CONCluSION • 247that “zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” This al-
leged link between Zionism and racism had already been made the
previous decade in the Palestinian National Charter, in which the Pal-
estine National Council declared that Zionism “is racist [ʿunṣuriyya]
and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its
aims, and fascist in its methods.”^35 Even after the UN’s revocation of
Resolution 3379 in 1991, the indictment of Zionism as a form of racism
and of Israeli policies as racist remains prevalent. Palestinian president
Mahmoud Abbas’s reference, in his 2011 speech before the UN General
Assembly, to Israel’s “settlement and apartheid policies and its con-
struction of the racist annexation wall” is characteristic of contempo-
rary Palestinians’ association of Israel with racism in general and with
South African apartheid in particular.^36 On the Israeli side, a popular
focus on the mandate- period Palestinian leader Hajj Amin al- Husseini
and his wartime relationship with Adolf Hitler reinforces the sense
among Israelis that their Palestinian antagonists are, like the Nazis,
motivated not by legitimate claims but by irrational racism.^37 Israelis
point to Hamas’s embrace of conspiracy theories historically linked to
racist antisemitism, most notably the Hamas Charter’s claim that “their
scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” as evi-
dence that Hajj Amin’s legacy lives on.^38 Notions of race clearly remain
part of the contemporary Israeli- Palestinian discourse, even as these
racial ideas are now generally relegated to condemnations of the other
side’s motivations and bigotry. Both sides, it would seem, are at least
partially correct in their perceptions of the other, and, as such, both
also project their own prejudices onto the other.
I close with a statement of hope that emerges from this research: the
ways in which people perceive and understand one another are not
fixed or immutable. Given later events, I was surprised by much of
what I discovered in this study; Zionists and Arabs imagined one an-
other in very different terms in the late Ottoman period from the ways
their descendants look at one another today. The perceptions have
changed, if generally not for the better. Just as perceptions can worsen,
however, it stands to reason that they can improve as well.
(^35) Article 22, Palestinian National Charter, in Laqueur and Rubin, The Israel- Arab
Reader, 119.
(^36) “Full transcript of Abbas’s speech at uN General Assembly,” http://www.haaretz
.com/news/diplomacy-defense/full-transcript-of-abbas-speech-at-un-general-assembly
-1.386385.
(^37) On this subject, see Penslar, “The Hands of Others.” This is a review of Achcar, The
Arabs and the Holocaust.
(^38) Hamas Charter in Laqueur and Rubin, The Israel- Arab Reader, 347.