| 1067 Zionism and Anti-Zionism 2015 The American Studies Association Zionism and Anti-Zionism: A Necessary Detour, Not a Final Destination Keith P. Feldman G iven the critical keywords animating American studies at present, it should not take long to situate Palestine as a suitable subject for research in the field. Transnationalism, diaspora, and indigeneity; race, gender, sexuality, nation, religion, law, and capital; memory, survivance, refugeehood, social movement, and solidarity; orientalisms, settler colonialisms, imperial cultures, borderlands, and carceral geographies: these are among the keywords that index possible insights into the histories, cultures, politics, and economies that have entangled Palestine in an American ambit. Yet the practice of situating Palestine institutionally has been particularly unsettling. As the American Studies Association underscores in its public statements supporting the call from Palestinian civil society to boycott Israeli academic institutions, locating American studies institutionally in relation to Palestine foregrounds, rather than elides or obfuscates, the field’s entanglement with a US state that supports Israel’s ongoing project of territorial expansion and Palestinian dispos- session. The ASA has undertaken such a position in the context of ongoing indigenous dispossession in the Americas and a corresponding intensification of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian racisms. In doing so, it has found itself persistently countered by a legal and administrative arsenal that seeks to conflate critiques of Israel with anti-Semitism, to interfere with the governance of universities, and to demonize faculty, staff, and students who consider Palestine a site of legitimate affective, political, and scholarly com- mitment. 1 The ASA’s boycott resolution invites us to open and maintain an ethical relation to Palestine, which means working toward the flourishing of just, vi- brant, and heterogeneous Palestinian futures. Such work underscores the need, as Mark Rifkin argues more generally, “to prioritize[e] Palestinian collective self-understandings and persistent connections to their homelands as a crucial guiding frame for any meaningful and just peace.” 2 The flourishing of Palestin-