The circular argument that became mainstream: Israel is defined as racist, therefore Israel must be racist ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, December 29, 2025

The circular argument that became mainstream: Israel is defined as racist, therefore Israel must be racist

In June, Stanford University Press released a book edited by Lana Tatour and Ronit Lentin titled "Race and the Question of Palestine."

The very title of the book all but announces its conclusion that Israel is racist. The Introduction confirms this impression, not by carefully arguing its case, but by building the conclusion into its premises and then presenting the result as discovery rather than assumption.

From the opening pages, the editors insist that race is not merely one analytic lens among many that might be used to understand the conflict, but the essential framework for interpreting Zionism, Israel, and Palestinian experience. Other explanatory models – citizenship law, nationalism, security doctrine, regional war, even ethnicity itself – are treated not as competing hypotheses to be weighed, but as evasions that obscure the truth.

Once this framing is in place, the logic becomes self-sealing. If Zionism is defined as settler colonialism, and settler colonialism is defined as inherently racial, then Israel must be a racial state. The conclusion is embedded in the premise.

This is where the circularity becomes impossible to ignore. The Introduction does not begin by asking whether race best explains Israeli policies, institutions, and conflicts. It begins by asserting that race does explain them, and then rereads every legal distinction, border regime, and security practice as confirmation of that claim. Evidence no longer tests the theory; the theory filters the evidence. That is coherence masquerading as correspondence – an internally consistent story that never seriously risks being wrong.

The most revealing moment comes when the editors turn their attention to human rights organizations that do not foreground race. B’Tselem, for example, is criticized not because its factual claims are false, but because it frames Israeli domination primarily in terms of ethnicity and citizenship rather than race.

See the circularity here:

Speaking of race in the context of Palestine, readers may ask why use “race” instead of “ethnicity,” “people,” or “nation,” and what analytical and explanatory work “race” does that “ethnicity” or “nationality” does not. ...[T]heir use alone without race analysis, I suggest, not only fails to capture the work of race, racialization, and racism as constitutive of colonial projects, but also conceals it. The apartheid reports, mentioned above, provide an example—one of many—of such concealment through their failure to recognize settler colonialism and race as the defining features of Israeli apartheid or to account for Zionism as the racial ideology that drives Israeli-Zionist colonization.

The circularity is explicit. If race is defined as the only valid explanatory category, then any analysis that does not center race is, by definition, accused of concealment. If you do not begin with race, you cannot arrive at race as the conclusion. The framework does not merely privilege a lens; it morally disqualifies alternatives.

This same structure governs the Introduction’s core claims:

The colonization of Palestine—like other imperial, colonial, and settler-colonial projects—cannot be understood outside the grammar of race. Concepts such as ethnicity and nationality do not capture the history or the political work of race as a project of colonial distinction that rationalizes dispossession and domination....

But if Zionism is understood as a movement of an indigenous people returning to its ancestral homeland – which it is – the argument collapses. That possibility is never seriously entertained, because the framing makes it impermissible from the outset. Alternative explanations are not rebutted; they are ruled out in advance.

A strong theory clarifies what it can and cannot explain. It specifies the conditions under which it might fail. It does not declare rival models ethically suspect simply for existing.

We have discussed many times that Israeli law maps far more cleanly onto distinctions between citizenship and non-citizenship than onto any racial hierarchy between Jews and Arabs. Arab citizens of Israel live on both sides of the Green Line and possess the same civil rights as Jewish citizens there. Arab Israelis and Druze serve at the highest levels of government, the judiciary, medicine, industry and the military. They aren't tokens. Their existence should be fatal to the claim that Israel operates as a racial regime in the sense implied by the book. Instead, they are ignored, leaving the reader unaware that such counterevidence even exists. The framework does not invite comparison; it forecloses it.

None of this is happening on the margins of activism or social media. This is a flagship academic press lending its imprimatur to an argument that relies on premise smuggling rather than demonstration. Stanford University Press is not Jadaliyya, a political blog, or an NGO position paper. It occupies a role that signals to readers, students, and journalists that what follows has passed serious scholarly scrutiny. When a press of this stature publishes a text that substitutes moral intensity and theoretical coherence for falsifiability and causal testing, it sends a signal far beyond this one book.

Once you see the circularity of the argument, you cannot unsee it. The fact that this passed through one of America’s most prestigious academic presses should trouble us far more than the argument itself.

What is at stake here is larger than a single book or a single conflict. When prestigious academic institutions normalize circular reasoning, moralized framing, and premise smuggling, they teach students and readers that conclusions matter more than truth-seeking, and that theory is a substitute for evidence rather than a tool for understanding reality. Once that lesson is absorbed, the damage is not confined to Middle East studies. It spreads outward, hollowing out the intellectual norms that make serious disagreement, genuine pluralism, and honest scholarship possible at all.