Uncivil Rites

Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom

Steven Salaita

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781608465781
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the summer of 2014, renowned American Indian studies professor Steven Salaita had his appointment to a tenured professorship revoked by the board of trustees of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Salaita's employment was terminated in response to his public tweets criticizing the Israeli government's summer assault on Gaza.Salaita's firing generated a huge public outcry, with thousands petitioning for his reinstatement, and more than five thousand scholars pledging to boycott UIUC. His case raises important questions about academic freedom, free speech on campus, and the movement for justice in Palestine.In this book, Salaita combines personal reflection and political critique to shed new light on his controversial termination. He situates his case at the intersection of important issues that affect both higher education and social justice activism.

Six

Imaginary Students

I’m often asked if I regret writing the tweets that supposedly got me fired.

I understand why folks ask the question, though their motivations differ. Sometimes it’s a gambit intended to provoke admission of wrongdoing. At other times it’s a sincerely curious query. I’m a humanities academic, though, trained to seek complexity even in the most exquisite forms of simplicity. Few binaristic questions are as easy to answer as they are to ask, especially when they possess conspicuous and complicated subtexts. I can’t simply say no or yes because it’s important to read questions in context of what they suggest, not merely what they desire. In this case, there’s too much of a reliance on linear induction. Would I have written the tweets knowing I would get fired? Of course not. But this is a much different inquiry than asking if I regret publishing the controversial tweets.

Would anybody swim in the ocean if that person knew she would be mauled by a bull shark? It’s always a possibility when we dive into the surf, and yet beaches see no shortage of bathers. We make decisions based on conscious or unconscious assessment of risk. Hypotheticals inform decisions, but moral signification exists most pertinently at the moment of deciding. I tweeted without any meaningful sense that I would be targeted by political opponents who might misread meaning and then undermine my livelihood. Nor do I believe that my tweets warrant such punishment even absent the protection of free speech.

Answering the question is particularly difficult in corporate media, whose formats reward zippy sound bites and pithy banter, two areas in which I have little skill. (Forgive my boastfulness.) Sometimes it takes me about ten seconds just to get started, which can constitute the entire time frame a host will allow a guest to respond. I am a reliable purveyor of dead air. I don’t simply find these formats personally unlikeable. They contribute to a political culture replete with platitudes and patriotic sloganeering.

A major complication of the question is that I don’t believe the tweets are the only reason for my termination. They’re metonymical, surely, and perhaps partly responsible, but not in ways I would call definitive. Fanatical Zionists can always find a pretext for being punitive, but their punitive strategies occupy broader questions. (Please note: I am not calling all Zionists fanatical, but identifying as fanatical those who seek to punish their ideological opponents.) Here are some of the factors that contributed to my firing:

• My vocal support of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS).

• My ethnic identity. (It is more nuanced than simply “Palestinian.”)

• The profoundly corrupt politics of Illinois.

• Having had the misfortune of being hired at a campus home to former AAUP president Cary Nelson.

• Israel’s failed propaganda efforts during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge.

• The interference of wealthy donors.

• The corporatization of American universities.

• The increased authority governing boards have conferred to themselves.

• The delegation of labor on campus into deeply stratified economic classes.

• The weak and impressionable leadership of Phyllis Wise.

What happened to me has been happening to ethnic, sexual, and cultural minorities in academe for decades, African Americans especially, and it continues to happen today. A shameful irony is that Jews were long marginalized in the academy because of their supposed dangers to Anglo civility, victim to rationalizations for their exclusion that, sadly, don’t look terribly different than the ones now being used against supporters of Palestinian human rights.

I thus want to honor those before and alongside me and those in the future on whose behalf we struggle for a better world. Any cursory review of the history of American universities shows that academic freedom isn’t universally accessible. The suppression of Blackness and Indigeneity predates the purge of Palestine and in many ways contextualizes and sustains it.

An outstanding case is that of Angela Davis, who was fired (twice) and falsely indicted for murder. A new assistant professor of philosophy at UCLA in 1969, Davis earned the ire of then-Governor Ronald Reagan, who orchestrated the termination of her employment because of her membership in the Communist Party. Her revolutionary politics around race and gender, along with her Black Panther affiliation, also enacted the UC Regents’ anxiety. Davis won a lawsuit for her reinstatement, but in 1970 the regents fired her for “inflammatory language,” a cruder version of the civility rationale. The only thing Davis’s language inflamed was the interests of the white male elite. She went on to a luminous career as a scholar and prison abolition activist, but that career has never escaped sensitivity to inflammation. It shouldn’t pass our notice that the main issue inspiring condemnation of Davis these days is her support of BDS.

The regulation of deviant bodies, ideas, and identities has influenced American campuses since their inception. With some exceptions, the ethos of the university as a site of special intellectual dispensation came into existence based on exclusion. My situation makes no sense outside of this context. Nothing in academe makes sense at the level of individuality. We are in it together, whether or not we want to be.

As to the reasons for my termination, BDS and Operation Protective Edge are central.

Let’s start with BDS, a nonviolent form of resistance to Israeli colonization, initiated by a call from Palestinian civil society in 2005. “Civil society” refers to civic, political, and educational organizations. In recent years, BDS has become a crucial element of organizing around Palestine. A number of powerful institutions have endorsed BDS in recent years, including trade unions, scholarly associations, and university senates.

Academic boycott, one facet of BDS, has lately generated great results, as numerous scholarly associations have pledged to adhere to the call from Palestinian civil society, most notably the American Studies Association (ASA), whose 2013 boycott resolution inspired widespread debate. (The ASA was not, in fact, the first US-based scholarly group to pass a boycott resolution; that superlative belongs to the Association for Asian American Studies [AAAS], which did it in March 2013.)

I have been a vocal proponent of BDS and academic boycott for many years and wrote a number of high-profile pieces supporting the ASA resolution. Contrary to popular perception, academic boycott does not target individuals, only institutions. This is not to say that academic boycott does not affect individuals; in some cases it does. Like all movements with a material aim—in this case to end the occupation of Palestine—it necessarily alters both interpersonal relationships and individual rites of affiliation. It does so only through the standard that to be subject to boycott an individual must act as a representative of the Israeli government (including as an emissary of one of the state’s universities—this precludes normal public statements of affiliation). The limits on personal autonomy, then, remain fully in the individual’s control.

BDS has the attention of major pro-Israel organizations and the Israeli government, which has devoted considerable resources to opposing it. Binyamin Netanyahu discusses it frequently, always with visible disgust. It has inspired legislation in New York, Maryland, and Illinois (subsequently defeated) to defund institutions and departments with ASA membership. (Illinois went on to pass an amended bill, SB1761, by unanimous vote in May 2015.) A significant portion of a 2014 conference organized by AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) explored strategies to contain BDS. It is a hot topic among pro-Israel organizations. (Quick aside: as a grassroots movement with no formal leadership and no external funding sources, BDS is impossible to contain.)

As to Operation Protective Edge, it resulted in largely terrible press for Israel. The viciousness of the assault was beamed around the world, which led to intensive criticism of the Israeli government. Images of dead infants and toddlers flooded social media. Even mainstream news outlets that normally sanitize Israeli violence covered the invasion from more critical points of view. In fewer than two months, Israel killed more than 2,100 Palestinians, 551 of them children; displaced 475,000 Palestinians in Gaza; destroyed 18,000 homes; damaged 244 schools; and repeatedly bombed hospitals and UN shelters. The inhabitants of Gaza suffered severe food and water shortages and had to subsist without electricity. According to a Ynetnews.com poll, 95 percent of Israelis supported this barbarity. Only 3 to 4 percent described Israel’s actions as excessive. We’re not talking about being opposed to the operation—just those who considered the firepower excessive. In fact, 45 percent of Israelis described the level of firepower as insufficient. A Jerusalem Post survey found that 86.5 percent of Israelis opposed a ceasefire. The campaign isolated Israel more than ever before.

In the span of one month in 2014, I was terminated from a tenured position. Megan Marzec, the student council president at Ohio University (OU), was serially harassed for condemning Israel by pouring a fake bucket of blood on her head as a spoof of the “ice bucket challenge”; upper administrators at OU participated in the condemnation, though their only legitimate responsibility was to affirm the speech rights of their student rather than entertaining baseless accusations from professional trolls. Bruce Shipman, an Episcopal chaplain at Yale, was fired for “anti-Semitic remarks” that in no way endorsed anti-Semitism.11 Brant Rosen, a rabbi critical of Israeli policies, resigned under pressure from his congregation for daring to condemn Operation Protective Edge. That September, the AMCHA Initiative, which is essentially devoted to getting professors fired, released a list of 218 scholars it deemed inadequately Zionist. Not long after, a cohort of anonymous cowards launched the Canary Mission, an online database to monitor student activists, intended to subvert their future employment prospects. Palestine Legal, a group protecting the civil and human rights of Israel’s critics, has recorded hundreds of complaints of harassment by pro-Israel outfits in the past few years.

BDS and Operation Protective Edge deeply inform these phenomena. While it has long been a staple of Zionist organizing to exert pressure on institutions to discipline and punish the recalcitrant, there’s something distinctly grievous at play here. I don’t know that, empirically speaking, there’s been an uptick of instances of Zionist repression in the past year, but it feels like there has; it’s worth considering what gives rise to that feeling.

Israel is losing the PR battle, the proverbial hearts and minds. Its supporters, in turn, are lashing out with the sort of desperation endemic to any strong party in decline. They are punitive and belligerent in the absence of honest debate. This is about undemocratic power reasserting itself, refusing to cede a word to Palestinians in a severely compromised public discourse. It is, simply stated, colonial paranoia.

This psychology should be easy for anybody to see. If your first impulse upon encountering a viewpoint you dislike is to punish the speaker, then you tacitly confess that your position has no merit (or that you don’t quite have a position so much as a superstition). Anybody not stuck in the dogmas of ethnocracy would consider reexamining that position. Zionism, of course, is not merely stuck in the dogmas of ethnocracy; many of its traditions embody them.

And now civility is spreading through universities as quickly as settlers overwhelmed the North American continent. Rutgers University has a Project Civility. The Univers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Tweet Tweet
• Palestine, (un)Naturally
• Entry Not Approved
• Uncivil Rites
• Survival of the Fitness
• Imaginary Students
• The Pro-Israel Activist Handbook, Unabridged
• On Being Palestinian and Other Things
• Spies (Don’t) Like Us
• PeP Talk
• Palestine in the American Imagination
• Shame on Me
• The Evolution of “Anti-Semitism”
• Puffery
• The Lovely, Timeless Noise of Innocence
• The Chief Features of Civility
• The Disappearance of Print
• Injustice: A Bull(shit) Market
• Civilized Twitter
• The Darling That Can No Longer Be Defended
• Consumption
• An Incivility Manifesto
• A Politics of the Child
• Addendum Speaking in Times of Repression
• Epilogue
• Appendix One: AAUP Statements
• Appendix Two: Hiring/Termination Documents
• Appendix Three: Salon Article and Virginia Tech Response
• About the Author