“The being of Israel is the non-being of Palestine”: Understanding Zionism through the Work of Fayez Sayegh

November 10th, 2025, marks the fiftieth anniversary of UN Resolution 3379, when the United Nations General Assembly voted to declare Zionism a form of racism and racial discrimination. This statement effectively condemned Zionism as a racist political ideology and Israel as a racist state, to be relegated alongside other colonial, apartheid, and imperial state projects. Passing with a vote of 72 in favor and 32 against with 35 nations abstaining, it was overwhelmingly supported by the newly liberated Third World countries who saw the statement as a challenge to American and European hegemony.

Resolution 3379 was not the work of a single individual.¹ Nonetheless, several Palestinian intellectuals deserve special recognition for their efforts in passing the resolution. Foremost amongst them is Fayez Sayegh, who spearheaded the effort and argued the Palestinian case on the Assembly floor. This review will work through Sayegh’s writings to come to a better understanding as to just what he and his counterparts within the Palestine Liberation Organization meant when they argued that Zionism is racism. How did they understand ‘racism’ and where does Zionist racism fit within what Sayegh called ‘the Palestine Problem’ more generally? Given that context what then is ‘anti-racism’? Is racism the appropriate lens through which to approach the problem?

Readers may know Fayez Sayegh from his 1965 essay, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. That was the first publication from the PLO Research Center, which Sayegh founded and directed for a short period. While interpreting Sayegh’s statements on Resolution 3379, I draw from both his own and his colleagues’ writings for the PLO Research Center, so it is useful to have some idea as to what that Center was. In its 18 years of operation in Beirut the Center published a total of 340 books. At its peak, the Center employed roughly 80 full-time researchers in a 6-storey building in downtown Beirut. Ten departments were dedicated to a variety of activities including translating Israeli radio broadcasts, archiving Palestinian history, and researching Zionism’s history and ideology.² The aim of the center was to study Palestinian identity and history as well as the history, practices, and ideology of the Zionist occupation, since, to quote Sayegh’s idea for the Center, “knowing the enemy is a parallel process to knowing the self.”³ The research was in large part designed to provide in-depth studies for fedayeen who at this point in time in the late 1960s were developing more sophisticated military operations. The Center provided militants with sophisticated theory as well as concrete studies of Israel and the United States. On 6th February 1983, Israeli-directed forces bombed the Center killing 18 and injuring 115.⁴

Sayegh’s presence before the U.N. to debate this matter also deserves some comment. In 1969, Sayegh was one of 18 experts elected to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. He would be elected three times as the Committee’s Rapporteur. A complete history of this body is beyond the scope of this analysis, but it should be noted that the Committee originated with the desecration of a German synagogue in 1959, which Zionist leadership promoted and manipulated to push European settlers to Israel.⁵ In 1960, the same year the U.N. adopted Resolution 1510 condemning “racial, religious, and national hatred” partly in response to that vandalism, Sayegh published a series of editorials analyzing how Zionist leadership uses antisemitism to promote Jewish emigration to Israel, a tactic Sayegh argued established a basic harmony between Zionism and Nazism. I’ve discussed Sayegh’s on this analysis elsewhere, but in this context, it is relevant insofar as readers should bear in mind Sayegh was arguing before an international body that was not designed for his purposes.⁶ Insofar as Zionist leadership amplified and manipulated the response to antisemitic vandalism, the Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination originated with Sayegh’s enemies. He was working a bricolage out of an institution, history, and definitions that were not his own. Given this history, Sayegh was well-aware of how imperial powers both produce and condemn racism to serve their ends, just as he was aware that the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination was not a revolutionary body, nor was it designed to be.

Turning to Resolution 3379, Sayegh spoke four times in the Fall of 1975 before the General Assembly arguing all the ways in which Zionism is racist. In his first speech on the matter, he began by distinguishing the question of racism from the question of Palestine more generally, stating, “The issue before us is not the Palestine Question; it is not the Arab-Israeli Conflict; it is not the situation in the Middle East. […] The issue before us is ‘The Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination’ and the draft resolution under consideration addresses itself to Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination and to nothing else.”⁷ He then went on to define Zionism, explaining that he would be working within accepted Zionist self-definitions, before then arguing that Zionism is racism in both ideology and practice according to known and accepted UN definitions of racism. However, this way of framing the issue raises the question, if Zionist racism is not identical to ‘the Palestine Question’, what exactly is the Palestine question? And what is ‘racism’ when approached within the framework of that question? And finally, what is the relationship between the Palestine question or Palestine problem and Zionist racism?

For an answer, start with a speech Sayegh delivered on January 19th, 1969, entitled “The Moral Aspect of the Palestine Problem.”⁸ Here Sayegh defines the problem in terms of “the fate of human beings who are the people of Palestine.” And that fate (elimination) is a result of what Zionists call ‘The Ingathering of the Exiles’: “For the idea of Zionism by definition meant that the Jews of the world, whom Zionism considers to be one nation, should leave all the countries of their residence and citizenship and congregate together in a land which would then be a purely Jewish state, a land in which there would be no non-Jews. Somehow the Palestinians had to disappear.” From this characterization of the Problem we can see that what is at stake is the wholesale displacement of one society for another. Naturally, these ingathering settlers need land and resources. Accordingly, as this so-called ‘Ingathering of the Exiles’ recruited more settlers, Zionist-controlled territory would have to expand. And while Zionists first tried buying Palestinian land, once they realized that process was too slow (David Ben-Gurion once lamented it “would have taken 1,000 years to occupy Palestine and we do not want to wait 1,000 years”)⁹ they resorted to brute militarism.

That brings us then to a second iteration of the problem. Sayegh formulated this version in Kuwait in 1971 for the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS). GUPS then republished Sayegh’s comments in a pamphlet titled “A Palestinian View”.¹⁰ There we read, “The crux of the Palestine Problem is the fate of a people and its homeland. It is the piecemeal conquest and continued seizure of the entire country by military force. It is the forcible dispossession and displacement of the bulk of the indigenous population, and the subjugation of the rest. It is also the massive importation of alien colonists — to replace the evicted, and to lord it over the conquered. And it is the colonization, by the foreign settlers, of both the expropriated private land and the seized national resources of the overpowered people.” Again, the problem is one of elimination, but in this formulation Sayegh foregrounds the violence of the problem. If, as Weizmann once declared, Palestine “is to be made as Jewish as England is English”, and the continuous flow of settlers requires an expanding land base to support them, and if that land cannot be purchased at a satisfactory rate and must then be acquired by force, then Israel is, in effect, a state of war. Sayegh described this dynamic of Israeli aggrandizement by wars of encroachment when he summarized the whole situation on an American talk show in 1967: “Every Israeli who is in Israel today is there because an Arab has been made not to be. The being of Israel is the non-being of Palestine.”¹¹ The so-called “ingathering of Exiles” is the production of this non-being. Zionism is a movement or force whereby Israeli development — Israeli being — stands in a dialectical relationship with Palestinian non-being. And so when David Ben-Gurion told Israeli Parliament in 1963 that the Zionist mission of “ingathering the exiles” is tantamount to “the fructification and population of the wasteland”, the Problem of Palestine from Sayegh’s point of view is precisely the production of that wasteland.¹²

When Sayegh writes in Zionist Colonialism in Palestine that Zionist racism is different from other race-supremacist European settler projects, he is saying that while other colonies have instantiated conditions of dependency over the native population wherein the natives may develop in ways that suit the colony, Israel has never primarily sought to exploit the Palestinians, although that has undoubtedly occurred. Rather, Palestinians have been configured for eviction, elimination, and dispossession without the opportunity for development. Sara Roy would later call this ‘de-development’.¹³ Where underdeveloped societies are often structured by demands for economic exploitation, de-development in this case is not primarily motivated by the extraction of surplus value from Palestinian laborers. The so-called ‘Ingathering’ is an ideological motive that cannot be made to fit with the long-term preservation and exploitation of a Palestinian population. In this regard, Sayegh cites Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan who once claimed “economically we can” accommodate a Palestinian population, but this was impossible because “It would turn Israel into […] a poly-Arab-Jewish state instead of a Jewish state.”¹⁴ Rather than reconfiguring the Arab population for exploitation — a form of domination that might include the typical features of settler colonial domination such as the construction of a comprador class or limited industry tailored to the global division of labor — Zionism has systematically dismembered and crippled Palestinian society in order to facilitate their expulsion. The Palestine Problem is then this problem of “non-being”.

Given this account of the Palestine Problem, it will be no surprise to learn that in a speech delivered in Libya in 1973 Sayegh described Israel as “a tool of foreign imperialism and an imperialism in its own right.”¹⁵ Sayegh and the rest of the PLO Research Center had sophisticated understandings of imperialism, U.S.-led capital, and the Israeli economy. They produced detailed studies of both the Israeli and American economies, and Sayegh was at least acquainted with the works of Joe Stork, Eqbal Ahmad, Paul Sweezy, and V.I. Lenin. Thanks to Patrick Higgins’s research, we know of one work published by the Research Center entitled ‘The Foreign Policy of America.’¹⁶ It draws extensively from the work of Harry Magdoff, a noted economist for The Monthly Review. Magdoff explains how through various mechanisms including banks, foreign aid, tariffs, and militarism, US foreign policy is directed toward one goal: “gaining control over as much of the sources of raw material as possible — wherever these raw materials may be, including potential new sources.”¹⁷ Control of raw materials allows leading firms to both limit competition and control the production and prices of finished products further down the supply chain, an important point I will return to at the end of this talk. This was a known feature of imperial capital, but Magdoff emphasizes the importance of raw material domination to the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Magdoff cites a 1952 report from the Truman administration summarizing the desperate situation of post-war U.S. industry suddenly consuming 10 percent more than it produces. This led Eisenhower in his first inaugural address in 1953 to proclaim the urgent need to secure the top of the supply chain through control of foreign raw materials. And so as a tool of American imperialism, Israel plays a vital role in controlling crucial raw material reserves in West Asia — namely, oil fields. As an imperialism in its own right, driven by the political motivation to create a ‘Jewish state’, that control takes the form of de-development, or in the words of Sayegh, “the non-being of Palestine.”

Given this understanding of the relation of imperial being and imperialized non-being, what does it mean to say Zionism is a form of racism? What role does racism play in the Zionist movement? As I interpret Sayegh’s writings, Zionist racism manifests itself as the ideological justification for and the practical administration of de-developmental policies implemented on the basis of a racial distinction between who will be fructified and who will be wasted. Let’s consider a few specific examples of Zionist racism from Sayegh’s 1975 UN speeches.

Consider racism in the Israeli educational system. In his 1975 speech, Sayegh cites the paucity of educational opportunities for Palestinian Arabs still residing in Israel. The higher the level of education, the more discriminatory the restrictions: where in 1965 Arabs constituted 10% of all pupils enrolled in post-primary schools, Arabs represented less than 1% of those enrolled in Israeli universities. These disparities particularly affected women, whom Sayegh found underrepresented at every level of the Israeli education system. As Sayegh observed in a 1966 booklet entitled Discrimination in Education Against the Arabs in Israel, “Higher education is almost entirely reserved for Jewish students.”¹⁸

Regarding labor, Sayegh cites Israeli law prohibiting the employment of Arabs, a policy that clearly has the effect of siphoning economic activity away from the Arab community and denying them the opportunity to develop manufacturing skills. Lack of education and employment is coupled with laws denying Arabs’ their own property, all of which Sayegh had documented in earlier works. Israel’s 1948 Emergency Regulation on the Cultivation of Waste Lands declared that any land ‘unused’ by the native population due to ‘war conditions’ could be confiscated by the Israeli government. This is coupled with discriminatory citizenship policies which provide incredibly lax conditions to Jewish immigrants from affluent countries and near impossible terms to the Arab population. While the 1948 Declaration for the Establishment of the State of Israel declares Israel “will be open for Jewish immigration”, the 1949 Emergency Land Requisition Law declares Arab land will be seized if “necessary for the defence of the state, public security, the maintenance of essential supplies or essential public services, or the absorption of immigrants.” All told, these laws define the Ingathering itself as a state of Emergency justifying the seizure of Arab land. Given citizenship and land, the Security Service Act of 1949 turns these citizens into soldiers, providing them with arms and military training to then expel more Arabs and occupy more land.

This is a sampling of all the evidence Sayegh and his cohort exhibited before the UN General Assembly in the Fall of 1975. Resolution 3379 established that this distinction between ‘Jew’ and ‘Arab’ which Sayegh and his cohort reject as a category mistake, is established by Zionists along racial biological lines. What I would like to emphasize is that when we consider Zionist racism in the context of the Palestine Problem – which again is the problem of imperial extraction, accumulation, and dispossession – then what Sayegh identified as racism must be understood in terms of the practical policies of de-development. The policies Sayegh cites – the denial of educational training, the confiscation of property and land, the marginalization of labor, and the purposeful destruction of infrastructure– are all articulated along hereditary lines and all aim at preventing the Palestinian Arab population from modernizing and developing technologies and industries. This is not to say Sayegh believes racism is the primary contradiction. Racism does not motivate the occupation. Instead, imperial usurpation — the Palestine Problem — defines the situation, and racism justifies and determines specific practices of oppression.

With that in mind, consider the writings of Sayegh’s colleague George Jabbour who wrote a comparative study of racism across settler colonial societies, entitled Settler Colonialism in Southern Africa and the Middle East. After a lengthy examination of settler colonial racism, Jabbour writes, “The settlers, whose settlement in lands not theirs was possible only because of the backwardness of the native inhabitants, see in the development of the natives a clear threat to their security and continued existence. […] The settlers, no matter how strongly they profess their attachment to the concept of ‘progress’, no matter how persistently they express their desire to develop the natives, are, in the final analysis, ardent reactionaries when the question of developing the natives comes into the picture.”¹⁹ And insofar as the “Ingathering of the Exiles” manifests itself as a perpetual state of war, Israel approaches the future well-armed. However, ‘well-armed’ is a relative term understood only in relation to the natives’ level of industrial development and modernization. Quoting Jabbour, “They can keep themselves superior by keeping their strength superior. And they can keep this if they continue to be more technically advanced. Hence, their enemies are not the natives in general, as much as they are the modernized natives: the natives who are both open to the sciences and to the world. […] They are afraid of the future, because the future will bring about, inevitably, more modernization of the natives.”²⁰ This is an alternative formulation of Sayegh’s claim before the General Assembly that racist Zionist practices take aim at Palestinian modernization — literacy, labor organizing, technical skills, water quality, land and its reserves of raw materials, and the protections offered by the state — creating a historical pattern of decay.

Where the imperial subjugation of Palestine is brought about through de-developmental policies at least partially aimed at monopolizing raw material inputs, Sayegh and his colleagues understood that the liberation of Palestine would come about through technical modernization and open access to global supply chains outside the controls of the imperial powers. As I mentioned earlier, insofar as one audience for these writings were the Palestinian freedom fighters, no one was better prepared to understand this argument, since their work depended on access to raw materials and modern technology. Here again is Jabbour, this time on the mindset of the fedayeen: “The espousal of armed struggle is a significant phenomenon. […] As it requires from the freedom fighter full devotion and unlimited sacrifice, it totally transforms his life-pattern: it widens his horizons so that he comes to realise that he is not only a revolutionary against the settlers, but also against the circumstances of his country that made the intrusion of the settlers possible. Unlike traditional resistance to the settlers, armed struggle well understands the world of today with its modern technology and its scientific foundations. Armed struggle is thus a modernizing movement fighting imperialism — and local traditionalism.”²¹ In other words, Jabbour believes the act of armed struggle necessarily drags Palestinian society into a future of modernized technological industry, since there are simply no arms without an openness to global production chains and modern industry. Where racism is the imposition of de-developmental policies attempting to keep the Palestinian in a primitive state, armed resistance — the gun itself before it is even fired — embraces a technologically developed and modernized future. Note for example where anti-Palestinian racism in Israeli schools particularly affected Palestinian women, Sayegh’s good friend and colleague Hisham Shirabi in a 1970 report on the demographics of Palestinian guerrillas documents high participation among women along with markedly higher literacy rates.²² One simply can’t effectively operate complex machinery without the ability to read.

In sum, the being of Israel is territorial expansion, an expansion that occurs through encroachment wars. The development of the Zionist movement is then the de-development of Palestinian society. And this de-development is instantiated and perpetuated through bombing and genocide, but also in part through racist legal, educational, and labor policies, the net effect of which is the excision of Palestinian Arab society from modern industry and technology. This excision is an important element in the more fundamental elimination of Arabs from the region as whole, a necessary condition for the creation of a racially exclusive ‘Jewish’ state. When Jabbour says armed struggle widens the horizon of the freedom fighter he is referring to the very practical recognition of the fact that the resistance stands or falls with the degree to which the indigenous society develops its industrial and technical abilities. The ‘armed’ part of ‘armed resistance’ refers precisely to that capacity, just as the de- prefix in ‘de-development’ takes aim at it. And the fedayeen understands this above all simply because the tools of his or her trade emerge at the intersection of internal productive capacities and global political alliances on the one hand and national sovereignty on the other, with the former being a necessary condition for the latter.

As I mentioned earlier, PLO researchers understood from Harry Magdoff and others that the decolonization of development would require at a minimum the breaking up of imperial monopoly controls over raw material and supply chains. This was the agenda of what Sayegh called “positive neutralism,” a doctrine that deserves more attention on another day. For now, it is sufficient to say positive neutralists and others associated with the non-alignment movement sought to overcome rigid monopolistic controls by creating a competitive market in which developing nations could obtain the necessary material inputs on the best terms possible. Sayegh calls this agenda, “nothing less than the revolt of the non-aligned countries […] It is their active response to the actual existence of a competitive situation in the mid-twentieth century world, making it possible for the emerging nations to strike back at the monopolists and their politically discriminatory or exploitative practices. It is their exercise of the prerogative to diversify their contacts in pursuit of the best and most abundant supplies as well as the most profitable and least disadvantageous terms.”²³ If ‘anti-racism’ is at all an appropriate term, then it would take into account both positive neutralism and its facilitation of industrial development, including above all, the development of armaments and the capacity for self-defense.

The PLO’s diplomatic engagement with the U.N. was denounced as “the locomotive of retreat” by the PFLP, but it is not accurate to say everyone was just blithely going along for the ride.²⁴ Jabbour makes clear that armed resistance is the most effective way forward, writing, “In the domain of concrete action, the UN suffers from limitations unknown to native armed resistance.”²⁵ Along with many declarations of support for Palestinian armed resistance, in May 1975, just six months before his speech to the UN, Canadian immigration officers delayed Sayegh’s entry because he refused to denounce the use of violence in the liberation of Palestine.²⁶ In fact, one basic lesson of Sayegh’s analyses is that, regarding the Palestine Problem, diplomacy and militancy are never effective in isolation.²⁷ Diplomacy divorced from armed struggle often amounts to demilitarization, which Sayegh claimed is the first stage of occupation. When Netanyahu says in 2025, “We are not going to occupy Gaza […] Gaza will be demilitarized, and a peaceful civilian administration will be established,”²⁸ Sayegh would respond, “[T]he demilitarization of any area of Palestine was never viewed by Israel as a final or permanent arrangement; demilitarization has invariably been viewed by Israel as a stepping-stone for Israeli occupation. The record is unmistakably clear; there is not a single exception to the pattern.”²⁹ The impotency of diplomacy uncomplimented by militancy is evidenced by the repeal of 3379 in 1991 as a condition for the PLO’s entry into the Madrid Conference and the subsequent Oslo negotiations. Although Sayegh passed away in 1980, he already glimpsed what was to come with the 1978 Camp David accords, a diplomatic effort he decried as “the permanent dismemberment of the Palestinian people.”³⁰

Sayegh’s role in passing Resolution 3379 must be approached in this context. It was not a naïve foray into diplomacy with the hope of shaming the colonists. Nor did it indicate an abandonment of the principles of armed resistance, the decolonization of industrial development, national security, and national sovereignty. The 1991 repeal of Resolution 3379 occurred conterminously with the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of the Bandung and Non-Aligned eras, the general weakening of Arab national and joint security, and the rise of widespread de-development along with feeble post-nationalist and post-humanist discourses. To engage Fayez Sayegh’s thought is to enter a different paradigm in which ‘racism’ and ‘anti-racism’ cannot be thought outside the constellation of initiatives including incursions against monopolized supply chains and the fortification of national security initiatives against colonial and imperial subjugation. Sayegh reminds us that diplomacy alone is insufficient, but at the same time Palestinian liberation requires more than just the courage of the fedayeen. It demands a corresponding struggle on the legal and diplomatic fronts, for Sayegh grasped the fact that “revolutionaries who are incapable of combining illegal forms of struggle with every form of legal struggle are poor revolutionaries indeed.”³¹

John Harfouch is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and author of books and articles on racism, orientalism, and Arab liberation. From 2024-2025 he was a Tanner Research Fellow at the University of Utah studying the Fayez Sayegh archive.