#steven salaita

[edwordsmyth]

"One thing is clear: the world is now experiencing a moral crisis whose enormity will reshape political attitudes and alliances for generations to come. Pretending that life, no matter how sheltered or comfortable, can simply continue as normal is its own kind of moral crisis. Teach Palestine: Hundreds of Palestinian poets, novelists, and essayists write in English or are available in translation. Consider including them on your syllabus. So what if your courses don’t focus on Palestine or the surrounding region? If you’re a modernist, then assign Fadwa Tuqan or Mahmoud Darwish. If you’re in gender studies, look up Fatima Bernawi or Rasmea Odeh. If you teach novels, try Susan Abulhawa, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Sahar Mustafah…on goes the list. If you’re an Americanist, there are numerous options. Same for Latin Americanists. A critical theorist? No problem: there’s Elias Sanbar and Bassel Al-Araj and Ghassan Kanafani. And if you’re, say, a medievalist? That’s no problem, either. “Who is my audience?” keep asking yourself. If the answer is anything other than “the dispossessed,” then recalibrate your ethics and try again."

#steven salaita #palestine

[protoslacker]

I write hundreds of things that don’t mention Palestine and yet Palestine is plastered all over everything I’ve ever written.  Its presence isn’t simply implicit.  It represents a set of values I attempt to vitalize through form and language.

Steven Salaita. Palestine Never Goes Away

Those who want to forget Palestine, can’t. Those who say they forgot Palestine, haven’t.

#palestine #gaza #steven salaita

[hero-israel]

I’m a Black-American Jew (parents were converts :)) and I agree with the Afro-Indigenous anon A LOT bc the same things they do to Indigenous Americans they do to African Americans and Afro-Palestinians. No sense of allyship whatsoever and when you bring up the horrible treatment of Black Palestinians (who aren’t all just descendants of enslaved Africans kind you, despite what many non Black Palis say, but even if they were all descendants of enslaved Africans that doesn’t change the fact they’re still Palestinians) they go silent and never have anything to say but are constantly comparing themselves to Black people (and pretending we have some sort of privilege over them as if our issues are continuously ignored) and crying for our support. AntiBlackness exists in the Jewish/Israeli world too but like the other anon said, this isn’t THAG big of a problem for me to disconnect myself for it. Israel has done a lot for Black Jews throughout its existence and Black Jews have always existed in the community and have been mostly accepted throughout. It’s never been like Black Jews have been completely ostracized and excluded from Jewishness.

I really appreciate the insights, thank you. A few additional angles on this:

Rabbi Susan Talve got up on stage in front of the presidents of both the U.S. and Israel and supported Black Lives Matter - she would also be arrested for her support - and yet lefty activists tried to read her out of the movement as a "pro-apartheid Zio"

Renowned pro-Palestine activists Max Blumenthal, Rania Khalek, and Steven Salaita just can't stop derailing conversations about anti-blackness and police brutality because ACKSHYUALLY Palestine is so much worse - with Salaita even using some of his typically antisemitic conspiracy lingo to now try to silence African-American activists

#israel #palestine #allyship #false allyship #black lives matter #anti-blackness #judaism #susan talve #max blumenthal #rania khalek #steven salaita #jumblr

[kissingcullens]

A Guide to Principled Anti-Zionism, Steven Salaita

“Done without care, opposition to Israeli brutality can reify other forms of oppression, or it can conceptualize Israel as an aberration from honorable American values.

Israel doesn’t corrupt the United States—nor does the United States corrupt Israel. Both states originated through corruption—as paragons of foreign settlement, land theft, environmental degradation, racial inequality, and labor exploitation—a condition they mutually reproduce within and beyond their borders.  

Israel doesn’t distract the United States from its otherwise noble mission in the world; it helps the United States manage a world order beneficial to its ruling class.”

#Anti-Zionism #Steven Salaita

[imaginedrago-ss]

ive always said tgis since i was a kid

#its from uncivil rites by steven salaita a guy who was fired for anti israel tweets

[tamarrud]

The theory that bearing witness will curtail Israel’s ability to act on exterminationist fantasies no longer holds.  Information and knowledge, it turns out, aren’t reliable bulwarks against genocide.  Impunity isn’t beholden to disapproval. 

What does it tell us that the Zionist entity can conduct this genocide in high definition, with no credible deniability and amid condemnation from all corners of the world? 

[...]

It tells us that “dialogue” was always a pathway to submission.  The idea that Israelis and Palestinians should dialogue as a means to peace was always dubious if only because dialogue can’t work in situations of disparate power.  But now, with Israelis overwhelmingly in favor of the genocide, it should be clear that Palestinians never had anyone to dialogue with in the first place. 

[...]

It tells us that racism isn’t simply an attitude, for its origin is social violence and eventually it will become physically violent in order to perform its civic mandate.  In the framework of settler colonization, racism manifests as a yearning for cultural purification through displacement of the native. 

It tells us that capitalism makes death a valuable commodity.  The Zionist entity isn’t merely an imperialist beachhead; it is a major player in the international weapons trade.  It tests new munitions, chemicals, and surveillance technology on Palestinians.  It arms reactionary forces throughout the Global South.  It serves as a conduit and accomplice to U.S. policing.  Because of Zionist occupation, corporations enjoy the use of human subjects as raw material for development and innovation. 

It tells us that we wasted a whole lot of time trying to convince the oppressor that we are worthy of life when the oppressor cannot live without our extinction. 

[...]

That’s why countless people can deplore a genocide zoomed into our personal devices without being able to stop it.  We are not simply ineffectual in the world of policymaking; policymakers are taunting us with their depravity. 

What can we do, then?  It’s important to start by recognizing that the entire political class, from presidents to online pundits, has no regard for us—detests us, in fact—and is therefore never a reliable source of empathy or relief.  Denizens of this class do not want our feedback; they want us to scroll through the debris of their malevolence. 

Upon this recognition, the possibilities become clearer, albeit less convenient.  But in the spirit of urgency, we can keep it simple:  whether it happens in darkness or light, on screen or off, the Zionist entity needs to become an archive we browse as a cautionary tale, or else our future on this planet will be history.

– Steven Salaita, Scrolling Through Genocide

#palestine #gaza #israel

[nothorses]

kinda. disappointed to see you sharing articles by steven "Zionists: transforming 'anti-Semitism' from something horrible into something honorable since 1948" salaita

if you're gonna vaguely reference possible wrongdoings and dangle your perception of my morality above my head that's fine & all but just know that I literally can't do anything about anything if I don't actually know what you're talking about. is this a guilt trip for the sake of guilt tripping, or you do want me to learn about who this person is & why whatever post this is referencing is a problem? because it kinda seems like it's the former.

[power-chords]

On Zionist Literature, which aims to demythologize the origins of Jewish nationalism, is an analysis of Zionism from the vantage of the people upon whom it was inflicted. With a verve verging on swagger, Kanafani challenges the very foundations of Jewish historiography on the origins of Zionism through a close reading of the literary precursors to the colonization of Palestine. Along the way, he makes historical claims that radically contradict the conventional wisdom of both his day and ours about Jewish ethnic identity and assimilation in Europe.

While some of these claims are myth-breaking, others are ahistorical. But as Palestinian American scholar Steven Salaita notes in his introduction to the new edition, his controversial analyses are usefully provocative, as Kanafani “inverts the common narrative of Zionism as an existential necessity.” Indeed, the strength of Kanafani’s contribution lies less in its ability to intervene in Jewish historiography than in its power as a method of reasoning from his own existential condition as a colonized Palestinian.

Ever the revolutionary, Kanafani’s intellectual pursuits were in direct service of a positive political project. After immersing himself in these texts—and in the wake of the total collapse of the Arab front following its military defeat in the June 1967 war (colloquially known as the “Six Day War” in Israel)—Kanafani began to believe that unlike Zionism, which turned the racializing logic of antisemitism on its head to produce its own racial chauvinism, Palestinian liberation must chart a path that destroys, rather than inverts, the essentialisms that undergird their oppression.

#ghassan kanafani

[holyfigtree]

steven salaita

#palestine

[survivingcapitalism]

Palestinian scholar, Steven Salaita shares the words of David Ben-Gurion who is considered the father of Israel, “Look what the Americans did, they took this land that was filled with savages and filled with swamps and they displaced the savages and drained the swamps and they ended up building this great civilization and that’s what we’re trying to do.”4 Ben-Gurion also stated in 1947, “we adopt the system of aggressive defense; with every Arab attack we must respond with a decisive blow: the destruction of the place or the expulsion of the residents along with the seizure of the place.”5 

The first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann stated that Palestinians, “are in the country, and have been there for ages. We are the newcomers and have to become part and parcel of the country. We are planting a new people in the country.”6

The Post-Colonial Pivot  

With the post-colonial movement in the mid-twentieth century came the decline of overt colonial rhetoric. This shift coupled with growing Indigenous socio-political movements has prompted settler societies to develop new colonial tactics. 

This brings us back to Buffy Sainte Marie and race-shifting. 

‘Playing Indian’ is a settler tradition older than both Canada and the United States.7 In recent years, settlers have also begun appropriating Indigeneity as an identity to inhabit on a full-time basis. Israel and Canada both rely on a colonial strategy that I’m calling the settler move to Indigeneity.8 The settler move to Indigeneity describes systemic ethnic fraud in late-stage settler colonialism. 

Ethnic fraud is the fullest extension of settler colonial dispossession. After disappearing, dominating, and dispossessing Indigenous peoples, the settler becomes the Native. 

In Canada, Indigenous calls for justice and restitution compel Canadians to reflect on their role in colonization. This is deeply uncomfortable and drives a faux Indigenization among those seeking to evade responsibility for wrong-doing and ‘legitimately’ claim their place as the rightful owners of the land. 

In the attempt to claim the rightful Indigeneity, Zionism also erases the presence of Jewish people already living in historic Palestine and other parts of the Middle East. This goes back to Erakat’s point that Zionism constructs Judaism as a unified polity to establish a pseudo-Indigenous nation-state. It draws on imperialist logics of possession and ownership and narrow interpretations of Indigeneity in religious text on the Promised Land.

In both cases, moving to Indigeneity is a strategy to legitimize colonization. 

[edwordsmyth]

"It has become clear during the past two months in the Gaza Strip that the Zionist entity is plenty capable of equaling the belligerence of the American frontier, an era of wholesale ethnic cleansing thought to be a feature of history.  (“It could never happen today,” people sometimes would foolishly declare.)  Colonial atrocities of the past—Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, the Trail of Tears—are now everywhere in evidence.  The Zionist entity is carrying out a kind of primitive violence with modern technology.  This violence fills our computer and television screens. People around the world get minute-by-minute accounts of massive destruction and widespread murder. Certain images have become horrifyingly familiar: throngs of refugees queuing for bread; ambulances dodging tank and machine gun fire; hospitals in disarray; once-dense neighborhoods transformed by aerial bombardment into kilometers of rubble. We scroll through photos of men blindfolded and stripped to their underwear, lined up on the ground like antiquities in a museum courtyard. The scrolling continues into pictures of white body bags in shallow trenches and then into videos of little girls and boys screaming trauma into the ruins of their childhood. We are perhaps the first generation to witness genocide in real time. History books about the horrors of the past are written every time somebody opens social media.

The theory that bearing witness will curtail Israel’s ability to act on exterminationist fantasies no longer holds. Information and knowledge, it turns out, aren’t reliable bulwarks against genocide. Impunity isn’t beholden to disapproval.

What does it tell us that the Zionist entity can conduct this genocide in high definition, with no credible deniability and amid condemnation from all corners of the world? It tells us that people serious about Palestinian liberation were right to despise the so-called radicals who laundered Zionism through celebrity activism, academic credentialism, NGO astroturf, and the Democratic Party. An entire class of influencers arose from Bernie Sanders’ failed presidential campaigns. They populate hundreds of podcasts and livestreams. They wasted incalculable energy and resources promoting a man who would go on to repeatedly justify the bloody campaign in Gaza. Now they deplore Sanders after having extracted all the clout appended to his name and having ostracized the outliers who accurately tagged him as a fraud from the get-go. It was the most noteworthy example of a timeworn practice: pursuing access to microphones and New Yorker profiles by subsuming Palestinian liberation to institutions constitutionally hostile to revolutionary politics. It tells us that international governing bodies and legal institutions are at best useless. Despite some halfhearted hemming and hawing, the UN has been an accomplice to the Zionist entity’s genocide. The ICC will never see an American, Israeli, or EU war criminal on its docket. The Arab League pretends to care, but its performance is entirely unconvincing. Such institutions have been captured by imperialism since their inception. It tells us that “dialogue” was always a pathway to submission. The idea that Israelis and Palestinians should dialogue as a means to peace was always dubious if only because dialogue can’t work in situations of disparate power. But now, with Israelis overwhelmingly in favor of the genocide, it should be clear that Palestinians never had anyone to dialogue with in the first place. It tells us that Western academe was completely unprepared for the material demands of decolonization despite its popularity as a professional brand. Many among the intellectual class, including scholars of Fanon like Adam Shatz and Lewis Gordon, either disavow or diminish anticolonial resistance or ignore it altogether. Academe is where resistance goes for processing and beautification after it has been completed. It’s rarely a place for the organizing stage. It tells us that deterrence isn’t a game of strategy played by eggheads on the internet, but an onerous project conditional on guns and rockets. Academics generally are too scared to say it, or, in an object lesson on arrogance, don’t actually believe it, but a cache of weapons will always be more important than a conference panel. It tells us that electoralism is a sham. There is no meaningful ideological variance among U.S. politicians at the national level. In practice, they range from center-right to fascist. In the upcoming presidential election, for example, voters will get to decide between two scarcely-functional old farts with histories of sexual misconduct and a complete devotion to Zionist genocide. It tells us that racism isn’t simply an attitude, for its origin is social violence and eventually it will become physically violent in order to perform its civic mandate. In the framework of settler colonization, racism manifests as a yearning for cultural purification through displacement of the native. It tells us that capitalism makes death a valuable commodity. The Zionist entity isn’t merely an imperialist beachhead; it is a major player in the international weapons trade. It tests new munitions, chemicals, and surveillance technology on Palestinians. It arms reactionary forces throughout the Global South. It serves as a conduit and accomplice to U.S. policing. Because of Zionist occupation, corporations enjoy the use of human subjects as raw material for development and innovation.

It tells us that we wasted a whole lot of time trying to convince the oppressor that we are worthy of life when the oppressor cannot live without our extinction.

More than anything, it tells us that in the benighted West there is no democracy, no free speech, no legislative remedy, no human rights, no right even to be human. These are illusions people repeat in an effort to survive pervasive depravity, or myths they cynically invoke to gather the crumbs of deprivation. There is a ruling class and various iterations of the dispossessed and the dispossessed exist only to serve ruling class gluttony.

That’s why countless people can deplore a genocide zoomed into our personal devices without being able to stop it. We are not simply ineffectual in the world of policymaking; policymakers are taunting us with their depravity.

What can we do, then? It’s important to start by recognizing that the entire political class, from presidents to online pundits, has no regard for us—detests us, in fact—and is therefore never a reliable source of empathy or relief. Denizens of this class do not want our feedback; they want us to scroll through the debris of their malevolence. Upon this recognition, the possibilities become clearer, albeit less convenient. But in the spirit of urgency, we can keep it simple: whether it happens in darkness or light, on screen or off, the Zionist entity needs to become an archive we browse as a cautionary tale, or else our future on this planet will be history."

#steven salaita #palestine

[protoslacker]

Steven Salaita essays (in 2018) what a principled anti-Zionism would look like.

I was very interested in the image illustrating the essay, especially because of South Africa prosecution Israel at the World Court. The credit:

POSTER DESIGNED BY MARC RUDIN PUBLISHED BY THE POPULAR FRONT FOR THE LIBERATION OF PALESTINE (PFLP) CIRCA 1988. (SOURCE: PALESTINE POSTER PROJECT ARCHIVES)

The Palestine Poster Project Archives is remarkable. It contains over 230 works produced by Mark Rudin. It contains over 20,000 posters by over 4,000 artists. The biography of Rudin is from an online archive of his work with over 700 items. The Wikipedia article for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is an entry for finding out about that organization.

One poster showed how hazy my understanding of history in my lifetime is.

#steven salaita #anti-zionism #marc rudin #graphic art #palestine #history

[ugisfeelings]

steven salaita's an honest living is now available for preordering

#qq

[kissingcullens]

U.S. Elections and the Lesser Evil of Genocide with Steven Salaita

Tamara Nassar, March 2024

“It’s beyond doubt that the world has raised its voice. The world has condemned what the Zionist entity is doing, and not a single politician in a position of authority has lifted a finger to stop it,” educator, writer and essayist Steven Salaita says.

Salaita, who now lives in Cairo, Egypt, spoke with me about moral clarity and the emboldening of political principles as Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza nears its five-month mark.

“And in fact, rather than stopping it, they have aided it and abetted it and funded it and justified it. So we have to be serious now. Where does that leave us? What options do we have?” Salaita continued.

“I don’t have the answers at the moment. A lot of answers are emerging and will continue to emerge from Gaza itself, but I do know where we cannot look anymore.”

Salaita is the author of eight books, including Uncivil Rites and Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine.”

[toseebirds]

My friend took this photo nearly 10 years ago when our University destroyed a newly hired professor's career and then lost an extremely expensive lawsuit about it. For talking about Palestine on Twitter.

If you know American University drama, you've probably heard of Steven Salaita. But did you know that he was a truly exciting hire for the American Indian Studies Department? And that admin fucked over their legitimate hiring process because Cary Nelson fought his appointment relentlessly? And had the absolute gall to keep presenting himself as a Union worker.

#free palestine #unionstrong

[imaginedrago-ss]

from uncivil rites by steven salaita, a book taht came out in 2015

#crazzy