Naming the racial dimensions of Israel’s founding carries social and intellectual costs.

Evidence

And yet one could point to the racial dimensions of Israel’s very definition only at risk of being ostracised, of being branded irrational, of being bedeviled as racist, as we’ll see in chapters that follow. The difficulty to name the fight against antisemitism as such reveals the point at issue. Anti-antisemitism, assimilation, the War of Independence, or Israel’s struggle to survive are either too awkward, too nebulous on one register of antiracist commitment, or speak to a specificity too narrow to the task, on another. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 118