On March 9, 2025, Mahmoud Khalil was abducted by ICE agents and transported to an unknown location, eventually ending up in a detention camp in Louisiana. His case was the first among many continued attempts by the US government and its Gestapo to threaten, silence, and remove Palestine solidarity voices in what some have dubbed “the Palestinian Scare”: rendering critics deportable in the name of a broader white supremacist and Zionist agenda.1Tweet by Mondoweiss (@Mondoweiss), X, April 1, 2025, 9:47 a.m., https://x.com/Mondoweiss/status/1907067250827296870. In short, this amounts to the instrumental use of the racist logic of border enforcement for political ends. These escalating cases are horrific, though not exceptional. They bear a remarkable resemblance to the case of the Los Angeles Eight, who were arrested in 1987 and faced deportation for their involvement in peaceful pro-Palestinian activism.2 David Cole, “Mahmoud Khalil and the Last Time Pro-Palestinian Activists Faced Deportation,” New Yorker, March 18, 2025, https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/mahmoud-khalil-and-the-last-time-pro-palestinian-activists-faced-deportation. As Noura Erakat points out, invoking Aimé Césaire’s formulation, these events might be understood as a “boomerang effect”: the violence and repression made permissible in the colonies manifests at home, breathing new life into authoritarian states and intensifying carceral institutions from policing and militarization to border securitization.3 Noura Erakat, “The Boomerang Comes Back,” Boston Review, February 28, 2024. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-boomerang-comes-back/. As we show below, the current juncture sees the American and European colonial boomerang thrust amidst the unfolding of the genocide in Gaza—carried out in the name of Israeli “security”—their racist deportation machines powered in large part by Israel’s primary export: technologies of surveillance and apartheid.
In this piece, we argue that Israel’s policies and implementation of ethnic cleansing and genocide have global reverberations. Zionist border logics and practices are simultaneously expansionist and constrictive. In the Middle East, the expansionist aspirations of the Zionist project extend beyond historic Palestine into sovereign national spaces from “the Brooke of Egypt to the Euphrates,” crossing the provisional borders of present-day Israel.4 Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. Raphael Patai (New York: Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), available at at https://ia903407.us.archive.org/2/items/the-complete-diaries-of-theodor-herzl/The%20Complete%20Diaries%20of%20Theodor%20Herzl.pdf. At the same time, this expansionist ethnostate constricts the territories available for Indigenous people of the region, confining them to besieged geographic encampments, restricting their movements and intensifying their exclusion and possible extermination. On a global level, Zionist discourses, lobbying activities, diplomatic relations, and trade relations both cohere with and strengthen racist border regimes elsewhere. Israel’s settler-colonial project is capitalist to its core, deeply imbricated in a global system of accumulation. It exports technologies of surveillance, incarceration, and oppression to countries around the world to limit, securitize, and criminalize the movement of migrants.
Zionist Bordering in the Middle East
Congruent with Zionism’s foundations and the Zionist entity’s state practices, the Zionist project aims to establish a “Greater Israel” through the annexation of at least all Palestinian lands, in addition to Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and parts of today’s Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. This is enshrined in the “Basic Laws” of Israel, which serve as the state’s quasiconstitutional framework, in which Israel does not recognize definite borders in either their political discourses or their military plans. In other words, they articulate a frontier-in-the-making. As we write this, Israeli forces remain on sovereign Lebanese lands, are encroaching on lands in the West Bank (displacing forty thousand Palestinians en masse), and are embedding themselves deeper into Syrian territories.5 Mariam Barghouti, “State of Siege: Israel Is Conducting Its Largest Mass Expulsion Campaign in the West Bank Since 1967,” DropSite News, March 6, 2025. https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/west-bank-displacement-destruction-israel-jenin.
In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israeli ethnocratic policies continue to restrict Palestinian movement—and life—in the West Bank. The construction of the Apartheid wall (“security wall”) continues to annex additional land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, further enclaving Palestinian villages. These restrictions are compounded by intensified campaigns of home demolitions and property seizures enforced by the Israeli state, with settlers protected by both police and the military, leaving Palestinians with no legal recourse or protections.6Mohamed El-Kurd, “Tomorrow My Friends and Neighbors May Be Forced Form Our Homes By Israeli Settlers,” Nation, November 20, 2020, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/east-jerusalem-settlers/. To advance its expansionist project, Israel deploys a number of conditionalities and restrictions through a myriad of (im)mobility apparatuses, including permit passes, flying and permanent checkpoints, bypass roads, fences, electronic metal gates, and security zones. Palestinians must obtain permits to physically traverse their daily lives (going to school, work, or a hospital), with much of their time waiting to receive unguaranteed permissions to pass through militarized gates. Since 2007, Gaza has been subjected to a full land, sea, and air siege, long before the ongoing genocide began in 2023.7Francesca Albanese, “Anatomy of a Genocide,” Human Rights Council, A/HRC/55/73/, July 1, 2024, https://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/55/73. The siege has rendered Gaza into what numerous human rights organizations have called an open-air prison, controlling and frequently preventing the passage of basic necessities, imposing conditions of “slow death” and meticulously titrating a calorie-deficit diet.8“Gaza: Israel’s ‘Open-Air Prison,’ at 15,” Human Rights Watch, June 14, 2022, https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/14/gaza-israels-open-air-prison-15; Amnesty International, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity (London: Amnesty International, 2022), available at https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/; “The Gaza Strip,” B’Tselem, November 11, 2017, updated February 26, 2023, https://www.btselem.org/gaza_strip. As Rabea Eghbariah writes, together, these settler practices—occupation, fragmentation, apartheid, and genocide—comprise the ongoingness of the Nakba: the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during and since the establishment of Israel in 1948.9Rabea Eghbariah, “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept,” Columbia Law Review 124, no. 4 (May 2024): 887–992 https://www.columbialawreview.org/content/toward-nakba-as-a-legal-concept/, available at https://www.columbialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/May-2024-1-Eghbariah.pdf.
Zionism gained traction…drawing on the devastation of European Jews to make a moral and political claim to Palestine. But rather than boomeranging back again, this violence ricocheted outward, taking the form of a Zionist project in Palestine that reframed colonial conquest as a form of historical redress.
This settler-colonial expansion is not accidental but grounded in a settler logic that openly embraces territorial conquest and demographic engineering. In a revealing, now-deleted blog entry in the “centrist” Times of Israel, titled “Lebensraum Needed for Israel’s Exploding Population,” an argument is made for the annexation and settlement of the West Bank as“ necessary” to make room for the rapidly growing (illegal) settlements.10Dan Ehrlich, “Lebensraum Needed for Israel’s Exploding Population,” Times of Israel (blog), December 4, 2024, post archived via Archive.ph, https://archive.ph/NGnNv; Maya Mehrara, “Israel needs ‘Lebensraum’ Says Blog by Major National Newspaper,” Newsweek, December 6, 2024, https://www.newsweek.com/israel-needs-lebensraum-says-blog-major-national-newspaper-1996635. Lebensraum, German for “living space,” was the official Nazi policy to expand territorial acquisition in tandem with racial domination. These policies do not simply reflect the opinion of a newspaper, but rather the very ideology of Zionism.
Israel’s establishment from the beginning belied the possibility of coexistence with Palestine’s native population, as it sought to establish a “Jewish state.” As Aimé Césaire famously argued, fascism was imperial violence returning home; the “boomerang” of colonialism striking back at Europe itself. “What [Europe] cannot forgive Hitler for,” Césaire writes in Discourse on Colonialism, “is not the crime in itself…it is the crime against the white man…the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India and the ‘n*****s’ of Africa.”11Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 36. In this framing, the Holocaust is not a rupture from colonial modernity but its culmination as a form of colonial violence turned inward.
Zionism gained traction in this context, drawing on the devastation of European Jews to make a moral and political claim to Palestine.12Zachary Foster, “The Forgotten History of Jewish Anti-Zionism,” Palestine Nexus, May 13, 2024, https://palestinenexus.com/articles/jewish-antizionism. But rather than boomeranging back again, this violence ricocheted outward, taking the form of a Zionist project in Palestine that reframed colonial conquest as a form of historical redress. Naomi Klein articulates this dynamic incisively in Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World:
Where European powers colonized from a position of strength and a claim to God-given superiority, the post-Holocaust Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the reverse: on Jewish victimization and vulnerability. The tacit argument many Zionists were making at the time was that Jews had earned the right to an exception from the decolonial consensus—an exception born of their very recent near extermination. The Zionist version of justice said to Western powers: If you could establish your empires and your settler colonial nations through ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft, then it is discrimination to say that we cannot. If you cleared your land of its Indigenous inhabitants, or did so in your colonies, then it is anti-Semitic to say that we cannot. It was as if the quest for equality were being reframed not as the right to be free from discrimination, but as the right to discriminate. Colonialism framed as reparations for genocide.13Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 270.
This narrative of exceptional victimhood—anchored in Ashkenazi experiences of genocide—has long elided the histories of non-European Jews, even as Zionism relied on their demographic presence to populate the settler state while subjecting them to systemic racial hierarchies.14Mari Cohen, “Can Genocide Studies Survive a Genocide in Gaza?” Jewish Currents, December 19, 2024, https://jewishcurrents.org/can-genocide-studies-survive-a-genocide-in-gaza; Ella Shohat, “ Sephardim in Israel, Zionism from the standpoint of its Jewish victims,” Social Text, no. 19–20(1988): https://www.jstor.org/stable/i220055; Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (London: Oneworld Publications, 2024); Massoud Hayoun, When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History (New York: The New Press, 2019). In this way, Zionism not only reproduces colonial violence outward onto Palestinians, but also inscribes it inward through internal stratification and racialized class formation and exploitation.15Jake Romm, “Idée Fixe: Holocaust Trauma and Zionist exterminationism,” Parapraxis, July 2025, https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/ide-fixe; Tom Mehager, “Yes Mizrahim support the right. But not for the reasons you think,” +972 Magazine, February 27, 2020, https://www.972mag.com/mizrahim-right-wing-ashkenazi-supremacy/. On this anachronism of perpetual victimhood, Ussama Makdisi notes that “Whereas the Jews in Europe were the victims of Western antisemitism that culminated in the Holocaust, Palestinians remain the victims of Israeli Jewish Zionists and their supporters, enablers, and allies in the West, including Christian Zionists.”16Ussama Makdisi, “On the Victims of the Victims,” Jewish Currents, January 17, 2025. https://jewishcurrents.org/on-the-victims-of-the-victims. In this configuration, Europe’s continual atonement for its crimes, expressed through postures of “anti-antisemitism,” is increasingly weaponized to justify racist practices of border enforcement. In this process, racist border discourses reinscribe a new “clash of civilizations,” in which Europe’s national guilt is projected onto the figure of the Arab/Muslim/racialized migrant, with its exorcism enacted through the expulsion of the “foreign” threat.
The “Export” of Zionist Bordering
Beyond the Middle East, Zionist border logics now seamlessly integrate with white supremacist border regimes that include an array of racist discourses and practices. To be sure, a broad range of extensive research already underlines the similarities between Israel’s violent bordering practices and analogous dynamics of racism and racialized surveillance compared with other nations. In fact, post-9/11 surveillance and security infrastructure in the United States were in many ways modeled after Israeli checkpoints and broader border security strategies. As Abu-Laban and Bakan poignantly argue, “the Palestinian struggle today has become a cipher for both the ‘clash of civilizations’ and ‘the war on terror’ in ways that reverberate outside of Israel/Palestine.”17Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail B. Bakan, “The ‘Israelization’ of Social Sorting and the ‘Palestinianization’ of the Racial Contract: Reframing Israel/Palestine and the War on Terror,” in Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory, and Power, ed. Elia Zureik, David Lyon, and Yasmeen Abu-Laban (New York: Routledge, 2011), 280. The racialized figure of the “Palestinian terrorist” central to Israel’s post-1948 security narrative has become a global archetype in post-9/11 counterterrorism discourse. After 9/11, this figure was absorbed into a broader reconstruction of the Muslim/Arab terrorist as a shared enemy of Israel and Western liberal democracies, legitimizing the expansion of surveillance regimes, border controls, racial profiling, and exceptional security measures. Israel’s self-image as a perpetual victim has been projected onto the United States and the West, reinforcing Islamophobic ideologies and justifying the erosion of due process, legal neutrality, and human rights protections.
In this context, Israel has positioned itself as a global authority on counterterrorism, actively exporting its security practices abroad—a process described as the “Israelization” of surveillance. Police forces across North America and Europe have increasingly turned to Israeli training programs, with fatal consequences. Border militarization has been facilitated through material and nonmaterial support from Israel, through training Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), in addition to disseminating the same ideologies of border control and racial profiling, tried and tested on Palestinians for decades now.18 Jewish Voice for Peace, “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Deadly Exchange,” Deadly Exchange, accessed May 10, 2025, https://deadlyexchange.org/immigration-and-customs-enforcement-ice-and-deadly-exchange/. This global diffusion of Israeli security doctrine reflects the “Palestinianization” of the racial contract, whereby racialized individuals—citizens and noncitizens alike—are treated as inherent threats under the guise of counterterrorism. Thus, beyond similarities between nations, the use of technologies of population control, surveillance, and eviction mutually reinforce exclusionary nationalism across national contexts. Rather than merely resembling each other, these national “cases” coconstitute one another through complex webs of colonial racial capitalist relations.
This genocide economy—in which companies have adapted their operations to becomes components of a mass death machine—is not an aberration but a feature of global capitalism that operates through racialized violence, enclosure, and dispossession, turning extermination into accumulation.
In Amsterdam, the racist provocations of Israeli Maccabi fans during the November 6, 2024 events of the UEFA Europa League generated falsehoods of the “pogrom that wasn’t,” but nonetheless led to the amplification of existing xenophobic antimigrant sentiments.19 Sana Saeed, “No, There Were No Antisemitic Pogroms in Amsterdam. Here’s What Really Happened,” Mondoweiss, November 9, 2024, https://mondoweiss.net/2024/11/no-there-were-no-antisemitic-pogroms-in-amsterdam-heres-what-really-happened/. In Germany, the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism not only misrepresents Jews as a monolithic group embodied by Israel and works to suppress pro-Palestinian activism, but also serves as a tool to advance anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and white nationalist agendas.20Josephine Becker, “Germany then and now: Guilt, white supremacy and sustaining genocide, from the far-right to the radical left,” Human Geography 18, no. 1 (2025): 70-77, https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786241299043; “Bad Memory,” Jewish Currents, July 5, 2023, https://jewishcurrents.org/bad-memory-2. In Canada, despite the systemic restrictions and anti-Palestinian racism embedded in the government’s temporary resident via (TRV) program, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) is lobbying the Canadian government to limit the already miserly quotas for Gazan relatives, ensuring that no Palestinian can escape the genocide to Canada. 21Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), Intended to Fail: Systemic Anti-Palestinian Racism and Canada’s Gaza Temporary Resident Visa Program (Montreal: CJPME, 2024), https://assets.nationbuilder.com/cjpme/pages/9076/attachments/original/1726604311/Intended_to_Fail_-_2024-09_-_EN_-_FINAL.pdf?1726604311. In their letter, “concerns” around “border security” are juxtaposed against a headline about the arrest of two men allegedly affiliated with ISIS.22Tweet by Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (@CIJA), X, August 28, 2024, 4:31 p.m., https://x.com/CIJAinfo/status/1828893110304399472. These are but a few examples in which fighting a perceived “antisemitism” (operationalized as criticism of either Israel’s atrocities or its settler colonialism) is accompanied by the fomenting of virulent anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia.23Faisal Bhabha, “Fighting Anti-Semitism by Fomenting Islamophobia: The Palestine Trope, A Case Study,” in Systemic Islamophobia in Canada: A Research Agenda, ed. Anver M. Emon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023).
These efforts are not isolated. Across multiple settler states and ethnonationalist regimes, Zionist organizations and officials have drawn on local structures of racial violence to justify Israel’s repression of Palestinians and to build transnational alliances grounded in shared logics of exclusion. A senior ICE official recently disclosed that they relied on the anti-Palestinian doxxing site Canary Mission (partially funded by Israeli intelligence organizations) to target students for deportation.24Michael Arria, “ICE Official: ‘We Used Canary Mission to Find Students to Target for Deportation,’” Mondoweiss, July 9, 2025. https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/ice-official-we-used-canary-mission-to-find-students-to-target-for-deportation/; James Bamford, “Who Is Funding Canary Mission? Inside the Doxxing Operation Targeting Anti-Zionist Students and Professors,” Nation, December 22, 2023. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/canary-mission-israel-covert-operations/. Extremist right-wing group Betar US openly took credit for compiling a “deportation list” for the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant crusade, which included hundreds of international student names.25Anna Betts, “Pro-Israel group says it ‘has deportation list’ and has sent ‘thousands’ of names to Trump officials,” Guardian, March 14, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/14/israel-betar-deportation-list-trump. The logic behind these actions echoes in other rhetorical justifications of violence. Commenting on the Great March of Return of 2018, the national director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League stated: “Ask yourself the question, ‘If the Mexicans stood at the border and marched, 1 million Mexicans or 20,000 Mexicans, what would America do?’ You know, first, they would try tear gas, […] eventually would have to shoot.”26United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), gaza’s “great march of return—one year on—impact on palestine refugees and unrwa services (Amman: UNRWA, 2019), https://www.unrwa.org/sites/default/files/content/resources/gaza_gmr_one_year_on_report_eng_final.pdf; Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertstein, Israelism, directed by Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen (Tikkun Olam Productions, 2023), https://www.israelismfilm.com/. In effect, this is a process of translating and appealing to white supremacy in the United States in order to justify Israeli war crimes. In India, Netanyahu’s growing relationship with the Modi government and its Hindutva ideology saw the signing of a bilateral mobility agreement in 2023 where Israel’s labor recruitment in India explicitly favors Hindus, excluding Muslims over fears of pro-Palestine solidarity. This preference reflects the growing alignment between Israel and India as ethnostates despite official denials of ethnoreligious bias.
Israel’s prolonged occupation of Palestinian territories has transformed the country into a global leader in military and surveillance technology, using these territories as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance systems, but also as a launchpad for a global market of militarized control.27Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports The Technology of Occupation Around the World (Verso Books, 2024). UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s June 30, 2025 report traces a shift from an economy of settler-colonial occupation to an economy of genocide, developing a database of roughly one thousand corporate entities that are complicit in and profit from Palestinian displacement, mass killing, displacement, and infrastructure annihilation. This genocide economy—in which companies have adapted their operations to becomes components of a mass death machine—is not an aberration but a feature of global capitalism that operates through racialized violence, enclosure, and dispossession, turning extermination into accumulation. As Albanese explains:
Post-October 2023, weapons and military technologies used to advance Palestinian expulsion have become tools for mass killing and destruction, rendering Gaza and parts of the West Bank uninhabitable. Surveillance and incarceration technologies, ordinarily used to enforce segregation/apartheid, have evolved into tools for indiscriminate targeting of the Palestinian population. Heavy machinery previously used for house demolitions, infrastructure destruction and resource seizure in the West Bank have been repurposed to obliterate the urban landscape of Gaza, preventing displaced populations from returning and reconstituting as a community.28Francesca Albanese, “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967 (Advance unedited version),” Human Rights Council, A/HRC/59/23, June 16, 2025, available at https://www.un.org/unispal/document/a-hrc-59-23-from-economy-of-occupation-to-economy-of-genocide-report-special-rapporteur-francesca-albanese-palestine-2025/.
Many of the same corporations named in Albanese’s report—Amazon, Microsoft, Palantir, and Google—are also major contractors for US immigration enforcement, carceral surveillance, and predictive policing.29Surveillance Resistance Lab, “Who’s Behind ICE?: The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations” (Surveillance Resistance Lab), https://mijente.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Who-is-Behind-ICE-The-Tech-and-Data-Companies-Fueling-Deportations_v4.pdf These tech giants do not merely operate in parallel: they help fuse the infrastructures of repression that stretch from ICE detention centres to besieged Gaza. By supplying predictive policing software, cloud services, and artificial intelligence tools to both ICE and the Israeli military, they enable a transnational circuit of racialized violence that link the carceral logics of US immigration control to the machinery of extermination in Palestine. This is not a one-way export; rather, it constitutes a feedback loop where methods of repression developed in Palestine are refined, redeployed, and reimported across militarized borders globally.
Just as Israel encroaches neighboring nations’ lands through so-called “buffer zones” (in other words, occupying their territories), the United States established its own version of a buffer zone between the Native American land of the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora to surveil border crossings. Serving as a high-tech border wall, the establishment of the Israeli Elbit Systems infrastructure distressed these Native American lands, violating ancestral burial sites, as its community members are made to live under a highly securitized and militarized zone.30Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory. From the MENA to India and El Salvador, and across the “settler-colonial bloc,” Israel’s “border industrial complex” represents the “the confluence of border policing, militarization, and corporate investments.”31Rashid I. Khalidi and Sherene Seikaly, “From the Editors,” Journal of Palestine Studies 51 no. 1 (2022): 1–3, https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2021.2016320; Rhys Machold, Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024); Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal, “Interwoven Dynamics of Israel and El Salvador as Nodes in a Global Carceral Archipelago Dominated by US Imperialism,” Middle East Critique (2025): 1–23, https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2025.2485692; Craig Mokhiber, “WEOG: The UN’s Settler-Colonial Bloc,” Foreign Policy in Focus, September 4, 2024, https://fpif.org/weog-the-uns-settler-colonial-bloc/; Petra Molnar, “All Roads Lead to Jerusalem: A Lucrative Border Industrial Complex,” Transnational Institute, December 19, 2023, https://www.tni.org/en/article/all-roads-lead-to-jerusalem.
…the violence of the state is laying bare the shared logics of racialized immobility and colonial domination, and in doing so, is inadvertently catalyzing new solidarities. This has become especially visible in the labor movement, where dockworkers and logistics workers have refused to load or unload cargo linked to Israeli apartheid and genocide.
Zionism functions as racism with(out) borders: it enforces rigid racial boundaries through the construction of an ethnocratic state, displacing and excluding in the name of territorial expansion. Yet the logics and technologies of racial violence it generates are not confined to the provisional borders of the Israeli state. Through military exports, diplomatic alliances, and ideological affinities, Zionist practices travel—circulating through global security infrastructures and embedding themselves in existing repertoires of white supremacy and Islamophobia. In doing so, Zionism extends and intensifies racial regimes elsewhere, contributing to the heightened surveillance, policing, and exclusion of racialized populations, particularly those rendered suspect through transnational scripts of threat. Israel’s settler colonization of Palestine and the political economy of occupation, apartheid, and genocide on which it rests does not simply operate in parallel to global racial capitalism: it is materially embedded within it, sustaining and reproducing its violent logics across borders. Thus, Zionism is both a project of bordering and a vehicle for borderless racial control.
Towards Transnational Anti-Zionist Political Solidarity
As we have argued, Zionism’s transnational state aspirations are simultaneously expansionary and constrictive. Its ethnocratic settler project expands “national space” for settler subjects through eliminationist bordering practices within the Middle East. The export of Zionist bordering logics and technologies foster and intensify existing xenophobic, orientalist, and Islamophobic immobility regimes elsewhere. Zionist ideology and its actually existing practices (re)produce racist dispossession and displacement both near and far, in historic Palestine and transnationally. A global repudiation of Zionism is needed for the cultivation of a transnational political solidarity rooted in antiracist, anticapitalist, and migrant justice politics.
In building meaningful convergence between antiborder and anti-Zionist movements, solidarity must move from symbolic alignment to sustained, collective action. This requires dismantling the boundaries that divide our struggles, and forging a unified front against the interconnected systems of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and border imperialism.32“L.A. Under Siege: Trump Sends in National Guard as Protests Continue over Militarized ICE Raids,” Democracy Now!, June 9, 2025. https://www.democracynow.org/2025/6/9/los_angeles_protests_immigration_ice_raids. This is not simply a theoretical ideal but a political necessity: the freedom to move, the freedom to stay, and the freedom to return are indivisible, and only through deepening transnational solidarity can these freedoms be reclaimed. Zionism’s bordering logic—anchored in racialized land dispossession, demographic engineering, and the criminalization of mobility—finds resonance in the carceral architectures of settler states like Canada and the United States. Israeli border technologies, crowd control weapons, surveillance software, and policing tactics are actively exported and tested on racialized and Indigenous populations across the globe. In turn, deportation regimes, refugee interdiction, and mass incarceration are shaped by a globalized security logic that links state violence in Palestine to migrant and Indigenous struggles elsewhere.
Concrete political work must make these linkages legible, actionable, and organizationally meaningful. This includes joint campaigns that challenge law enforcement and military exchange programs between Israel and Western states; coordinated responses to deportations and detentions that highlight the role of Zionist military-industrial corporations in constructing surveillance infrastructure; and co-organized actions that situate the criminalization of pro-Palestinian dissent alongside the repression of migrant and border justice activists.33 “‘This Is All Retaliatory’ : Judge Blocks Mahmoud Khalil’s Deportation as Trump Vows More Arrests,” Democracy Now!, March 11, 2025. https://www.democracynow.org/2025/3/11/mahmoud_khalil_ice_columbia_university_palestine.
As Mahmoud Khalil asked following his ICE detention, “What does my detention say about America?”34Mahmoud Khalil, “What Does My Detention by ICE Say About America?” Washington Post, April 17, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/17/mahmoud-khalil-columbia-student-ice-detention/. Although he is now freed from detention, his deportation case remains ongoing as part of a wider pattern of state repression that targets those who dare to speak out against empire. His case—like those of Rümeysa Öztürk, Badar Khan Suri, and the thousands of migrants criminalized across settler states—reveals how the state’s carceral and border regimes are designed to isolate and repress. These tactics are not new: they echo a longstanding pattern in which solidarity with Palestine has been met with surveillance, repression, and criminalization, precisely because of the power such solidarities have carried across time and place.
Solidarity movements with Palestine, in fact, have long histories. Far from being a recent phenomenon, they are rooted in internationalist struggles—especially during the era of Third World liberation movements, when Palestine emerged as a central node in global resistance. From the 1960s onward, Palestinian liberation was understood not as a singular or isolated cause, but as part of a wider anticolonial and anti-imperialist horizon, intertwined with struggles across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Indigenous nations resisting settler occupation. That legacy is carried forward today by movements like Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and the water protectors at Standing Rock, which have exposed how anti-Black racism, Indigenous dispossession, and environmental destruction are bound to the same global systems that enable Zionist settler colonialism. These movements remind us that local resistance is always entangled in transnational circuits of power and possibility.
As the labor movement reminds us, the boss is often the best organizer. So too in this case: the violence of the state is laying bare the shared logics of racialized immobility and colonial domination, and in doing so, is inadvertently catalyzing new solidarities. This has become especially visible in the labor movement, where dockworkers and logistics workers have refused to load or unload cargo linked to Israeli apartheid and genocide.35 Rafeef Ziadah and Katy Fox-Hodess. “European Dockworkers Refuse to Load Weapons Aimed at Palestine,” Labor Notes, June 12, 2025, https://www.labornotes.org/2025/06/european-dockworkers-refuse-load-weapons-aimed-palestine; Ashok Kumar, “Morocco’s powerful port workers union seeks to block Maersk’s ‘military shipment’ to Israel,” New Arab, April 15, 2025, https://www.newarab.com/news/morocco-port-workers-block-maersks-arms-shipment-israel; Basma El Atti, “Indian Port Workers Refuse to Load Weapon’s for Israel’s War, ” Jacobin, February 21, 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/02/india-transport-worker-union-palestine-israel-weapons. These refusals are not just acts of protest; they are material refusals of complicity and expressions of a growing consciousness that understands the links between exploited labor, militarized borders, and colonial occupation. In that convergence lies the possibility of a transnational, abolitionist, and anticolonial solidarity powerful enough to challenge the borders of the present. As organizers and communities across the world have chanted in recent months, none of us is free until Palestine is free!