Steve Salaita

The Customs of Obedience in Academe

A longform reflection on the interplay between obedience and disobedience in the modern corporate university.

I once had an acquaintance who nearly rose to the level of friend. Before forming a personal relationship, we had known of each other for many years and had even met on one occasion, quite by chance, outside of an ice cream shop in Ramallah. We were young then, both in graduate school, both figuring out what it meant for us, born in the United States, to be Palestinian. We chatted with a mutual friend serving as mediator and then went our separate ways, aware of each other’s existence in subsequent years through a tight-knit but complicated network of Arab Americans.

Arab Americans Won’t Be Shamed into Voting for Joe Biden

Some Arab American individuals might vote for Biden this November, but the community as a whole won’t forget his endorsement of genocide.

I grew up in the Arab American community. I have a large extended family who claim the identity (along with my nuclear family). I know the community well, both personally and sociologically, and both in its working class and professional iterations. It is my opinion that liberals who expect Arab Americans to forget about Biden’s endorsement of Zionist genocide when November comes around are profoundly mistaken.

So You’re a Professor? Here’s What You Can Do to Oppose Genocide

Feeling helpless does not mean being useless. It is possible to support Palestinians from afar.

College instructors, particularly those in Europe and North America, are generally limited when it comes to meaningful intervention in imperialist horrors afflicting the Global South. Nevertheless, it is usually their governments either orchestrating or abetting the horror. They ought to do something, then, even if it seems pyrrhic or inadequate.

Scrolling Through Genocide

Zionist massacres are livestreamed to the masses in high definition and still nobody can stop them.

Not so long ago there was a common theory to which I subscribed: that in an era of mass media and instant streaming the Zionist entity is unable to fully displace or wantonly slaughter Palestinians because of the scrutiny it would invite. You can get away with a lot worse, the thinking goes, if nobody is watching.

It’s a theory I’ve considered over the years while working in the fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies. From the beginning of this work, over 25 years ago, interlocutors stressed the importance of differences in comparative analyses. One crucial difference between Euro-American and Zionist colonization, everyone agreed, was the timeline. While colonization is ongoing in North and South America, often in situations of great struggle or tension, settlement of the so-called New World precedes the conquest of modern Palestine by a few centuries.

Hamas is a Figment of Your Imagination

What is Hamas? Fuck if you know.

Yes, it’s true. Hamas is a figment of your imagination.

I understand that your impulse is to ask about decapitated babies and mass rape and bearded men hiding in the treetops, but it will do no good. Those are also figments of your imagination.

Genocide Joe and the Electoralists

The fundamental inhumanity of electoralism has reached its final stage.

What do you do with a genocidaire? Demand his resignation? Put him on trial? Drag him through the streets?

If you’re American, apparently you make him president.

To the People in Gaza and all of Palestine

To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine: we have no platitudes, no pity, no piety, no passivity; we pronounce instead our sadness and rage.

To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine: we vow never to apologize for the oppressor.

To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine: your light nourishes our joy; your darkness ignites our consciousness.

To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine: we will never forgive the silence; we will never forgive the treachery; we will never forgive the obedience.

To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine: we will vote for no president.

To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine: we do not condemn you.

To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine: we will remind anyone who tries to forget.

To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine: we love you without any of the conditions imposed by the West.

A Practical Appraisal of Palestinian Violence

Palestinian violence, a complicated and ambivalent category, requires thoughtful analysis, not Orientalist commonplaces and liberal platitudes.

I. Terror and Jubilation

When I was a graduate student many years ago, I got to spend time in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. Life in the camp was challenging, but community bonds were strong despite the adversity. Internal tensions existed, but return to Palestine served as a unifying principle.

It was an active era of Palestinian resistance—what Western journalists and intellectuals lazily refer to as “Palestinian violence.” A major tactic at the time was the suicide bomb. Sometimes the attacker would go after a military installation. At other times, he (or she) targeted public spaces. Western pundits and intellectuals, along with a fair number of their counterparts in the Arab World, declared the tactic a byproduct of atavistic evil and collected the usual plaudits in return. To even suggest the possibility of sociological factors was a monstrous breach of professional standards. According to the orthodoxy, Palestinian behavior was rash and unreasoned.

Palestine Never Goes Away

Those who want to forget Palestine, can’t. Those who say they forgot Palestine, haven’t.

I’ve never thought of my devotion to Palestine’s liberation as contingent on any kind of productivity. It’s there whether or not I write about the occupation, whether or not I attend a conference, whether or not I argue with trolls on the internet, whether or not I read Electronic Intifada, whether or not I donate to Red Crescent, whether or not I do archival history, whether or not I buy revolutionary paraphernalia. It doesn’t matter if I visit Palestine, avoid Palestine, ignore Palestine, or visualize Palestine.

Yet Another Think-Piece on ChatGPT

New technology can be terrifying, but it needn’t scare us into immobility.

From 1999 to 2017, I taught college. Then I ran into some trouble. From 2017-2022, I was deprived of teaching. Technology changes rapidly in five years, which means pedagogy does, as well. The classroom to which I returned last fall, albeit in the Arab World rather than the United States, felt profoundly familiar. It also changed in ways I can’t quite comprehend.