Steve Salaita

The Muslim Zionists

A generation of compradors has learned that Palestinians are valuable raw material for careerism.

A few days ago, I finally managed to synthesize an observation that has bothered me for decades: “Being an asshole to Palestinians is an excellent way to launch a media career in the United States.” From Martin Peretz to Bari Weiss, the strategy has rarely failed writers seeking bylines in prestigious newspapers.

The Architecture of Surveillance in Northern Virginia

The unfreedom we often fear is real, and it’s visible everywhere

Back in November, I had to drop off my bus at one of the county garages for a minor repair. On the way, I radioed dispatch and said I’d need a ride back to the lot where my car was parked. I dallied outside the garage office, on the clock, until my ride ambled along and scooped me up.

The driver was inquisitive and after learning that I was relatively new asked if I enjoy my work. Not wanting to reveal too much about myself—I hate mixing politics with chitchat—I started joke-complaining about how goddamn hard it is to find the garage. The gambit worked. My new friend told me a funny story about his first year on the job.

Regular People

Who are they? And why do they never speak for themselves?

Regular people. Normal people. Ordinary people. Average people. Everyday people. (No, not the song whose chorus is likely stuck in your head right now.)

The masses. Salt of the earth. The working class.

A Dispatch from Month Four of Quarantine

A personal reckoning with the dialectic between pain and pleasure.

Without looking it up, I know exactly when lockdown got serious: Friday, March 13. The entire day felt off. I remember parking my bus in the evening—the lot was uncharacteristically quiet—and thinking, “Yeah, I won’t be doing this again for a while.”

Later that evening, the county I work for closed down all the schools. The closure would last until the end of the term. My child’s school, in Maryland, would shutter the following Monday.

Should We Cancel Cancel Culture?

Let’s figure out what we’re talking about first.

Note: This essay is the third part of a three-part series on social media. Click here for part one and here for part two.

Many champions of free speech are less into civil liberties than the preservation of a certain view of modernity. “Free speech,” in its discursive form (the form it takes as a rhetorical ideal), can be a mechanism to discipline people who have long been voiceless. Beyond its legal dynamics, the term often reifies capitalist principles of free-marketeering and accumulation. It also enables social media luminaries to deflect criticism when they share ghoulish opinions. Above all, the discourse of free speech preserves a vision of Americana implicated in an unacknowledged colonial origin. Harmful politics, logic has it, are a necessary feature of democracy.

Does It Matter If Israel Annexes the West Bank?

Annexation is bad news, but we should understand it as a material expression of Zionism.

Annexation of the West Bank isn’t a new idea. Zionists always had their eye on what they call Judea and Samaria, the actual sites of biblical significance as opposed to the coastal and desert areas they conquered in 1948. As soon as Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in 1967, its leaders began discussing annexation.

In fact, Netanyahu’s effort isn’t much different from Yigal Allon’s 1967 proposal (the so-called Allon Plan). It’s still not clear exactly how the Israeli government will proceed—apparently it intends to annex Area C, including the Jordan Valley, although some officials reportedly want to claim the entire West Bank—but the idea is to make a viable Palestinian state impossible, in keeping with Allon’s vision.

To Students and Teachers Targeted by the Israel Lobby

Zionist defamation can be scary, but it needn’t immobilize your commitment to justice.

University students and instructors periodically drop into my inbox with stories of repression and reprisal for having criticized Israel—or merely for having spoken favorably of Palestinians. In some cases, faculty have been demoted or fired, or have been denied tenure. In other cases, they’ve lost funding or opportunities to publish. They’ve been threatened, if only implicitly (plenty of times the threat is explicit). Students have been profiled by websites aiming to destroy their careers (pro-Israel zealots are expert snitches) or subject to some kind of disciplinary action.

A Postmortem on Bernie Sanders and Palestine

Now that the Sanders campaign has ended, Palestinian Americans should reflect on why our organizations so readily abandoned anti-imperialism.

Let me start with a story about the Democratic primary. Now, I’m no operative, so this story has nothing to do with voting choices or electability. It’s about how Palestine disappears in US electoral discourses, even when people who identify as Palestinian purport to make it visible.

An Unadulterated Sense of Wonder

A child finds love amid pandemic.

A few weeks ago, my son’s eighth birthday passed and he didn’t get to have a party. He spent the day watching TV and eating junk food. Although he seemed content, his mother and I were crushed. Like most seven-and-a-half-year-olds, he had spoken excitedly about the kind of party he wanted. None of his ideas involved social distancing.