Anti-Palestinian Racism and Racial Gaslighting

Abstract

Since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, more attention is being paid to anti-black racism and anti-racism. The authors contend that, by extension, other forms of racism need to be considered more closely, including those that have received limited scholarly and public attention. This article isolates key elements of anti-Palestinian racism as a specific form of racism that operates at local and global levels. As an Arab group which includes both Christians and Muslims, Palestinians can experience anti-Muslim racism (or Islamophobia) along with being subjected to anti-Arab racism and Orientalist stereotypes. Using the concept of racial gaslighting which has been advanced recently across a number of disciplines, the authors isolate an identifiable anti-Palestinian racism, arguing that anti-Palestinian racism is expressed through racial gaslighting in a threefold manner. The first is denial, with a key example being the treatment of the 1948 Nakba (or catastrophe). The second is how racial gaslighting operates through power inequities, with stateless Palestinians, occupied Palestinians and Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship having clear inequities, distorted by an active repositioning of the apartheid and settler-colonial character of the Israeli state as one that is ‘democratic’, ‘Jewish’, and unfairly treated. Finally, the article considers how Palestinians are victim-blamed, by discourses which present them as ‘terrorist’, ‘anti-semitic’, and ‘undemocratic’.