Palestine Archives - Page 3 of 4

The Inhumanity of Academic Freedom

A transcript of the 2019 TB Davie Memorial Lecture at the University of Cape Town, delivered August 7, 2019.

I begin with a straightforward proposition: academic freedom is inhumane. Its inhumanity isn’t of the physical, legal, or intellectual variety. Even at its best, academic freedom is capable of transforming human beings into instruments of bureaucracy. It is inhumane as an ontological category. It cannot provide the very artifact it promises: freedom. To become practicable, academic freedom requires textual boundaries. Under this sort of regime, freedom is merely academic.

Tulsi Gabbard and the Art of the Half-Sentence

Gabbard’s views on Palestine appear to have evolved, but that doesn’t mean they’re good.

People in the Palestine solidarity community have been debating the merits of Tulsi Gabbard’s presidential campaign. Gabbard has earned the sympathy, or at least the interest, of some activists, while others (including myself) dismiss her as a Zionist.

Gabbard’s supporters point to occasional tweets and comments critical of Israel (most of them actually critical of Netanyahu). The best of them came during the Great March of Return in 2018: “Israel needs to stop using live ammunition in its response to unarmed protesters in Gaza. It has resulted in over 50 dead and thousands seriously wounded.”

It Ain’t Merit

Reactionary pundits are infuriating, but we should reserve much of our anger for the media that generate their fame.

A recent Intercept article about Mohamad Tawhidi, the so-called “imam of peace,” a rightwing, Zionist, Islamophobic Shia cleric (no, seriously), sheds light on his rapid emergence as a media darling:

Tawhidi’s public career began, as he recently told “intellectual dark web” star Dave Rubin, when he “was discovered” by a producer for a tabloid news show on Australia’s Channel 7. “I got a call from Channel 7,” Tawhidi told Rubin, “and apparently they Googled ‘imam,’ ‘Adelaide,’ ‘Muslim,’ just to get a comment.”

He speaks with pride where shame is appropriate:

“So they came in wanting a three-minute comment on a certain issue and I gave them a 30-minute talk about the Muslim community,” Tawhidi continued, “and the director gets in touch with me and [said], ‘We can do a lot with what you’re saying.’”

College Administrators Care About Your Speech Rights–If You’re a Nazi

They disapprove of speech favorable to Palestinians, however.

Discussing free speech in the United States is a losing proposition. Every political demographic screams about hypocrisy, but doing so misses the larger point: it’s impossible to lionize speech as understood in this country without also being hypocritical. That’s because civil liberties are indivisible from the needs of power. In many cases, speech isn’t performed as a freedom; it’s an asset exploited by the shrewdest consumers.

Ripping the Headlines

What do corporate media headlines tell us about ruling class agendas? As always, Palestine provides an answer.

Headlines are critical and often decisive elements of any news cycle. They inhabit a specific rhetorical genre—being a kind of art, as well—one reason why most publications don’t allow contributors the honor of writing them. They can be tantalizingly vague, purposefully misleading, or notoriously sensational (looking at you, Salon). But, like any textual phenomenon, they’re never neutral. Even headlines that aim to be functional omit infinite possibilities; editors select certain words over others, limit description according to ideological need, and influence a reader’s focus. (These conventions aren’t inherently bad, but they preclude objectivity.)

James Baldwin and the Jewish State

Baldwin didn’t speak often of Israel, but he still managed to say plenty

For James Baldwin, nothing started or stopped at the borders of the United States. His comments about Black-Jewish tension in the country of his birth took on worldly dimensions, offering unusual insight into domestic race relations, international affairs, and conflict in the Middle East.

Baldwin wasn’t a policy wonk, but, befitting a person of his stature, he commented regularly on contemporary issues of global import. Public figures don’t normally escape questions about Palestine and Israel; Baldwin was no exception. The few times he spoke about the region reveal a thinker of significant prescience and a skilled rhetorician who doesn’t allow audiences the luxury of comfort.

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.

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.