Steve Salaita

Our (Your) Pitiful Ethics!: A Response to Zadie Smith’s “Shibboleth”

In its apparent nothingness, Zadie Smith’s essay “Shibboleth” tells us plenty about how genocide can be rationalized.

Since the publication of her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), Zadie Smith has been a darling of tastemakers across the Atlantic. Much of her ensuing work feels like a love letter to the forces who anointed her into literary stardom. Twenty-four years on, she continues to repay the favor.

The Free Speech Exception to Palestine

Now that (even moderate) pro-Palestine sentiment has been effectively outlawed in both the public and private sectors, I hope we can say goodbye to the Western myth of “free speech” from which so many reactionaries built their careers.

The following is a reproduction, with slight modifications, of an article recently published in a special issue of Middle East Critique, “The Academic Question of Palestine,” edited by Walaa Alqaisiya and Nicola Perugini.

The title of this essay inverts a common phrase, “the Palestine exception to free speech,” first used by civil rights attorney Michael Ratner (2013) and later popularized by Maria LaHood of the Center for Constitutional Rights. While it is true that free speech protections often fail to accommodate criticism of Israel in various Western countries, the phrase assumes that the failure is out of character. An alternate view would suggest that exclusion of Palestine results from the limitations of free speech itself. As is often the case, the issue of Palestine exposes hypocrisy, myth, or deceit in the USA’s exceptional self-image.

My Worst Career Move: An Excerpt from “An Honest Living”

Amid a history of poor career choices, none was more damaging than this.

What follows is an excerpt from my new book, An Honest Living: A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries. Told primarily from behind the wheel of a school bus—a vantage point from which I explore social anxiety, suburban architecture, political alienation, racial oppression, working-class solidarity, professional malfeasance, and the joy of chauffeuring children to and from school—An Honest Living describes a decade of turbulent post-professorial life and my recent return to the lectern. The book is available here and here.

With friends it’s fine to act like a fool. Professional spaces are more tenuous. Don’t get me wrong, you’re definitely allowed to act like a fool in professional spaces, but the foolishness needs to comply with a certain etiquette. Ghosting colleagues and skipping social functions to smoke weed are a no-no. The professionals prefer foolishness of a loutish or belligerent variety, not the kind that makes life more peaceful.

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.