“Subject Matter:” Orientalism and Arab Racialization in the Work of Yitzhaq Shami

The Palestinian Jewish author celebrated an “exotic” hybrid of Arab and Jewish identity not in order to shift Zionism’s Orientalist premises or to intervene in the political tensions brewing because of it; Rather, Shami’s work was a protocol for racialization, and a significant contribution to Zionist settler-ideology, in its appropriation of Arabism.