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Decolonization : Survival :: Water: Life

Why does Palestine matter to Native Americans? How can Palestinians help liberate Native America?

During the summer of 2016, thousands of people representing dozens of nations converged on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in the American state currently known as South Dakota. They arrived to prevent the destruction of land and water by a foreign oil company. Energy Transfer Partners of Dallas, a regular in the Fortune 500, was constructing an underground pipeline to deliver crude oil from near the Canadian border to southern Illinois, where it would hook up with extant transport infrastructure to the Gulf of Mexico. The convergence at Standing Rock, a nation existentially threatened by the pipeline, earned the world’s attention and became an extraordinary site of multinational organizing. The Palestinian black, red, and green could be seen in the spectrum of colors.

The Problem with Apology

When should anti-Zionists apologize to apologists for Israeli war crimes?

Two Saturdays ago, I was relaxing in my pajamas while my child watched cartoons and my wife tapped at her laptop when our calm morning was interrupted by a loud, menacing knock. I opened the door to a smiling man holding a thick manila envelope in both hands.

“Are you Steven Salaita?” he asked.

Palestine in the Revolutionary Imagination

Finding Palestine among the disinherited.

Beirut’s corniche is a terrific place to contemplate the immovable and the ephemeral. The seaside walkway is one of the city’s few remaining public spaces and the only place where servitude doesn’t divide rich and poor. Tourists mingle among locals, many of them Syrian and Palestinian, and on lucky days entertainment will include oddball breakdancers, daredevil divers, and somebody playing an oud plugged into an amplifier. On a nice Sunday, which in the Eastern Mediterranean is usually a weekly occurrence, crowds are so thick (with pedestrians strolling in bike lanes and bikes weaving through pedestrians) that walking briskly is impossible.

Impractical Living

Reflections on moving through a society acclimated to violence.

In August, 2017, I moved back to the USA after two years of living in Beirut. I quickly sensed the tension of Donald Trump’s America, but it wasn’t especially jarring: Donald Trump’s America is just a more explicit version of what “America” has been my entire life. I found more jarring the constant displays of patriotism, something I never liked and was happy to forget shortly after I left the country. (Lebanese displays of patriotism are no more comforting, but they don’t resonate the same way to a Western expat.) After a few months, my family settled into a townhouse in one of DC’s anodyne suburbs.

Find Me Someone Better

A rant about the stupidity of electoral discourse in the United States.

I’ve long deployed what I consider a simple viewpoint about US elections (congressional and presidential): if leftists choose to participate, they should do it without making certain people disposable. In other words, don’t commit to movements that require the downtrodden anywhere in the world to remain in states of hardship or dispossession. US electoralism, by design, assiduously elides the needs and aspirations of communities whose freedom would disrupt imperial and colonial accumulation. Few groups are more familiar with this culture of disposability than Palestinians.

Absence and Dissent

No amount of charm or persuasiveness will compel reactionaries to forfeit the advantages they derive from racism.

Not a week passes without a new petition appearing in my inbox or Facebook feed urging solidarity with a scholar facing employer recrimination or harassment from rightwing culture warriors. (“Harassment” doesn’t get at the racist, sexist, and homophobic vitriol that victims of these campaigns endure.) The uptick in rightwing bullying many suspected would accompany a Trump presidency has come to fruition.

Certain patterns define these harassment campaigns. Republican operatives prowl social media for provocative comments, with the help of professional snitches and everyday informants (even if your posts are private, they are vulnerable to public consumption—watch your friends list closely). Those operatives then repurpose the quotes with the aim of inflaming white anxieties. The controversies almost always originate in social media, though op-ed pieces and conference programs also come in for scrutiny.

The ABCs of US and Israeli Propaganda

The main function of US and Israeli propaganda is to affirm the disposability of colonized people. Dissent, then, isn’t merely a pastime, but the foundation of existential clarity and economic relief.

US and Israeli propaganda diverge according to circumstance, but they share basic characteristics (and modes of delivery). It’s easy to get sucked into the fantasy that we can make reporting and commentary more even-handed, but the propaganda model precludes that possibility. The model is dynamic; capitalism is the only ideology it absolutely preserves. Everything else is contingent on the needs of power. If at any point the economic and political elite need new narratives, corporate media will make the changes.

What to do about Corporate Media

Should leftists pursue access to corporate media? Only if they’re willing to accept rejection.

If you consider yourself a leftist, corporate media are your enemy. I don’t use the term “enemy” to sound melodramatic. Nor do I use it hyperbolically. I’m thinking about its denotation as a person or entity whose interests are anathema to your own. If you are not of the elite (culturally, politically, or economically), or don’t long to join the club, then hostility exists between you as a consumer of news and those who deliver the product, even if you don’t always see it. In fact, corporate media view you with bald contempt. You needn’t return the favor (though it won’t hurt to try), but it’s wise to understand that the industry is beyond redemption (by its nature) and does its best to keep you disempowered.

Except for Palestine

Progressive Except for Palestine (PEP) is a myth. Adherence to Zionism inhibits comprehensive political decency.

Progressive except for Palestine, PEP (or PeP), is a familiar appellation. Palestine solidarity activists have been using it for a long time to describe the kind of leftist who professes support for racial and economic justice without extending that concern to Palestinians. In other words, the appellation describes standard-issue liberals in the metropole.

In recent months a cognate has emerged: feminist except for Palestine. This species, often indistinguishable from the PEP, locates in settler colonization a space for women’s liberation. In some cases, FEPs affirm Zionist civility by highlighting male barbarity among Israel’s enemies. They have a cozy relationship with US intervention in backward regions of the globe and imagine that gender equality can be realized through Zionism. Lately, they’ve been trying to rid the Women’s March of radical affectations.

An Honest Living

What is it like to go from a tenured professorship to an hourly wage driving buses? This piece tries to make sense of an unusual transition.

About halfway to the lot, a ribbon of cobalt rises on the horizon; when it’s cloudy, a common occurrence in the mid-Atlantic, the darkness stays pure. The spectrum of color will change with the seasons, but now it is winter and the sun comes slowly, if it appears at all.

Upon arrival, I exit my car, leaving it unlocked, and strap on my hazel backpack, which holds a bottle of tap water, a book (usually detective or spy fiction), lens cleaner, Imodium, a pen (I hate being anywhere without one), cough drops, hand sanitizer, two granola bars, and a banana. Garden mat and flashlight in hand, I begin my safety check, circling the vehicle for anything suspicious. Then I inspect rims, lug nuts, and tire tread before kneeling on the pavement to check the frame, slack adjusters, fuel tank, steering linkage, bushings, shock absorbers, brake lining, and a bunch of other doohickeys, a task that age and temperature make especially unpleasant. I open the door, examine the stairs and handrail, click the interior lights, unlock emergency hatches, and walk the aisle to make sure seats are properly bolted, exiting again into the cold morning, its cobalt replaced by the lucent bloom of dawn, where I check tire pressure, light covers, and compartments. After lifting the hood, I shine the flashlight on belts and engine parts and fluid tanks, finally removing the floppy dipstick to verify proper oil level. An elaborate brake test, three more walk-arounds, some additional prodding and dickering, and I’m done.