Indigeneity Archives - Steve Salaita

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.