Palestine Archives - Steve Salaita

Some Lessons about Zionism and Anti-Zionism from an Ongoing Genocide

If you knew anything of Zionism, then Israel’s current bloodlust is no surprise.

Ostensible supporters of Palestine who dissembled or backed down after October 7 in deference to the Zionist entity deserve to suffer endless shame. Not because they made an error of judgment; not because they got suckered by a propaganda campaign; not because they ignored more skeptical colleagues; not even because in their haste to disassociate from Palestinian resistance they validated the rationale for genocide. They should be shamed for knowing so little about Zionism.

Down with the Zionist Entity; Long Live “the Zionist Entity”

There is no vocabulary that will make Palestinians acceptable in the eyes of our oppressor.

Since the acceleration of the Zionist entity’s genocide, we’ve seen lots of debate about language and terminology. It’s a common kind of debate, usually more annoying than enlightening, especially when it occurs among thought-leaders in the Anglosphere. As Gaza suffers incalculable horror, a parade of sophisticates has decided that it’s of paramount importance for Palestinians to look presentable. Their interventions are the intellectual equivalent of a grandparent insisting that if you die in a car crash it’s important to be wearing clean underwear.

Literary Criticism in a Time of Genocide

Exploring disaffection as a critical practice.

Below is a transcript of the keynote speech I delivered for the 14^th Conference on East-West Cross-Cultural Relations at the American University in Cairo.

How the fuck am I supposed to teach Mark Twain?

I repeated this question as I sat on the bus traveling to campus. It was my first time meeting classes since October 7. I would be walking onto the same campus, but the world in which it is situated had forever changed. Trying to separate campus from Palestine was no more viable than trying to separate Christ from the crucifix.

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.

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.

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.

Palestine and the Anxiety of Existence

How do we communicate with folks who have deeply emotional responses to criticism of Israel?

I delivered the following comments (originally published at MondoWeiss) at Israeli Apartheid Week events at the School of Oriental and African Studies and Oxford University during the week of February 22, 2016. I remember the intensity of the audience at SOAS. I’d often heard that Zionism in the USA is a uniquely fervid phenomenon, but that hasn’t been my experience. I’ve had police turn up at my public events in two countries: Canada and the UK. In both cases, it was because of rambunctious pro-Israel partisans. At SOAS, a man kept yelling into the back of my head as my hosts escorted me out of the building. We made it to the sidewalk to find a bunch of constables trying to restore order. Some in the audience wanted to argue with them. The Arabs hightailed it out of there.

This evening I’m going to talk about the challenges of talking about Zionism. I begin with a question I often hear in some variation when people discuss Jews and Palestinians: how do we communicate with folks who have deeply emotional responses to criticism of Israel?

Is Palestine a Muslim Issue?

Sorting the intricacies of an impossible debate.

Is Palestine a “Muslim” issue? I regularly see some variation of the question these days—with predictably passionate, and sometimes acrimonious, responses.

In short: yes, it is.

Betty McCollum Takes on the Israel Lobby

A close reading of “Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living under Israeli Military Occupation Act”

Betty McCollum (D-MN) recently introduced legislation, with (thus far) thirteen cosponsors and dozens of organizational endorsements, that has generated significant interest. The main gist of the legislation is to condition U.S. aid to Israel on Israeli adherence to international human rights standards. The interest derives in part from the fact that what can be considered “pro-Palestine” legislation is a rarity in the U.S. Congress. McCollum is bucking the near-complete fealty to Israel customary among her House and Senate colleagues.