‘Palestine is an anxiety’ for Americans– Salaita in New York

The embattled scholar Steven Salaita is in New York. He spoke at NYU three days ago to an overflow crowd; the audio was posted by Law and Disorder Radio; and it’s fascinating. I summarize the speech below.

First, Corey Robin heard Salaita– who was fired by the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in August because of his outspokenness against the Gaza onslaught– talk at Brooklyn College last night. He lays out the politics, both structural and personal, of the appearance:
All of us at Brooklyn College, and in the larger community, owe a debt of gratitude to the Students for Justice in Palestine. This is now the fourth or fifth (probably more) major event of its kind that they have put on at Brooklyn College since the BDS affair [of a year ago]. And each time, they’ve managed to offer members of the College—on all sides of the Israel/Palestine issue—and the community a chance to have a thoughtful discussion. Whatever your position is on this issue, there should be little disagreement that SJP has enriched the College. Not because they advocate for justice in Palestine—though they do that, too—but because they have provided us all with a space to stretch our minds…
Though I was obviously sympathetic to Steven Salaita going into this event, I came out of it extraordinarily impressed by him. Not merely his character—he’s as haimish as can be—but his intellect. He has an extraordinarily agile mind. Within minutes he can move you from Cotton Mather to Franz Fanon, and throughout the ride, you know exactly where you are. You can see why he’s such a good teacher and why his students love him so much: not because he tells you what you know, but because he takes you somewhere you’ve not been. He had a brilliant riff about how it’s an old trope in colonial discourse that the native corrupts the colonizer, that it’s the native that turns the colonizer from someone who’s as pure as the driven snow into the foulest heart. And suddenly Salaita leaped to Spielberg’s Munich, and showed how it illustrated that exact principle.
This is the man the University of Illinois fired. Because, they claimed, he would be a toxin in the classroom. They have no idea what they’ve squandered.

Having listened to Salaita’s 40-minute NYU speech , I agree with Robin; what the heck was the University of Illinois thinking? Salaita’s speech was about the ways that Palestine has become magnified and distorted in the American imagination because of our own anxieties surrounding the indigenous community, and about the need to simplify our understanding of the conflict to one of colonial settlement. As Salaita himself says humbly at the beginning of the talk, lots of folks have their own ideas; you don’t have to agree with him. But you do have to engage these ideas.

On his firing by the University of Illinois last summer, Salaita says that the case has become a flashpoint because it demonstrates the role of the university as “neoliberal corporation.” And he was double trouble because he studies not just Palestine but American Indian dispossession.

I was hired to teach in the American Indian Studies program, a crucial fact that is too often overlooked… [My firing is] an attack on fields of American Indian and indigenous studies.

Salaita rejects the ideal of “civility” that was offered by the university to justify his firing. Civility comes out of the “lexicon of colonial conquest” and the “discourse of educated racism.” It is “the pretext of the oppressor… a tragic allegory of a centuries’ old federal Indian policy.” And though he doesn’t recapitulate his Gaza tweets that were the focus of Israel lobby groups’ attack on him, he says:

To support Palestine in the American polity automatically entails an act of radicalism. No matter how measured or demonstrable the point of view, it is necessarily uncivil… Civility is not a state of mind, it is a regime. Civility reinforces the conceits of modernity…

No state attaches more power to the stature of its identity than Israel. The United States is inseparable from Israeli power. This is the context of my situation with the University of Illinois.

Salaita begins the speech by explaining that Palestine exists in a “mythological space” in the American polity; it exposes our anxieties about the “inability of the American ideal to fully come to fruition.”

Palestine as a myth and an avatar informs the groundwork of the American project. Palestine is the progenitor of American manifest destiny….

Palestine is a symbol. For many it is an avatar of barbaric Arab and Muslim violence, a key battleground in the global war on terror. For others, it is a space of courageous resistance. On the political left especially, Palestine has become a metaphor of liberatory struggle, the site of a new third world movement against western imperialism. For others still, it is a confounding example of tribal or religious intractability…

In many ways, Israel is a fuller realization of the American dream. Palestine on the other hand is an anxiety. One whose existence insures the presence of the native.

Salaita says that we should treat the conflict as familiar and unexceptional: “I urge us to extract Palestine from the American imagination.” Palestine, he says, is just another case of settler colonization. One group of people forcibly settled the land of another group of people. The solution is to implement democracy and end the colonization, and end the “tiered system of belonging,” based on religion. This solution is “complicated” only for those invested in the settlement enterprise.
He cannot count the number of times he’s heard the argument, the dispossession happened, and we’re all better off for it, the US had to displace Indians to create the world’s greatest democracy. “Are we supposed to return land to the Indians?”

The idea is that you can’t reverse history, a notion that can only be put forward by the victor.

That’s not an argument, Salaita says, but an evasion. Indigenous communities are not “objects of the past.”

They are living communities whose numbers are growing… Colonialism is present across North America.

And yes, the U.S. must return lands to the native population; that’s what the treaties are all about. The vast majority of five states in the midwest is Indian land.
No amount of ignorance, willful or unwilling, will invalidate the vigorous efforts to decolonize North and South America. When Israel’s supporters invoke the dispossession of living communities on those continents as a rationale for colonizing Palestine, they betray a profound disdain of indigenous humanity, the sort of contempt that renders the oppressor’s psyche so unsettled. … [They posit the belief that] modernity itself is impossible without violent practices justified as inevitable.
 People are supporting Steven Salaita here.

Thanks to Michael Smith, who hosted and posted Salaita.

 

 

65 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

an enormous loss for students, faculty, and the greater community of UIUC.

“And he was double trouble because he studies not just Palestine but American Indian dispossession. [sic]

I was hired to teach in the American Indian Studies program, a crucial fact that is too often overlooked… [My firing is] an attack on fields of American Indian and indigenous studies.”

That IS the essential nugget for me.

Someone will offer him a tenured position~ probably many someones. I hope that UIUC gets trounced for this.

Thanks, Phil.

“Salaita’s speech was about the ways that Palestine has become magnified and distorted in the American imagination because of our own anxieties surrounding the indigenous community, and about the need to simplify our understanding of the conflict to one of colonial settlement.”

I understand what he/you are saying, but I think that most Americans have precious little anxiety about any indigenous people! That’s why his voice is so very important!

But, boy is he on target here:

“In many ways, Israel is a fuller realization of the American dream. Palestine on the other hand is an anxiety. One whose existence insures the presence of the native.”

just look at the furor over immigration, when most Americans themselves all originated from immigrants. large swaths of America are pretty xenophobic, whether the immigrants are legal or not, and they are still discriminatory toward indigenous Americans.

Last night Obama said that some people who are illegal immigrants in the USA may stay (still illegally but) without government opposition (for a while).

I’d like him to say that illegal immigrants into Israel’s occupied territories (WB and Golan at present) may NOT stay; but that (as it is in the USA) legal residents MAY stay (and not be oppressed by Israel).

My guess? He’ll get it wrong.

Well, I could turn that around and say that Israel has become an anxiety for some US Arabs

if salaita had tweeted, i wish all the settlers were stabbed or shot to death, would that have only been a question of civility. because his tweet was less direct, that does increase its civility. but if this is really about civility of the regime of oppression then it should be okay to tweet, i wish all the settlers were stabbed or shot to death.