<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<div id="container" class="container font-size5 content-width3">
<div id="reader-header" class="header" style="display: block;"> <font
size="-2"><a id="reader-domain" class="domain"
href="http://mondoweiss.net/2017/04/speaking-palestine-academic/">http://mondoweiss.net/2017/04/speaking-palestine-academic/</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">Speaking of Palestine and academic freedom
<br>
</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Steven Salaita - April
24, 2017<br>
</div>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="content">
<div id="moz-reader-content" class="line-height4"
style="display: block;">
<div id="readability-page-1" class="page"
xml:base="http://mondoweiss.net/2017/04/speaking-palestine-academic/">
<div class="entry-content c2-8">
<p class="sizeable">In the past few years, I’ve become
something of a counselor. I have no formal credentials
and a bad track record at the very thing I’m supposed to
help others avoid. How can I be critical of Israel,
friends and strangers ask, without losing my job or
getting into trouble? I’m flattered to be approached in
this way, I am. But I can’t help but think: me?
You’re asking <em>me</em> how to manage a career in
academe while being critical of Israel? I’ve lost two
jobs in the past three years because of my sharp
criticism of Israel and I’m a month away from being
unemployed again. I mean, I’ll try, but if you want to
ask me about how to get into trouble in academe, I’m on
better footing.</p>
<p class="sizeable">I recall one such inquiry from a
colleague last month. It was a routine, even banal,
question, nothing that would normally require a halting
answer. And yet, as is often the case with ordinary
things, the question was filled with a world of
complexity.</p>
<p class="sizeable">My colleague wanted to know if she
should join a delegation of scholars to Palestine. A
well-respected <a href="http://parc-us-pal.org/"
class="sizeable">organization</a> offers a development
seminar on Palestine for US professors, including a
short visit to the country. It’s a nice opportunity:
participants get a trip to the Mediterranean, where
they will be treated to visual beauty, warm hospitality,
and wonderful cuisine. They will have an opportunity to
interact with sharp intellectuals and activists and to
visit the holy sites so grandiose in humanity’s
imagination.</p>
<p class="sizeable">This kind of trip is common for
scholars, who visit places around the world with
sponsorship from research groups or universities. There
is only one instance where the question “should I go?”
needs to be raised: in relation to Palestine. My
friend wasn’t concerned about safety or other
fantastical perils, but about the possibility of being
condemned by Zionist groups and damaging her chances at
tenure. She was right to be worried.</p>
<p class="sizeable">We had a long conversation weighing
the benefits of the trip against its potential
pratfalls. It’s a fun adventure. You’ll come back with
plenty to write about. This is important to your
research. The networking possibilities are attractive.
But. A number of organizations torment anyone who goes
to Palestine unless it’s to serve in the IDF.
Incorporating Palestine into a program of radical
scholarship has potential to tip the balance from “I’m
wary of her” to “she’s gotta go.” Universities are
filled with individual faculty who relish punishing
colleagues who don’t express adequate fealty to Israel.
They certainly exist on your campus.</p>
<p class="sizeable">I had no easy answer. Palestine has a
way of reaffirming a person’s most empathetic
sensibilities, so I was confident my friend would come
back invigorated. But I wasn’t certain she would remain
unscathed.</p>
<p class="sizeable">“Just go,” I finally declared. Then I
felt guilty for the next two days.</p>
<p class="sizeable">It was an exemplary moment of
existential silliness. After all, why is it even a
question if somebody should go to Palestine? It’s a
terrific place to visit. Overzealous Israeli
authorities are the only real threat to visitors.
Travel, however, isn’t neutral. It’s always a
political choice even when it has hedonistic ambitions.
The question, then, isn’t rhetorical. Understanding
why going to Palestine is inadvisable allows us to
discard the silly notion that we’re free to do as we
please because of pluck or protocol.</p>
<p class="sizeable">The episode illuminates the special
status to which Palestine is subject in US academe.
Professors will be lauded and rewarded for visiting
certain places, but Palestine isn’t one of those places.
It doesn’t offer the sort of war porn that titillates
the political imagination. How countries and regions
come to be understood as worthy of adulation or sympathy
depends on a constellation of policy conventions,
institutional cultures, power dynamics, narrative
orthodoxies, and economic interests, all of them
variously in concert and at odds with one another. That
the possibility of visiting Palestine evokes
consternation suggests we have a case where those
phenomena are largely aligned.</p>
<p class="sizeable">It also illuminates the depth of
pressure certain students and faculty experience on
campus. Two years ago, a joint <a
href="https://ccrjustice.org/the-palestine-exception"
class="sizeable">report</a> by Palestine Legal and the
Center for Constitutional Rights found nearly 300 cases
in which speech or activism around Palestine was
suppressed. Those cases included disciplinary action
for campus activists, the suspension of student groups,
employment termination, and the cancellation of course
sections.</p>
<p class="sizeable">This suppression goes beyond campus,
too, though its tentacles manage to slither into our
well-manicured spaces. Numerous states have introduced
<a href="http://palestinelegal.org/righttoboycott/"
class="sizeable">legislation</a> criminalizing
Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions [BDS], a highly
effective, nonviolent strategy for opposing the Israeli
occupation. Whatever one makes of BDS, it is
indubitably a form of protected speech, as affirmed by
dozens of court rulings. That so many politicians and
legislative bodies are willing to make it illegal
shouldn’t be understood simply as constitutional
negligence, but as evidence of a political culture that
values power over mobilization. Countries such as <a
href="http://www.france24.com/en/20160120-france-boycott-israel-bds-law-free-speech-antisemitism"
class="sizeable">France</a> and the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-quietly-pushed-anti-bds-legislation-us-uk"
class="sizeable">UK</a>, not to mention <a
href="http://www.acri.org.il/en/2011/07/17/the-anti-boycott-law-questions-and-answers/"
class="sizeable">Israel</a> itself, have pushed to
criminalize BDS. Suppressing Palestine is a
transnational industry.</p>
<p class="sizeable">We need academic freedom to criticize
Israel, but it takes more than academic freedom to
contest the sites of power invested in protecting Israel
from criticism. Most commentators, however, are too
scared to name Zionism as a problem. People spend
considerable time these days arguing about speech and
disruption on campus, yet Palestine is shockingly absent
from the conversation. Exploring the repression of
ideas at universities while ignoring Palestine is like
discussing LeBron James without mentioning basketball.</p>
<p class="sizeable">Palestine isn’t the totality, or the
crux, of today’s debates about speech and resistance on
campus. There’s too much repression preceding
Palestine, and now in existence alongside it, for that
to be true. But Palestine deeply informs the substance
of those debates, and by recovering this sunken reality
we can better understand the disputes around free speech
and academic freedom that generate so much attention.</p>
<p class="sizeable">*****</p>
<p class="sizeable">It is impossible to speak, or be
heard, with a set of impartial senses. Free speech, in
both philosophy and practice, is attached to structures
of power (seen and unseen, discernible and oblique,
steady and unstable). Despite the state’s professions
of fairness and benevolence, free speech is never fixed
or disinterested. It is prosecuted according to
circumstance. It is reified based on the needs of the
audience. And it is conditioned by race, gender,
nationality, class, religion, ideology, culture,
sexuality, and so forth.</p>
<p class="sizeable">Take UC-Berkeley, a longtime testing
ground for these matters. Its administrators proclaimed
that nothing short of a near-riot would <a
href="http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/01/26/chancellor-statement-on-yiannopoulos/"
class="sizeable">compel them to cancel</a> a recent
lecture by right wing provocateur Milo Yianopoulis. Yet
last semester the same university shut down a <a
href="https://academeblog.org/2016/09/15/berkeley-bans-a-palestine-class/"
class="sizeable">legitimate course</a> about Israeli
settler colonization offered by a Palestinian
instructor. In the end, Milo’s lecture was disrupted
and the course was allowed to proceed. It wasn’t the
infallibility of a concept that changed the outcome of
each situation, but an organized shift in relationships
of power.</p>
<p class="sizeable">Free speech, in short, is a limited
commodity pretending to be a universal ideal.</p>
<p class="sizeable">We can’t understand the importance of
free speech in civic or academic settings unless we also
engage the politics that precede its invocation.
Rallying around free speech is easy, which is why
arguing about it never solves any problems. Nobody
opposes free speech as an ideal. The term is often a
slogan or shaming device that can be summoned in order
to safeguard a viewpoint or ideology without having to
confront its ethical anatomies and material
consequences. Free speech isn’t the actual site of
contestation in our cantankerous debates. What we talk
about matters more.</p>
<p class="sizeable">Here we can pivot back to academic
freedom because its function on campus mirrors free
speech in US society more broadly. The preservation of
academic freedom as an end in itself isn’t the best
allocation of intellectual energy. We still have to
discuss, and, ideally, resolve, the issues that generate
controversy because they supersede academic freedom.
Given the serious problems now facing
academe—corporatization, receding faculty governance,
donor influence, decreased public funding,
administrative bloat, systemic racism, obscene student
debt, sexual violence—our campuses won’t survive current
trends if we refuse to analyze the structural conditions
that often get reduced to frames of ahistorical
disagreement.</p>
<p class="sizeable">Suppose we desire any of the
following: to liberate Black people, decolonize North
America, destroy a neo-Nazi resurgence, get some
economic justice, free Palestine. If we treat those
desires merely as rights to be practiced in controlled
environments, then academic freedom becomes a pretext to
normalize conventional politics. It has potential to
supplement transformative writing and organizing, but
that potential must be created. Academic freedom isn’t
inherently radical.</p>
<p class="sizeable">*****</p>
<p class="sizeable">For Palestinians, any type of freedom,
including the academic variety, is acutely unavailable.
Living under military occupation in the Gaza Strip and
West Bank and as <a
href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/israel/2016-06-08/israel-s-second-class-citizens"
class="sizeable">second-class citizens</a> inside
Israel, their lives are controlled by an unequal legal
system that proffers rights according to religion (as
defined by the state). Palestinians suffer <a
href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/09/israel-opt-pattern-of-unlawful-killings-reveals-shocking-disregard-for-human-life/"
class="sizeable">extrajudicial assassination</a>, <a
href="https://www.afsc.org/resource/restricted-movement-occupied-palestinian-territory"
class="sizeable">limited movement</a>, arbitrary
arrest and <a
href="http://www.btselem.org/topic/administrative_detention"
class="sizeable">indefinite detention</a>, <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.763331"
class="sizeable">home demolition</a>, restricted <a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/israel-narrowing-space-freedom-expression-160720073126511.html"
class="sizeable">speech rights</a>, harassment and <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.773115"
class="sizeable">torture</a>, <a
href="http://www.btselem.org/settlements/land_takeover"
class="sizeable">land expropriation</a>, and <a
href="http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Netanyahu-on-Palestinian-right-of-return-There-is-no-room-for-maneuver-338329"
class="sizeable">forced exile</a>.</p>
<p class="sizeable">There are currently 6300 Palestinian
political <a href="http://www.addameer.org/statistics"
class="sizeable">prisoners</a>. 700 of them just
began a <a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/04/palestinian-prisoners-launch-mass-hunger-strike-170416173501861.html"
class="sizeable">hunger strike</a>, in fact. 300 of
them are children. The <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.657712"
class="sizeable">unemployment rate</a> in the Gaza
Strip is nearly fifty percent, the <a
href="http://gisha.org/updates/4388" class="sizeable">highest
in the world</a>. Real per capita income is <a
href="https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/emergency-reports/gaza-situation-report-94"
class="sizeable">$970</a>. Eighty percent of the
population receives some sort of social assistance.
Almost forty percent live below the <a
href="http://www.ps.undp.org/content/dam/papp/docs/Publications/UNDP-papp-research-PHDR2015Poverty.pdf"
class="sizeable">poverty line</a>.</p>
<p class="sizeable">Gaza has been under a land, air, and
sea blockade for ten years, which has <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/tens-thousands-still-displaced-gaza"
class="sizeable">reduced its GDP</a> by half: Israel,
in cooperation with Egypt, determines what comes in and
what goes out. Israeli politicians speak of <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/17/israeli-military-calorie-limit-gaza"
class="sizeable">“putting Gaza on a diet,”</a> that
is, allocating a certain amount of foodstuff for the
territory based on minimal caloric requirements. At
other times, those politicians speak of <a
href="http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-real-reason-israel-mows-lawn-gaza"
class="sizeable">“mowing the lawn”</a> in Gaza, which
means exactly what it sounds like. The cancer rate is <a
href="http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/03/cancer-rates-soar-gaza-war.html"
class="sizeable">unusually high</a>. Life expectancy
is <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/adri-nieuwhof/ten-year-gap-between-palestinian-and-israeli-life-expectancy-report"
class="sizeable">dismal</a>. Fishing boats, one of
the lifelines of the economy, are sometimes <a
href="https://www.oxfam.org/en/emergencies/airstrikes-destroying-gazas-fishing-industry"
class="sizeable">destroyed</a>, or their occupants are
shot at. Citizens deal with extended <a
href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/gaza-strip-power-cut-crisis-electric-palestinian-territories-israel-electricity-a7533086.html"
class="sizeable">power cuts</a>. Schools and
hospitals are <a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/01/gaza-cancer-patients-dying-slowly-170115120725304.html"
class="sizeable">undersupplied</a>. According to both
local and international doctors, the psychological
damage from the blockade and Israel’s periodic war
crimes has been extraordinary. The children of the
territory suffer abnormal levels of <a
href="http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract/10267"
class="sizeable">trauma and anxiety</a>. There is no
developed medical apparatus to mitigate these problems.</p>
<p class="sizeable">Narrowing the focus to academe,
Palestinian students and professors experience forms of
institutional repression that on US campuses are
virtually unimaginable. For decades, universities in
the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been <a
href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-gaza-conflict-university-hit-as-palestinians-endure-more-than-200-strikes-in-24-hours-9644243.html"
class="sizeable">bombed</a>, invaded, <a
href="http://mondoweiss.net/2014/11/israeli-university-academic/"
class="sizeable">looted</a>, and <a
href="http://www.chronicle.com/article/Closure-of-Palestinian/88058"
class="sizeable">closed</a> for extended periods.
Students, staff, and professors often can’t make it to
campus because of checkpoints and unexpected curfews.
Their political activity is closely monitored.
Professors sometimes meet class in their living rooms.
It is difficult to get permission to travel abroad for
conferences and research symposia. And when students
graduate, they enter into an economy devoid of skilled
jobs. (In this, at least, the comparison to US academe
is striking.) Compounding this problem, Palestinian
citizens of Israel face <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.550152"
class="sizeable">significant discrimination</a> in the
labor market.</p>
<p class="sizeable">I studied at Birzeit University, near
Ramallah, in the summer of 2000. My best friend there
was from Gaza, but didn’t have permission to study in
the West Bank. Both territories, mind you, are said to
comprise the same country. As an “illegal” student, he
couldn’t travel to Ramallah, just down the road. The
Israelis sometimes erected a mobile checkpoint between
the two towns. In turn, he was stuck in the hamlet of
Birzeit. Getting home to Gaza, fewer than a hundred
miles away as the crow flies, would have required
illegally crossing three borders, as he did to get to
Birzeit in the first place. Many of the students from
Gaza faced the same hardships. Plenty of students from
the West Bank couldn’t travel abroad, or even to nearby
Jerusalem. Those with Western passports were free to
explore. The foreigner had greater rights than the
native, a condition to which Palestinians were
accustomed. Strangers, after all, have transformed
their lives into a simulation of existence, where one
merely bides time, with no place to go, while
impatiently narrating the dream of actually existing.</p>
<p class="sizeable">These brutal realities inhabit campus
speech and they are blithely minimized when scholars
make Palestine contingent on Western sensibilities. In
short, we shouldn’t compromise the seriousness, or the
severity, of our investment in certain political sites,
both geographical and imaginative, in order to
accommodate the strictures of academic freedom as a
self-contained phenomenon. Doing so actually limits the
effectiveness of academic freedom by providing it a kind
of philosophical autonomy that restricts its immersion
into material politics. Academic freedom is only
meaningful in relation to the sites of contestation that
necessitate its presence.</p>
<p class="sizeable">When we think about the difficulties
that Palestinians face in academe, then, it’s crucial to
orient critique around the hostile conditions of
repression rather than merely safeguarding ourselves
against hostility.</p>
<p class="sizeable">*****</p>
<p class="sizeable">My maternal grandmother died last
year. She was my connection to Palestine, having lived
through the nakba, the mass expulsion of Palestinians in
1948, and the messy histories that followed. Her
family’s home in Palestine was forever lost to Israeli
settlers and she wouldn’t return to the country for four
more decades, this time on a tourist visa.</p>
<p class="sizeable">She could be a difficult woman:
stubborn and blunt and imperious. She wasn’t one for
shows of affection, but from my childhood I remember
very well the protective and efficient quality of her
supervision. Neither I nor my cousins dared to disobey
her, but we relished the fact that in her care nobody
would dare to cause us harm. When I was in high school,
she regularly visited us in rural Appalachia, a place
ill-suited to her cosmopolitan predilections. We never
spoke much, though she was delighted when I became
competent enough in Arabic to hold a conversation. She
adamantly disapproved of my fledgling attempts at facial
hair and nagged my mother to buy me proper clothes.</p>
<p class="sizeable">Like all memories of this variety,
they’ve evolved from moments of annoyance to subjects of
affection. The original sentiment of one memory,
however, has only intensified with time. I had driven
my mom and grandmother to the grocery store. My
grandmother unexpectedly opted to wait with me in the
car. “My daughter talks too much,” she explained after
my mom had left, a tacit condemnation of small-town
culture. My fingers tapping the steering wheel provided
the soundtrack for our tense silence. Then, out of
nowhere, she began talking about Palestine. About 1948.
About her village. About her displacement. About the
pain that had never gone away. “These things, I never
forget,” she concluded matter-of-factly. “No. I never
forget.”</p>
<p class="sizeable">I was a kid in that moment, sixteen
and preoccupied with teenage drama, but I understood
exactly what she was telling me: that I could never
forget, either. Academic freedom doesn’t preserve this
memory. But it damn sure gives me the right to
remember.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>