anti-palestinian racism & racial gaslighting
Racial gaslighting has emerged as a key example of a broader pattern of what has been termed structural gaslighting, that is, a form of gaslighting designed by those with power to maintain the status quo over marginalised groups. Anti-Palestinian racism (APR) 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).
A tangible example being the israeli Nakba law that prohibits institutions from holding any events commemorating the Nakba and conflates any ceremony marking the Nakba with incitement to racism, violence and terrorism and the rejection of israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
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.
Palestinians are victim-blamed, by discourses which present them as terrorist, antisemitic, and undemocratic.
In an example of victim-blaming, israel designated six Palestinian civil society groups to be ‘terrorist organisations’, effectively rendering their activities illegal. These were organisations committed to defending Palestinian human rights:
Al-Haq Law in the Service of Man
Defense for Children International—Palestine
The Union of Agricultural Work Committees
Bisan Center for Research and Development
The Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees
Addameer Prisoner Support & Human Rights Association
Amnesty International & Human Rights Watch, both of which had an established history of working with these groups, issued a joint statement noting that israeli authorities have systematically sought to muzzle human rights monitoring and punish those who criticize its repressive rule over Palestinians. Racial gaslighting that blames the victim serves to manipulate the discursive terrain of resistance and silence even the most minimal acts of resistance. In the case of Palestinians, gaslighting provides a lens through which to explain some of their experiences that need to be named and framed as anti-Palestinian racism.
Track anti-Arab racism here: canarablaw.org & report anti-Palestinian racism to the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee at: adc.org
Sources
We are grateful to the work of Yasmeen Abu-Laban & Abigail B. Bakan for their article Anti-Palestinian Racism and Racial Gaslighting (2022) and Neve Gordon for their article Israel denies the Nakba while perpetuating it (2023), direct excerpts of which informed the content for this blog post.
