[News] Zionism and Native American Studies
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Wed Jun 7 11:01:50 EDT 2017
https://abolitionjournal.org/zionism-native-american-studies-steven-salaita/
Zionism and Native American Studies
June 6, 2017
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*by Steven Salaita*
It was only a matter of time before Zionism and Native American Studies
[NAS] came into conflict—or, to be more precise, before Zionists began
targeting the field for acrimony and recrimination, as they have long
done
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/joseph-massad-responds-intimidation-columbia-university/5289>
to various humanities
<http://www.chronicle.com/article/A-New-Fact-on-the-Ground-/39883> and
social science
<https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/05/31/why-did-fresno-state-cancel-search-professorship-named-after-late-edward-said>
disciplines. With an increasingly global focus (in concert with
emphasis on local concerns), a commitment to material transformation, a
disdain for US imperialism and militarism, a rejection of state power in
nearly all its manifestations, and a plethora of young artists
<https://moontimewarrior.com/2014/08/19/our-revolution-first-nations-women-in-solidarity-with-palestine/>
and scholar-activists
<http://nakbafiles.org/2016/07/20/reclaiming-native-history-from-new-mexico-to-palestine/>
interested in Palestine, it’s little surprise that Israeli colonization
would become a topic in the field. And because most people in the field
don’t have nice things to say about Israel, some of the state’s
apologists have forced themselves into Indigenous spaces with a singular
purpose: to intimidate its practitioners into obedience. As usual,
those undertaking the intimidation know nothing about the people they
endeavor to subdue. Over five centuries of history prove that
Indigenous peoples are not given to submission.
The Zionist assaults on NAS rely on well-worn tactics and narratives,
but they also entail some new strategies. Pro-Israel operatives have
never limited themselves to specific disciplines, targeting Palestinians
wherever they were located within the university—concurrently deploying
a secondary but no less confrontational focus on Black radical
scholars—but these days the pro-Israel punishment industry is expanding
its target zone through a combination of relaxed standards and increased
anguish. Recent events at Dartmouth College, discussed below, clarify
the nature of that expansion.
In examining the relationship between Zionism and NAS, it’s critical to
think past obvious explanations. It’s easy to say that because
Palestine exists in NAS the pro-Israel punishment industry now targets
it, but we elide lots of important possibilities by repeating that
formulation, which has the potential to instrumentalize NAS as an
adjunct to overseas geographies and thus to minimize, if only
unwittingly, the ongoing dispossession of Native nations in North
America. Zionist displeasure with NAS is best situated in the context
of US and Canadian colonization, with which the Israeli variety is
symbiotic.
Zionist interference in NAS hasn’t merely sought to regulate Palestine.
It is paradigmatic of the so-called “special relationship” between the
US and Israel and therefore vigorously opposes North American
decolonization. This dual concern with Israel’s reputation and
America’s moral standing, so easily conflated, illuminates crucial
features of Palestine as a global presence while highlighting the
difficult conditions attending to Native scholarship. Most iterations
of Zionism include devotion to US colonization. It’s no longer enough
to conceptualize Israel merely as an appendage of US foreign policy
interests. Too many concrete alliances, mutual training programs,
concerted policing strategies, weapon exchanges, and synchronized acts
of oppression exist for that metric to capture the intensity of the
alliance, which is mutually constitutive (economically, militarily,
culturally, and discursively).
If we explore the discourses of those who decry (or merely chide) Native
scholars for opposing Israeli policies, or for supporting Palestinian
freedom, five features emerge:
1. Outrage or befuddlement that a people as noble as Natives could
possibly reject Israelis, their natural allies.
2. An impulse to police the scope and content of NAS.
3. Profound misunderstanding (or ignorance) of the field’s
methodologies, ethical and philosophical commitments, and
intellectual traditions.
4. A belief, often tacit, that the US should retain its claim as
steward of Native populations.
5. Deep anxiety about a perceived loss of authority in academe.
These discursive norms aren’t identical to the ones that exist vis-à-vis
repression of Palestine Studies, though there’s overlap. Identifying
that overlap is useful, but here I want to assess the broadened focus of
the pro-Israel punishment industry and then consider the implications of
the encounter between Zionism and NAS.
*The Duthu Dartmouth Deanship*
In March, 2017, Bruce Duthu accepted a position as dean of the College
of Arts and Sciences at Dartmouth College. Duthu is a prominent figure
in NAS and the occupant of an endowed chair in a prestigious
department. Few Natives become upper administrators, so the ascension
of Duthu at an Ivy League university, whatever one thinks of the utility
of managerial aspirations, was a noteworthy achievement. The
appointment got processed and Duthu received the usual congratulations
when, two months later, somebody discovered that Duthu once signed a
statement favoring the boycott of Israeli academic institutions, a
popular position in the Southern Hemisphere.
But common sense in the South is often taboo in the North and so even
though he inhabits a field that rejects US nationalism, Duthu was doomed
by nationalistic sentiment. No indication exists that Duthu harbors any
special animus for Israel or affinity for Palestine; in fact, he walked
back his endorsement of BDS (as initiated in limited form by the NAISA
Council <http://pacbi.org/pacbi140812/?p=2305>) without disavowing his
empathy for Palestinians. That his endorsement of the statement appears
to have been a function of his position as a NAISA officer rather than
an ideological commitment did little to assuage his detractors.
The chatter around Duthu’s resignation exposes the mentality of the
pro-Israel punishment industry. Dartmouth economist Alan Gustman offered
a dose of comic paranoia
<https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/05/23/popular-native-american-studies-scholar-declines-deanship-dartmouth-amid-concerns>
unbefitting a person presumably devoted to the rigor of social science:
“The chant of the BDS movement, from the river to the sea, is
anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and profoundly anti-Jewish…. Again, this
movement has become a cover for many anti-Semites who like nothing
better than to once again be free to exercise their prejudices.” He
helpfully noted that he has “no reason to believe that Duthu is
anti-Semitic.” Speculation about Gustman’s attitude toward Native
Americans and Arabs is thus far unavailable.
Venerable saboteur Cary Nelson played moderate Zionist to Gustman’s
extremist, appearing to back Duthu’s appointment. “[Duthu] is hardly a
hardcore boycott advocate,” Nelson observed. “Some people can sign a
BDS petition without imposing that agenda on the rest of their
professional life, while others cannot.”
Let’s compare this observation with Gustman’s claim that “[it’s] not
appropriate to appoint an advocate of BDS, thereby providing the BDS
movement with a foothold at the highest levels of our administration.”
Here we have two Zionist fanatics, one in favor of Duthu’s appointment,
the other against. A close reading of their quotes, however, indicates
that both say essentially the same thing: a litmus test on Palestine
enforceable by dilettantes with no qualifications beyond an irrational
devotion to Israel must exist before Native scholars can be allowed
career promotions. Apropos of the field’s general relationship with US
academe, familiarity isn’t necessary to have an expert opinion about NAS.
The pro-Israel punishment industry relies on the settler’s prerogative
to freely grant authority as required to maintain colonial hierarchies.
Zionist academics anoint themselves arbiters of NAS, something we saw
repeatedly in the past few years, thanks largely to Nelson’s efforts,
vis-à-vis the Zionist destruction of American Indian Studies at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (though the problem has
existed alongside the field since its inception). Not content merely to
obliterate academic freedom, Nelson set out to discredit the entire
field
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/salaita-case-and-cary-nelsons-use-academic-freedom-silence-dissent/13756>
by conceptualizing it as given to demagoguery, incompetence,
dereliction, and irrationality.
This self-granted authority vis-à-vis NAS is possible only because of a
long history of entitlement on campus in general. Many Zionist scholars
consider themselves uniquely fit to judge which viewpoints are
acceptable and thereby interject themselves as indispensable arbiters of
the reward economy. The culture of US academe gives them latitude to
act on those judgments. For instance, Dartmouth Jewish Studies director
Susannah Heschel, in an apparent display of support for Duthu, noted
that “he is not promoting or facilitating the boycotting [of Israeli
institutions]…on the contrary, he is doing the opposite of boycotting,”
adding that BDS is “very dangerous, wrong and nasty
<http://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2017/05/concerns-arise-over-duthus-appointment-as-dean-of-faculty>.”
These are the words of somebody accustomed to being consulted.
Like Nelson, Heschel implies that certain views on Israel constitute
grounds for punishment. In her mind Duthu doesn’t descend into
anti-Zionism, an affliction about which the wrong kind of people need to
be “educated.”
<https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/05/22/newly-appointed-dartmouth-dean-steps-down-after-facing-barrage-of-criticism-over-bds-ties/>
He is salvageable as an ethnic subject. This sort of magnanimity
reinforces conditions that harm Indigenous scholars. In the articles
reporting Duthu’s resignation, we see this theme repeated with slight
rhetorical variations. Duthu is one of the good Natives who, while
given to lapses of judgment, isn’t very hard on Israel. He is therefore
qualified to be a dean. None of those articles quotes a Native or
Palestinian, or even an anti-Zionist Jew, only people opposed to BDS.
Such exclusions are a journalistic custom that validates pro-Israel
normativity and reinforces the impression that Palestine is exclusively
the concern of those who identify as Jewish. In this case, Indian
Country also suffers discursive erasures. It is unwise to imagine
Israel as inconsequential to Natives.
Israel’s participation in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples is
inscribed in the narrative dynamics of the Duthu controversy. Gustman,
for example, worries about extant Palestinian influence, and hints at
the dangers of unchecked Native influence, in ways that are rightly
considered anti-Semitic when the subject is one of Jewish influence.
Only because Natives and Palestinians inhabit a wretched position in
academe are they so casually subject to racist suppositions. Academic
racism both precedes and validates the supervisory role Zionists confer
to themselves in relation to colonized demographics.
This racism produces material consequences for its perpetrators and
victims. Many observers assume that targets of recrimination are worthy
of recrimination merely because they were targeted, as against the
timeless authority of the perpetrator. Relations of power can define
notions of probity. Take Cary Nelson, for example. He damaged his
reputation as a stalwart of academic freedom by leading the assault on
his colleagues in American Indian Studies at UIUC, including partnership
with far-right demagogues
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/zionist-groups-planned-lobby-univ-illinois-trustees-over-salaita-appointment>
and complicity with the Israeli security state
<http://www.inss.org.il/he/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/systemfiles/SystemFiles/AcademicBoycott%20INV.pdf>.
These actions weren’t a basis for punishment, however.
Now Nelson is again everywhere, organizing against human rights in the
MLA
<http://fathomjournal.org/the-bds-disinformation-campaign-in-the-modern-language-association/>,
interjecting himself in Native American Studies, providing quotes on
topical matters for industry publications. That institutions and
individuals in academe continue to entertain him as an expert on
anything other than dishonesty, snitching, and duplicity illustrates how
uninviting academe is for those positioned against state power.
Nelson isn’t exceptional. Ringleaders of campus repression rarely lose
their rarified positions; in fact, they are often rewarded. This
inveterate feature of US academe both reflects and reproduces the
institutional norms of settler colonization, which treat the violence of
modernity as a civilizational imperative. Authoritarianism is the
currency of American redemption, made available for study but studiously
ignored during presidential elections, faculty searches, geostrategic
fads, and every other moment when the populace is expected to lionize
personalities. Linear history, feted as insuperable progress, is
actually a series of regressions to colonial authority. Academe has
been so easily corporatized because its originaries prevent it from
developing in ways that value (or tolerate) unorthodoxy.
Consider that Alan Gustman will suffer no repercussions for his crusade
against Duthu. (If anything, he has burnished his own administrative
credentials.) Heschel will continue to be lauded
<http://www.dartreview.com/great-professor-series-susannah-heschel/> as
a voice of compassion and reason. The off-campus groups that interfered
will be further emboldened. Duthu, on the other hand, has to face down
a permanent demotion. Victims of the pro-Israel punishment industry
earn lifetime sentences.
While Gustman and Heschel intervene in ways that should cause any
discerning observer to object, Nelson, despite his hopeless attempt to
sound open-minded, offers the most objectionable intervention. Allow me
to speak more plainly: it’s not Cary Nelson’s business what happens at
Dartmouth. It’s not Cary Nelson’s business what happens in Native
American Studies. It’s not Cary Nelson’s business who does and doesn’t
support BDS. It’s not Cary Nelson’s business to sort the good people of
color from the bad people of color. And yet in the structures within
which he functions it actually is his business. He exemplifies a
specific class of white senior scholar who exercise the responsibility
of managing political standards on campus. Administration forever
summons men of that class to the task. It is their duty, their
pleasure, their passion, their birthright, their burden. That’s why men
like Nelson never offer a “no comment.”
We can return to one of his comments to recognize the settler’s
indomitable subject position: “Some people can sign a BDS petition
without imposing that agenda on the rest of their professional life,
while others cannot.” Neither the /Chronicle of Higher Education/ nor
/Inside Higher Ed/, where this passage appears, has ever considered the
question in the inverse. Can people be devoted to Israel without
imposing that agenda on the rest of their professional lives? Given the
unabated growth of the pro-Israel punishment industry and Nelson’s own
obsession with safeguarding Israel’s reputation, it’s a question worth
raising if we’re going to be in the business of implicating
professionalism based on political opinions. (It’s worth noting that
there’s no known instance in the history of US academe where a professor
has been fired for supporting Israel or for unethical practices
vis-à-vis Indigenous communities.) That only the dark thoughts of
subalternity are marked for surgical restriction indicates that
enlightenment often does little more than project onto the subaltern its
most incriminating anxieties.
Despite Duthu’s ambiguous response to the controversy, it’s important
for observers to condemn the behavior of his adversaries (and ostensible
supporters). We can remain mindful of Duthu’s personal circumstances
while simultaneously assessing the broader implications of the imbroglio
for NAS and the various scholarly and activist communities with which it
is in conversation. Zionists didn’t merely interfere with Duthu’s
career. Their actions are deleterious to the field Duthu represents.
Are its practitioners now obliged to appease Zionists before seeking
promotion? Must they check with the local supporters of settler
colonization before they undertake transnational organizing? Is their
self-governance contingent on the magnanimity of their oppressor? After
all, they have just been warned that their criticism of colonization
must remain confined to points of view that please the settler.
*Civilizing Aggression*
Dialogue between Natives and Palestinians goes back at least half a
century. The first substantive interchange occurred during the heyday
of the American Indian Movement [AIM], when Native activists, like their
Black Panther peers, looked to global liberation struggles for
inspiration and solidarity, proffering both to anti-colonial movements
in return. The radical politics of the time put numerous armed groups
across the globe into communication.
In turn, many efforts to chronicle Native activism engage on some level
with Palestine, Algeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Cuba, Northern Ireland,
and other contemporaneous struggles. NAS has numerous antecedents, but
in important ways it is derivative of that moment, helped along by
campus organizing that demanded representation of underserved ethnic,
racial, and national groups. Its presence in US academe, then, ranges
from tenuous to unwelcome. It sometimes acts as a repository of
managerial grandstanding about diversity and at others as a productive
link between colleges and Native nations. We cannot ascribe a specific
function to NAS that universally captures its place on campus, but we
can observe that it regularly encounters, or creates, a tension between
cultures of resistance and sites of state power.
Some Zionist agitators see in that tension an opportunity to shame NAS
away from the spaces of academe hostile to settler colonization—spaces
long derided as radical or unrigorous. Their vision of NAS is quaintly
anthropological. It exists to decode culture, to vitalize American
diversity, to celebrate resilience, to unearth civilizational origins,
to transmit ancient wisdom to a modern world always in need of
redemption. All that decolonization stuff? It degrades the field’s
integrity. Any suggestion of complicating rather than perfecting
modernity inhibits the purpose of higher education.
This vision of higher education as guardian of responsible
inquiry—absent, of course, the omnipresent dynamics of colonial
power—underlies the pro-Israel punishment industry’s justifications for
disciplining wayward individuals. That the industry would come into
conflict with NAS, especially as Palestine is invigorated through
movements for North American decolonization, seems inevitable, but
linking Zionism to NAS only through Palestine misses important elements
of the story.
NAS’s commitment to decolonization is incongruous with the type of
academy regulated by Zionist agitators, from progressives like Heschel
to extremists like William Jacobson of /Legal Insurrection/. We have
seen that liberal Zionists are happy to join reactionary forces when the
protection of Israel is at stake. We have scant evidence of those
liberals entering into alliance with movements and individuals perceived
as radical. These are strategic decisions, yes, but they also speak to
people’s structural positions in relation to their professional
aspirations. The Zionist cannot accept being implicated in Israeli
colonization. He is even less prepared to be identified with the
settlement of the United States. By flagging Natives for recrimination,
the Zionist doesn’t merely save Israel from scrutiny; he protects a
system of neoliberal commerce to which Israel is indispensable.
Israel’s indispensability to American militarism is regularly evident.
During the movement in Standing Rock to preserve ancestral land from the
environmental devastation of oil pipelines, US authorities availed
themselves of security firm G4S
<http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/G4S-Admits-it-Guards-Dakota-Pipeline-as-Protesters-Get-Attacked-20160906-0036.html>,
a longtime stalwart in Palestine before the BDS movement pushed it out.
The US government likewise approached the Standing Rock protests as a
counterterrorism operation
<https://theintercept.com/2017/05/27/leaked-documents-reveal-security-firms-counterterrorism-tactics-at-standing-rock-to-defeat-pipeline-insurgencies/>,
a move that coheres with its treatment of radical activism around
Palestinian, Puerto Rican, Hawaiian, and Black liberation. Israel is an
American talisman in matters of terror. And Israeli authorities work
with US police departments
<http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joint-us-israel-police-and-law-enforcement-training>
across the country.
Counterterrorism isn’t merely a legal tactic, but a frame of reference,
a defensive posture, and an ideology, a result of the hardboiled belief
that Native sovereignty (much less liberation) imperils the United
States. Terrorism is the requisite antithesis to the imaginary of a
stable, exalted nation-state. If it is an act of terror for Natives to
assert basic rights, then Indigeneity becomes foreign, an unsettling
departure from its traditional role as a pastoral validation of the body
politic. Native assertions of self-determination represent an
unpacified history, the source of deep settler anxiety, where landscapes
conquered into docility threaten to become animate and rebel against
their corporate steward.
It is easy to frame anti-Zionism as a rejection of the US polity,
something that happens regularly, albeit with variegated iterations, in
Native scholarship. Anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism needn’t be
articulated together to generate settler anxiety and the rancor that
often follows. The pro-Israel punishment industry is concerned with a
particular order of the world, one in which their glamorized
nation-state maintains a rarified presence. More than anything it is
interested in protecting that world from the unglamorous crudeness of
condemnation. Even without mentioning Palestine, certain features of
NAS are a nightmare for Zionism.
Just as continuous returns to authority restrict political vision in the
US, regressions to normativity in North American academe hamper
intellectual creativity. Such is the design of universities that
reproduce neoliberal imperatives, a structure campus Zionists adamantly
enforce. I recall, for example, the time on a Facebook NAISA thread
when Sergei Kan, an anthropologist of Tlingit cultures and an Israeli
apologist of spectacular pettiness, invoked a viral essay
<http://www.salon.com/2013/08/25/no_thanks_i_wont_support_the_troops/> I
had written about the problems with the phrase “support our troops” as a
way to discredit my participation in NAS on the grounds of inadequate
patriotism. Khan has likewise targeted Kahnawake scholar Audra Simpson,
whose book /Mohawk Interruptus/ proffers a sophisticated reading of
Indigenous liberation, a prospect Kan appears to find highly troublesome.
The pro-Israel punishment industry makes heavy use of Metis goon Ryan
Bellerose to purify NAS of its decolonial tendencies. Bellerose prowls
the internet to find Indigenes nefarious enough to criticize Israel and
then lavishes the offenders with vitriol. He has attacked J. Kehaulani
Kuaunui
<https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/opinions/dont-mix-indigenous-fight-with-palestinian-rights/>
and Robert Warrior
<http://www.israellycool.com/2014/04/01/dances-with-idiots/>, among
others, calling them “idiots” and “asshats” and questioning their ethnic
authenticity. (A few years ago, Bellerose showed up to a talk I gave in
Alberta and got himself removed, physically threatening Native women in
the audience on his way out.)
Bellerose is an extreme example—Hillel Montreal once cancelled an event
<http://www.cjnews.com/news/canada/hillel-cancels-talk-controversial-aboriginal-zionist>
with him because of his belligerent behavior—but still he represents the
sanctified rendition of a phenomenon that Indigenous scholars regularly
endure: aggressive men demanding compliance by deploying tactics of
shame and intimidation. However eagerly the genteel and urbane
pro-Israel observers of NAS may want to distance themselves from people
like Bellerose, we must point out that liberal Zionists evince more
tolerance for reactionary hacks than for the targets of their opprobrium.
*Native American Studies Without Zionism*
As somebody with a history of conflict with the pro-Israel punishment
industry and an investment in the fields of American Indian and
Indigenous Studies, I can offer a few pragmatic observations that I hope
readers might find useful.
We should treat the pro-Israel punishment industry as a nuisance and not
an interlocutor. We can conceptualize it as a nuisance without
minimizing the harmful outcomes it is capable of producing. It is
crucial to develop strategies for surviving recrimination, or for
eliminating it altogether. It is likewise crucial to expose and analyze
the industry’s detrimental presence in academe. Treating that industry
as a nuisance is a way of taking it seriously without accommodating its
unsolicited interventions. We cannot allow it to have a voice within
Native American Studies despite the difficulty of ignoring the noise it
makes from the outside.
I suggest treating Zionist displeasure with our work as a site of
productive inquiry: what does this reactionary interest in NAS tell us
about the field? In inoculating ourselves against recrimination, how
are we developing intellectual spaces that bypass or evade the
traditional strictures of academe? In what ways can those spaces be
meaningful to the communities we represent?
The pro-Israel punishment industry isn’t an aberration; it makes
manifest an implicit feature of American higher education: that
Indigenous peoples are unwelcome whenever they supersede the safe
romance of mascotry. Aspiring to liberation is inherently hostile.
Decolonization is anathema to norms of responsibility. The field’s
leading scholars attempt to undermine private ownership
<https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/red-skin-white-masks>
and land-grant mythologies
<https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-transit-of-empire>,
narrative bellwethers of US higher education. If the goal of Zionist
meddling is to destroy affiliation with radical geographies, then it
unwittingly facilitates one of the discipline’s basic needs—to
disaffiliate from the institutions that house it.
Conflict with pro-Israel zealots is a professional detriment, but also a
philosophical affirmation. Few political formations make the corporate,
colonial marrow of campus more obvious. In this sense, Zionist
recrimination is useful in that it forces onlookers to profess their
real affinities. Those who allow flaccid ideals of diversity to
colonize the real work of anti-racism must either stay silent, a damning
ethical choice, or align with the unenlightened conservatives they
pretend to abhor.
For those in NAS and related fields, the appearance of Zionist martinets
and their tacit enablers can be something of a clarifying ritual. The
kinds of responses those martinets generate (or don’t) help advocates of
decolonization determine whether US academe even deserves to survive.
This formula is neither flippant nor facetious. To the contrary, it
is a statement of principle. Native American Studies doesn’t exist to
marshal Indigenous peoples into the service of redeeming the colonial
university, but to ensure that they outlast it.
/About the author: /Steven Salaita’s most recent book is
/Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine
<https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/inter-nationalism>/.
--
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20170607/b6a47d17/attachment.htm>
More information about the News
mailing list