April 2022 - Steve Salaita

The Importance of Being Flippant

Obsessing over the fate of the settler when discussing decolonization is an insidious practice.

Mohammed El-Kurd, the young Palestinian poet and activist made famous because his home near Jerusalem was stolen by a guy from Long Island who looks like a slightly more unkempt Captain Caveman, recently found himself in yet another scandal. (Any vocal Palestinian with name recognition is destined to live a scandalous existence.)

During an Israeli Apartheid Week event at Duke University, somebody asked what the slogan “from the river to the sea” means for Israeli Jews. El-Kurd reportedly answered, “I don’t care. I truly, sincerely don’t give a f….” The audience “roared its approval.”

Listening to Zionists is a Pitiful Experience

Zionism doesn’t simply compromise people’s ethics; it inhibits their ability to comprehend simple ideas about the world.

Put aside what they profess to believe and consider instead how Zionists understand Israel. Not “Israel and Palestine.” (You might want to lose that formulation altogether.) Just Israel, as in the settler colony built atop Palestine.