August 2021 - Steve Salaita

Palestine and the Anxiety of Existence

How do we communicate with folks who have deeply emotional responses to criticism of Israel?

I delivered the following comments (originally published at MondoWeiss) at Israeli Apartheid Week events at the School of Oriental and African Studies and Oxford University during the week of February 22, 2016. I remember the intensity of the audience at SOAS. I’d often heard that Zionism in the USA is a uniquely fervid phenomenon, but that hasn’t been my experience. I’ve had police turn up at my public events in two countries: Canada and the UK. In both cases, it was because of rambunctious pro-Israel partisans. At SOAS, a man kept yelling into the back of my head as my hosts escorted me out of the building. We made it to the sidewalk to find a bunch of constables trying to restore order. Some in the audience wanted to argue with them. The Arabs hightailed it out of there.

This evening I’m going to talk about the challenges of talking about Zionism. I begin with a question I often hear in some variation when people discuss Jews and Palestinians: how do we communicate with folks who have deeply emotional responses to criticism of Israel?

No, thanks: Stop saying “support the troops”

A reboot of an old essay with some added reflection.

This article was originally published at Salon in August, 2013. It got me into lots of trouble. I was teaching at Virginia Tech at the time and the campus’s large ROTC contingent took grave offense to what they considered an unfair portrayal of the troops. Fox got hold of the article and soon it was in the news cycle. I was nearly fired and put under police protection. Things were very tense for a few days. I was asked to explain myself to an auditorium filled with hundreds of cadets. I did, without conceding any of my arguments, and ended up leading a productive conversation, one that appeared to displease the commander who had conscripted me into the event. What I remember most, though, is the utter cowardice of my colleagues at Tech, who refused to speak in my defense. That cowardice would finally eliminate whatever residual belief I had in academe as a site of insurgency. Despite the trouble, it’s one of my favorite essays. I knew when I finished that I had produced something capable of outlasting the moment, a rare and special feeling for a writer. I figured the piece would generate some conversation, but didn’t expect to provoke nationwide outrage—in no small part because, having tailored it for a mainstream publication, I considered it rather tame and conservative. Reading the essay eight years later, I find that I’m different politically. The permissiveness I expressed about my son one day joining the military arose from a youthful notion of freedom that is deeply masculine and deeply American. (My wife told me at the time that I’m out of my mind.) I’m no longer sanguine about the possibility. Nor am I so willing to absolve individuals of violence even if they exist on the low end of a hierarchy. Nevertheless, I still recognize philosophical value in the rhetoric I chose and am happy that the essay continues to challenge the logic of a destructive ideology so many years after its initial publication.

The Taming of Anti-Zionism in the United States

The Palestine solidarity movement in the United States has lost much of its revolutionary attitude. Is it ever coming back?

It’s difficult to reflect on the history of radical social movements without the curse of nostalgia. Partly this is because time mitigates bygone frustrations, leaving us with exaggerated memories of idealism and youthful energy. But partly it’s also because radical social movements in the USA all seem to follow the same negative trajectory. (It doesn’t help that the climate apocalypse is palpable with no possibility of relief in sight.)