“Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom” with & by Dr. Steven Salaita

And one thing I’ve tried my best to do ever since the firing put me into something of a spotlight to speak about the situation was to highlight the reality that this isn’t an individual but an institutional problem and it’s going to require an institutional response. An institutional response isn’t going to be simple. I think the advent and the development and, really, the popularity of BDS—Boycott, Divestments, Sanctions—over the past ten years, but it’s really picked up steam in the past two or three years, has led to a vicious sort of response. We have billionaires like Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson pumping literally millions of dollars into not only combating BDS but really any kind of narrative that is favorable to the freedom or in many cases the mere existence of Palestinians, Palestinians with a voice. We see too many university presidents and upper administrators in the thrall of these moneyed interests. We’re also seeing a particular appropriation of a kind of tender language of student wellness that is being deployed on US campuses, the language of comfort and safe space, anti-bullying, these sorts of things being deployed by pro-Israeli students as a way of conceptualizing pro-Palestine activists as somehow existing beyond the pale and engaging in various forms of unethical or inappropriate behavior. The Israeli government has devoted plenty of time and resources to combating the so-called problem of BDS, and the existence now of significant communities on- and off-campus who are speaking about Israeli war crimes and advocating of the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinian people. So the problem is institutional. I knew at the moment of my firing that I wasn’t the first person in academe to be punished in such a way. I also knew, unfortunately, that I wouldn’t be the last. That’s one element of speaking about Palestine on-and off-campus, but I’m mostly interested in what happens on campus, you know, given my professional vocation and my recent history, that anybody who’s interested in this sort of work had to come to grips with. It’s an ugly reality but it’s a reality nonetheless. The way I’ve always put it is by suggesting to people, and I kind of closed the book on this note, with this bit of unsolicited advice, that when it comes to speaking in favor of Palestinian dignity and Palestinian human rights, somebody’s always going to be punished. Somebody is always punished. The moment that you are prepared to be the person who receives punishment is the moment at which you’re ready to make the effort and raise your voice. It’s not very often a consequence-free, sort of, duty or obligation. A lot of people, thankfully, are working to change that reality.

So I’ve thought a lot about, you know, the fallout of the firing and I reflect on it, you know, pretty regularly when I’m at Beirut, or when I’m at AUB, or just being in Beirut in general. And I still, sometimes, can’t make sense of the, almost ridiculousness of a situation in which a person condemns war crimes on a social media platform and, in consequence, is essentially barred from teaching at a U.S. university as a result. It would probably be easier to understand, or to make sense of, if mine were an isolated situation, but it is not. This has been going on for thirty, forty, fifty years, and I think that we are in a particular moment in which Israel, and Israel’s actions particularly, are getting more and more difficult to defend. And in the indefensibility of Israel’s behavior, the modes of suppression that targeted me and that target others, have been stepped up. You can notice the indefensibility of Israel’s actions based on the way those [who] are inclined to supporting Israel raise objections to the kind of critique and criticism that get so many of us in trouble. And I am thinking of two instances in particular, and I discuss them at length in Uncivil Rites.

One is the passage of the academic boycott resolution of the American Studies Association. This happened a little bit more than two years ago; it formally passed in December of 2013. And the ASA resolution ended up generating, during its contemplation and then its subsequent passage, a tremendous amount of media attention. This is kind of a mid-sized scholarly organization, usually they don’t end up being written about in the New York Times and Haaretz, and other places. But suddenly this mid-sized scholarly association that non-scholars would not normally care much about became kind of a symbol and an emblem of a particular cultural war, right, around the issue of Israel-Palestine. And I remember clearly, in so many cases during public forums, in sort of email exchanges, comments that people were posting on the ASA blog and so forth, that those who opposed the resolution were actually never defending Israel’s behavior, but they were being really careful not to mention Israel’s behavior at all. It became, for them, a kind of abstract commitment to the idea of Israel. But there was very little engagement with the substance that had inspired the movement for academic boycott in the first place. So, what were people saying? “Why are you boycotting Israel, why don’t you boycott China?” Or, “why don’t you boycott North Korea?” “Why don’t you boycott Cuba?” Okay, fine. Find me the institutional links between U.S. and North Korean universities and then, you know, we’ll look to sever them. And this is a particular kind of ‘what about-ery’ that doesn’t rise to the level of seriousness that would warrant a serious, considered, moral response because it is a diversion. It is a diversionary tactic, it is not even anything that is worth, uh, from an intellectual standpoint, seriously entertaining. The other protestations to the ASA resolution were things like, “well this is not the role of a scholarly organization” or “this issue is divisive.” Taken together, these kinds of rationalizations against the resolution, not only didn’t rise to the defense of Israel’s behavior, they never actually surpassed, in my mind, the category of platitude. They were diversionary tactics.

The other example that I always remember and that I discuss in Uncivil Rites is the media blitz that happened to the profound criticism to which Israel was subject during its bombardment of Gaza, which it called Operation Protective Edge. And so I was involved in a lot of these online skirmishes, taking up for the sanctity, or even the validity, of Palestinian life against those who were celebrating the wanton and cruel, callous slaughter of Palestinian civilians, dozens and dozens of children included. And yes, there are people who rationalize these things. There was very little defense of Israel’s actions during this two month slaughter. What I kept hearing were a particular sort of, or particular set of, diversionary narratives: “well, Israel is being forced to kill children by Hamas, they are putting children on rooftops, they are firing rockets; we are being led into doing something that we don’t want to do.” Or, “the Palestinians are even worse.” Or, “the Palestinians don’t recognize Israel’s right to exist,” bla bla bla bla bla… but it never amounted, again, to a defense of what Israel was doing, the policies it was actually undertaking. It failed to acknowledge the vast disparities of power between Israel and the Palestinians or even Israel and Hamas. The fact that Israel was being resupplied with arms and weaponry by the United States – it was not taking any of these things into account, it basically amounted to a tired, and well-trod, centuries-old colonial discourse of “the native made me do it.” That’s what it amounted to. This is something that colonizers, settler-colonizers and otherwise, have been saying …since the beginning of the time of European colonization. That “I came into this situation of clean heart and pure soul, with clear motive, and my encounter with the barbaric other brought out something in me that I did not know existed. It is the Palestinian who ruined my innocence. And it is the Palestinian that compelled me to do things that I never would have thought to do otherwise.”

So, the violence, the institutional violence of the Israeli state cossetted by American, European powers, suddenly becomes the responsibility of those on the receiving end of the bombs, and the receiving end of the artillery. You can say what you want about this kind of discourse, but you cannot call it a defense of Israel’s behavior. It is an outsourcing of its negative behavior to those who most suffer its consequences. Well, what do you do in this situation? What do you do when the state you adore, not so much as a geopolitical entity but as an ideal, as an idea… what do you do when it has become indefensible? What do you do when you cannot win an argument about the founding of the state? You shut down the conversation altogether, and we’re seeing that happen. Israel is less and less popular, it deserves and needs to be even less popular. Israel, outside of ever-shrinking pockets of influence in the Northern and Western hemispheres, is universally seen to be a settler-colonial enterprise. Its violations of international and human rights law are well-known and well documented. And a bevy of historians of all kinds of nationalities have put to rest the founding mythologies of Israel’s creation. It’s done.

So, if two people, or more, are going to have an honest debate about what happened in 1948, what happened in 1967, what’s been happening since, about who is to blame for the various failures of the peace process, who is the aggressor, who started it, all the facts, all of them, all of the historiography, all of it, all of the scholarship, everything worth reading that has been written in the past ten years points to the favor of the Palestinian narrative, points to the favor of Palestinian liberation. Those who are funding anti-BDS efforts, those who are working to criminalize speech that is critical of Israel, those who are going to extraordinary lengths to change basic constitutional laws and principles in the United States are well aware of this fact. They don’t want to have the debate whatsoever because having the debate is always for them a losing proposition. It can be no other way.

Well, this actually dovetails in interesting ways with what we’re seeing around the issue of Palestine and academic freedoms these days. First of all, I think it’s important to understand that academic freedom has never been comprehensive or it has never been comprehensively applied in any way. Certain types of speech have always been more vigorously punished than others. Academic freedom based on its inherent particularities does better in evaluating or protecting a certain kind of academic or a certain kind of discourse. Now let me try to lay it out a little bit more clearly: speech and scholarship that approaches issues of racism and state power, military power, issues of economic inequality and structural issues, as things that need to be addressed institutionally, rather than as individual failures. Right, so let’s take the discourse of racism, for example, alright, a lot of times we sort of point our finger at people who have done something adjectively racist and that allows us to sort of position ourselves in comfortable spaces. Alright, comfortable, non-racist spaces. Look, I’m not like that person. That’s why people like Paula Deen and other loudmouth idiots, are sort of convenient in that sense. I’m not her or I’m not like those other southern rednecks that wave *eh* the rebel flag. You know, I’m a decent respectable human being. I don’t have to worry about that. I’m not like that.

Well, we can’t reduce racism to an individual attitude or an individual failure because racism is structural. Alright, racism exists in the very institutions that govern the economies that sustain our lives, that govern the way our cities are organized, that govern the way policies are made and implemented, that govern the way police behave, that govern the way certain people are prosecuted and other people are not. So, it’s not an individual failure. It’s a structural problem. Now, if [we] approach racism as a structural problem, you’re also automatically criticizing capitalism, you’re automatically criticizing certain forms of state-mandated social and economic privilege. You’re probably also likely criticizing a whole array of troublesome imperialist policies. And in so doing, you’re upsetting a particular balance and so you’ll not only generate a conservative right-wing response, but you’ll also often generate a negative liberal response. And, it’s when liberal outrage and conservative outrage converge around the figure of somebody who is criticizing colonization, or is criticizing structural racism, or is criticizing militarism, or the stupidity of patriotism, and so forth, that academic freedom largely fails.

The first and probably best known victims of academic witch hunts, of course, occurred in the McCarthy era. But even before then, people were being drummed out of universities for articulating unpopular opinions. Anybody who criticized World War I was likely to have been fired, for example. This is the era, of course, in which Eugene Debs was put into prison for his criticism of that war. If you look since the late 1960s at who actually suffers recrimination in universities, it’s overwhelmingly people of color and overwhelmingly women. If you look at the people who have suffered recrimination just in the last year alone, in the year since I was fired, they’re all women of color. Right, there is a conservative narrative that I guess, people who vote for Donald Trump are kind of drawn to the white male Christians, [and] are the most oppressed species on earth. But there is no evidentiary basis for such a claim. It’s all anecdotal and it’s based on a majoritarian. So if you look of the case of Divya Nair, she was fired from Philadelphia College for participating in a Black Lives Matter activism. There’s a recent case of a professor of Evangelical Wheaton College who was just fired for saying that Muslims and Christians worship the same god, which is a factually basic point. It upset the conservatives who are always whining about their speech being suppressed. It upset donors and of course the donors went after it and of course the university management listened to the donors. That’s what university management does. There’s the case of Saeed Abedini, who was almost fired last summer; Zandria Robinson; Dima Kumar. So, if you look at the names of people who are actually put under a public spotlight and punished in some way for dissension speech, it’s not the white male Christian of FOX News; it’s people of color or women of color who are proffering public critiques of structural inequities in U.S. societies that are said to be outside the boundaries of acceptable critiques.

I don’t know that academic freedom is capable of the sorts of protection that it needs to primarily because the influence of private industry, private donors and private sources on universities and university governance are also strong. I’m often have said to be fired for tweets critical of Israel. In a basic sense, that’s true, but what really got me fired was the fact that donors contacted the university and said “Get rid of this guy.” Donors hold tremendous sway at universities in part because university management is so profoundly beholden money. But in part also because universities, particularly public universities, have been defunded to the point that they’re almost completely reliant on the largess of private entities, in order to function. Though the desires of private entities and the desire of private donors predominate, this isn’t just a problem of radical speech. It’s not just a problem of Zionist hysteria over the existence of such a thing as a Palestinian voice. It’s also a problem of the privatization and corporatization of higher education. And very often Palestinian students, or students who are active on behalf of Palestine who are not necessarily Palestinians, and professors who support, publicly, support Palestine get caught up in the broader context of corporatization and privatization.

And one of the things that academic freedom needs to do is address this influence of private donors. And AUP and other watchdog groups of academic freedom have been saying the right things and doing the right things but it’s an extremely powerful force that we’re up against, that not only does not want to hear any sort of critique that implicates its privateers in injustice, but also has a vision of universities and higher education as kind of a factory assembly-line. I’m going to go ahead and close up in just a second and open up to comments and turn it over to you for comments or questions. I’m guessing there are things that I haven’t addressed that some of you are interested in hearing about. So, I encourage you to ask what you like and I’ll do my best to answer it. The battle isn’t over.

When the University of Illinois and I settled the lawsuit a few months ago, maybe less than a few months ago – I get my dates confused – it was simply a legal closure. It was a legal closure. In the scheme of things, and in terms of the issues, it doesn’t have anything to do with anything. Problems still remain. One reason, an important reason, in fact, I was so tentative about settling it at any point is that I did not want this tremendous energy that has developed around my case to die along with the lawsuit. I wanted it to supersede the lawsuit. I wanted people to see the lawsuit as a particular legal means to desire a rectification. But, I kept thinking in the back of my mind I don’t want this energy to go away, I don’t want this issue to go away, because, you know, the legal proceedings might be done but the same problems remain at the University of Illinois and elsewhere. The American Indian Studies program at Illinois is still decimated. They’re down to 1.5 faculty members and they’re not getting restocked. So many people’s lives have been messed by the university’s decision, beyond my own. Some faculty have left. Faculty of color, particularly on campus in the ethnic studies clusters, have been subjected to a tremendous amount of racism. Upper management has made it clear how much it values their units and the humanities and even the social sciences, more broadly, so it’s a very difficult place for them, but they’re not in a unique position. A lot of universities are facing the same phenomena.

And as literally millions and millions of dollars get contributed to sponsor legislation that intends to strip us of our rights if we criticize Israel or if we support BDS, as upper administrators and university management, more broadly, continue to be in the thrall of the whims of private donors and, as students who work on the issue of Palestinian freedom, or who work simply to humanize Palestinians, increasingly are criminalized, and treated as bullies, and marginalized on campus, and completely unprotected by the same administration whose job involves the well-being of students, as these problems continue, it’s deeply important for those of us with an interest in education, and in the well-being of universities, and in free speech rights, and the Constitution, and simply living in some semblance of a free society, to band together and counter the negative effects of this kind of activism that is coming from on high. And one way we do it, the best way to do it, is by banding together in grassroots communities and contesting it. The one power of BDS is that it is decentralized, it happens spontaneously and organically, and it absolutely cannot be stopped by money. It cannot. Nothing can slow it down except the criminalization of advocacy of BDS, or by throwing supporters of BDS in prison, and I promise you, if that’s what it takes to shut down BDS, then that’s the result that they’re going to seek. So I’ll go ahead and take your questions and comments, and thank you very much.