Colonization Archives - Steve Salaita

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.

The Magical City of Jerusalem

“Where are you from?” For Palestinians, it can be a devastating question.

The other day I was browsing the July issue of Palestine in America (an excellent magazine) featuring a profile of fashion designer Rami Kashou. Kashou is best known for his appearance on season 4 of Project Runway (2007-08), a design competition in which he placed second. He went on to a successful career in fashion.

Although I didn’t follow Kashou’s career, I remember him well. My wife and I liked Project Runway in its heyday and were watching when Kashou was introduced. His accent, his body language, his facial features—all felt deeply familiar. We glanced at each other. “Gotta be,” she said. The energy in the room got happier. We would have the rare opportunity to cheer on a Palestinian contestant.

Renouncing Israel on Principle

How to answer the question, “Do you affirm Israel’s right to exist?”

When anti-Zionists discuss the Middle East, the topic of Israel’s existence rarely arises. It’s almost exclusively a pro-Israel talking point. We’re focused on national liberation, on surviving repression, on strategies of resistance, on recovering subjugated histories, on the complex (and sometimes touchy) relationships among an Indigenous population disaggregated by decades of aggression. That a colonial state—or any state, really—possesses no ontological rights is an unspoken assumption.

BDS is a Picket Line

And crossing it makes you a scab

Last week, Shadi Hamid, a scholar affiliated with the Brookings Institute, announced on Twitter that he was visiting “Israel” and the “Palestinian territories” as part of a “study tour” sponsored by the Philos Project, a Christian Zionist outfit with warlike proclivities which “believe[s] that the Jewish nation is an indigenous nation of the Middle East with a right to live in its ancient homeland.” The announcement didn’t go over well with members of the Palestine solidarity movement.

Left-Rights

Random thoughts on carting around schoolchildren

Driving is a poor way to learn a place. Walking enables a person to discern the minutia of lawn design, roadside detritus, home disrepair, fraying utilities, and domesticated wildlife. It adjusts perception of civilized habitats. Bicyclists become familiar with grading, pavement conditions, wind patterns, shoulder clearances, and shortcuts inaccessible to cars. Both modes of transport provide an intimacy with physical surroundings precluded by the speed and structure of a vehicle.

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.

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.