Books in Brief

This highly theorized and well-documented study is original and innovative.Taking the framework of race vis--vis Palestine, the book's multi-layered chapters flesh out the connections between racial capitalism and the Zionist settlercolony of Israel.Going beyond identity politics and ethnic studies, which play into ethno-nationalism and cultural politics, the editors place race at the center of their project.Rather than exploring what race is, Alana Lentin suggests race is a "technology for the management of human difference, the main goal of which is the production, reproduction, and maintenance of white supremacy" (187-188).From racializing the Palestinian Arab, the refugee, the Black and Brown, and inventing the "Bedouin race" to racializing the land, patriarchy, and gender, the 11 chapters in this book are informative and persuasive.The arguments break new ground in the ways to understand what is going on in Palestine and the world more generally.Racial capitalism, the term associated with South Africa's settler-colonial Apartheid regime, gained currency in the early 1980s.Although the black American scholar Cedric Robinson proposed that "capitalism is always racial" (19) in his groundbreaking work Black Marxism (1983), the term had its roots in the discussions of anti-colonial struggles of the 1970s in Africa and the Caribbean, among other regions.Specifically, he theorized capitalism vis--vis "settlercolonialism, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, [and] imperialism" in South Africa and during the decolonization period of the formerly colonized (19-20).Race and the Question of Palestine proposes that Palestinian dispossession by Zionist Israel is not only a strategy of settler-colonialism.It is also "a racialized process of capital accumulation" (20), cautioning against two issues: essentializing the Palestinian as the indigenous victim, and acknowledging that capital accumulation by elite Palestinians predates the settler-colony, one that engaged class formations and relations prior to the arrival of Zionist racial capitalism.As Lana Tatour insists, using this framework allows for the telling of Palestine's diverse and multiple histories and for fleshing out the dynamic complexity of race, which depends on the context (30).She adds that race in the settler-colonial project functions in three domains: "a political and economic structure, a set of legal and discursive practices, and a classificatory technology" (32).The book offers many noteworthy