Beyond the Palestine Exception

The heart of the Palestine exception is not simply—or necessarily—the crude denial of Palestinian humanity. It is also the constant overriding and overwriting of Palestinian history by a different and deeply Eurocentric history of age-old antisemitism that is intimately familiar to Western academia and society. This act of substitution is essential to understand how actual Palestinian obliteration in the Gaza genocide has been obscured and deflected from view. Despite having their extraordinary and livestreamed persecution unfold in the twenty-first century, Palestinians are not seen as victims worthy of commemoration but are instead framed as anachronistic antisemites. At the same time, the narrative of a crisis of antisemitism on campuses transforms those who support colonial Zionism, rather than those who oppose it, into the targets who need protection, vigilance, and reassurance by those in positions of academic, institutional, and governmental power.