecloses the analysis it pretends to conduct.
Ask yourself whether Lentin would accept "Palestinian Jihadist Forces" or "Hamas Exterminationist Movement" as neutral academic terminology in a scholarly volume. She cannot even acknowledge Hamas as a terrorist organization — that label, she writes, is merely how 'white Jewish supremacy' frames it — and insists the October 7 attack must be understood as resistance to colonialism (p. 30).
Lentin argues that Zionism is "essentially a race-making ideology and practice" rooted in "European Jewish racial supremacy." This is her axiom, stated in the opening pages and never subsequently argued — only applied. From that premise, everything follows with logical inevitability: Gaza is racialized violence, Israeli military operations are genocidal by definition, and anyone who questions the genocide framing is participating in racial ideology.
Conspiracy theories and closed systems look exactly like this. It is internally coherent and completely unfalsifiable. Counter-evidence does not challenge the framework — it confirms it, as proof of how deep the denial runs.
Lentin is at least partially aware of this exposure. She writes that the chapter "does not deal with the legal implications" of genocide. Rather than modesty, this is insulation. By relocating the debate from international law — where genocide has a specific legal threshold requiring demonstrated intent — to race theory and colonial discourse, she moves onto terrain where legal standards of proof do not apply. Then she uses the word "genocide" as a legal and literal term throughout, even quoting approvingly from scholars who call Gaza "more than genocide." The chapter title insists genocide is not a metaphor, but she has quietly removed the framework that would make it anything other than one.
The author deliberately obscures what happened on October 7 - kidnapping women and children, slaughtering families, cold blooded murders of young people at a dance festival. Since facts upset the coherence of her arguments, she ignores them. Although when it comes to rape, she has a lot to say.
The rape allegations, Lentin argues, function not as evidence of atrocity but as a "racial boundary maintenance" mechanism — a tool for dehumanizing Palestinians and constructing Jewish women as symbols of national purity requiring protection. She cites Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada twice: once for the claim that the rape accusations rest on "emotional manipulation, outlandish claims, distortion, and an appeal to racist notions," and once for the claim that prosecutors found no October 7 rape victims. She cites the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs report only to immediately undercut it, and cites a Guardian piece noting no victims were identified by name.
What she does not cite is the Pramila Patten report.
Patten is the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict. Her March 2024 report — document A/78/773 — found "clear and convincing information" that sexual violence occurred on October 7, including rape and gang rape, and concluded there were "reasonable grounds to believe" these acts were "widespread and systematic." It is the authoritative UN document specifically addressing October 7 sexual violence, and it does not appear anywhere in Lentin's references.
Similarly, the first Israeli hostage to directly admit being sexually abused also went public in March 2024. Lentin does not want to admit it - so she ignores it.
Compare this to her treatment of Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories, whose reports Lentin cites approvingly and repeatedly as evidence of genocide. Albanese, it should be noted, is not a lawyer. Her mandate is advocacy, not adjudication. But Lentin treats her warnings as institutional validation while ignoring the findings of the UN's own investigator on sexual violence.
The pattern is precise: the UN is authoritative when it supports the genocide framing and irrelevant when it documents Hamas sexual violence. The Patten report was published a full year before she wrote this piece. . It was widely covered. Lentin cites sources from 2024 and 2025 throughout. She chose not to engage with it because its findings complicated her argument that rape discourse is a Zionist racial instrument.
Individual bad papers exist in every field. What matters here is the editorial decision to open a Palgrave handbook's substantive content with this chapter. It tells readers how the editors believe the Israeli-Arab conflict should be categorized — not merely as a political dispute, a territorial conflict, or even a humanitarian crisis, but as the paradigmatic example of racial injustice. Before a word of any other chapter is read, the framework has been established: Israel is a white supremacist racial state, Gaza is a genocide, and skepticism is denial.
University syllabi will cite this volume. Graduate students will footnote it. It will be used to establish what "the scholarly consensus" holds.
Lentin is a sophisticated scholar who knows how to insulate an argument. She disclaims legal analysis while making legal accusations. She frames rape evidence as racial discourse. She cites the UN selectively. She builds a system where every objection is pre-categorized as ideological.
But the IGF rename gives it away. So does the missing Patten report. So does citing a partisan blog twice on sexual violence while ignoring the UN's own investigator on the same subject.
Lentin's framework has one final, self-sealing feature worth naming explicitly. Once genocide is established as axiomatic, the focus shifts to its denial — and denial itself becomes the crime. Her chapter title is not just "Genocide Is Not a Metaphor" but "Reflections on Gaza and the Denial of the Crime of Genocide." The denial is the subject, not the genocide itself.
This is elegant, in a troubling way. No one disputes that Israeli officials, journalists, and supporters dispute the genocide charge. That denial is real and documented. So Lentin has constructed a framework where the one thing no one can argue against — that Israelis deny committing genocide — becomes proof of their ideology. The denial confirms the racial logic. The more vigorously you reject the charge, the deeper your complicity.
There are no facts that Lentin can accept that would disprove her thesis. And that is evidence that her entire well-footnoted article is structurally identical to antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Academic freedom means the right to publish arguments. It does not obligate the rest of us to pretend that selective citation, unfalsifiable frameworks, and pre-verdict terminology constitute scholarship. Palgrave/Macmillan apparently disagrees.
Sunday, March 01, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
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