After a conversation with my wife in which she encouraged me to deploy language that won’t disaffect leftists enamored of US political spectacles, but instead invite them into conversation about why I consider it troublesome to mythologize presidential candidates by whitewashing their Zionism and thus diverting hard-won energy from Palestine’s national movement into electoralism (innately anathema to decolonization), I’ve been considering how to act on the advice, for I’ve tried the soft approach many times, always with the same result—a snide and often belligerent defense of pragmatism—and I can’t imagine that result changing because ultimately the objection to recalcitrance isn’t about tone so much as outlook, ethics, ambition, and ideology, and yet I want to honor the appeal to decorum, so with an open heart I ask, “What words might I use to illustrate that Palestinian well-being is more important than networking opportunities and podcast appearances, that investment in electoral politics is both dull and provincial, that instinctively defending parties in position to proffer social capital betrays the wretched and dispossessed, that nothing in this vanishing world matters more than keeping alive the idea of freedom (real freedom, untethered to the numbing conventions of US exceptionalism), that beautiful possibilities arise when we attempt to inhabit alien sensibilities—is there anything, in other words, I can say that would convince you to stop colonizing the left on behalf of liberalism and calling it a revolution?”
A Simple Question
A civil inquest into the incompatibility of electoralism and decolonization.
Mic. Drop.
You’re too much!
“that beautiful possibilities arise when we attempt to inhabit alien sensibilities.”
Swoon
Can you expand on this, please: ultimately the objection to recalcitrance isn’t about tone so much as outlook, ethics, ambition, and ideology
Thanks
This is a very good question, but I doubt Steve will answer. (I hope he will prove me wrong.) He will most likely dismiss it as an inadequate understanding of the tenets of “deconolizing Palestine from river to sea” (while it is first and foremost a question of human rights and of freedom). What “decolonization” implies for Jews who fled the surrounding countries or who fled the holocaust in the last century is a mystery. Anyone who does not share his position is not worthy of being in the “decolonized” left. As descendants of people who have been persecuted for being Palestinian, I think we need to hold ourselves to higher standards. His attitude of not engaging in debate where arguments rather than people are assessed and dismissed is not doing us Palestinians any favors.
Sounds good to me. It is rare to see this opinion and it is appreciated.
For a quantitative answer to your question, you might want to look at the evolution of debate during the French revolution,
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/18/4607.full.pdf
I also ask you with an open heart
“What words might I use to illustrate that the well-being of each and every human being, and not only that of Palestinians, is paramount, that rhetoric alone carries nothing but the sterile seeds of the status quo, that relinquishing attempts for change at the level of legislative committees within an evolving political system is a betrayal of the wretched and the dispossessed, that nothing in this world is more important than acting to transform our hopes, including our hope for freedom, into a future reality, that the complexity of the total sum of human endeavors can not and should not be measured using a single criterion (such as colonialism or Zionism), that ideas stay alive and capture the public imagination when one demonstrates in an unambiguous manner their tenability, that bringing about cultural evolution requires a critical process of proposing and disposing of ideas until a viable path emerges, in other words, what can I say to convince you that being held hostage to ‘beautiful’ ideals that are divorced from action or from engagement with those who hold different views will not bring the imperative cultural (re)evolution?”
This is worse than I expected.
https://twitter.com/stevesalaita/status/1156568354385252352
Growing up as a stateless refugee in Lebanon, I can assure you in unequivocal terms that I found a lot more humanity and common decency among some “white leftists” that you dismiss than among a lot of fellow “non-white” Lebanese.
I know you will most probably never apologize since you regard it as compliance. However, your dismissing others without open debate is harming Palestinians in more ways than you can imagine. Please stop inadvertently giving political Zionists ammunition to continue dehumanizing Palestinians. Unplug from social media, spend some quality time with people you love and care for, and read a book like “Les Misérables” and decide at the end whether you identify more with Jean Valjean or Inspector Javert.
Steve, I will say this as someone who vehemently defended your right for academic freedom and freedom of expression even when I find some of your arguments untenable, so much so that I lost some dear friends because of it.
Our oppressors can dispossess us, take our homes, kill our children, raise our fields and uproot our thousand years old olive trees, heck, even take our life on a whim. One, and only one thing they can not take: our humanity. If we preserve it, we are victorious. Do not lose sight of it because of anger or a misplaced sense of entitlement or victimhood. Salam.
So you are only happy when you have propaganda that can be used to dehumanize Jews? Your oppressor? Your oppressor is a Palestinian Arab.