June 2020 - Steve Salaita

Should We Cancel Cancel Culture?

Let’s figure out what we’re talking about first.

Note: This essay is the third part of a three-part series on social media. Click here for part one and here for part two.

Many champions of free speech are less into civil liberties than the preservation of a certain view of modernity. “Free speech,” in its discursive form (the form it takes as a rhetorical ideal), can be a mechanism to discipline people who have long been voiceless. Beyond its legal dynamics, the term often reifies capitalist principles of free-marketeering and accumulation. It also enables social media luminaries to deflect criticism when they share ghoulish opinions. Above all, the discourse of free speech preserves a vision of Americana implicated in an unacknowledged colonial origin. Harmful politics, logic has it, are a necessary feature of democracy.

Does It Matter If Israel Annexes the West Bank?

Annexation is bad news, but we should understand it as a material expression of Zionism.

Annexation of the West Bank isn’t a new idea. Zionists always had their eye on what they call Judea and Samaria, the actual sites of biblical significance as opposed to the coastal and desert areas they conquered in 1948. As soon as Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in 1967, its leaders began discussing annexation.

In fact, Netanyahu’s effort isn’t much different from Yigal Allon’s 1967 proposal (the so-called Allon Plan). It’s still not clear exactly how the Israeli government will proceed—apparently it intends to annex Area C, including the Jordan Valley, although some officials reportedly want to claim the entire West Bank—but the idea is to make a viable Palestinian state impossible, in keeping with Allon’s vision.