The liberation of Palestine is, above all, a world-building project.
Originally published in Steve Salaita.
For decades, Palestinians and fellow travelers have warned about the dangers of unchecked Zionist repression. Without meaningful opposition, we pointed out, their shenanigans would result in the complete breakdown of a civil liberties regime that was never up to the task of its own promises.
It was an easy prediction because over the course of five decades Zionists have made academe incredibly hostile to Palestinians: they torpedoed the hiring or upward mobility of countless faculty; they created profiles of students and instructors with the express purpose of getting them fired or preventing them from finding work; they cozied up to reactionary elements across the political spectrum; they whipped up hysteria about an ever-emerging crisis of “antisemitism”; they influenced administrative decision-making through a robust and active donor class; and they sent spies into the classrooms of anti-Zionist professors. On top of it all, they deployed armies of trolls in the internet era to heap racist abuse on the victims of their aggression.
In a period that saw dramatic growth of area and ethnic studies, there were few faculty lines devoted to Palestine, in contrast to dozens of named chairs in “Israel Studies.” Campuses were filled with outfits committed to disseminating Zionist talking points and, by extension, suppressing any discourse or activity critical of Israel. Politicians demanded fealty under threat of funding cuts. Organizations with governmental ties bankrolled lawsuits against BDS organizers. It’s truly difficult to describe just how complete, how aggressive, how unrestrained, was this Zionist presence on campus. All before October 7, 2023.
Nevertheless, plenty of scholars who would fancy themselves civil libertarians dismissed our warnings as paranoid or fantastical. Or they read the warnings as yet more evidence of Arab barbarity. They don’t understand how free speech works! Their culture is incompatible with democracy! They don’t believe in dialogue! It turns out that if anything our warnings weren’t dire enough.
Far from merely ignoring the warnings about unchecked Zionist repression, which would have been bad enough on its own, everyone got caught up in the “cancel culture” panic, which from the start was a Zionist endeavor and, contrary to its name, largely a mechanism for career-building among online pundits and failed academics. The phenomenon was obviously reactionary to anyone who cared to pay attention. Even a glance should have tipped off any half-discerning person given the lineup of Zionist gasbags who originated and then peddled the narrative.
And now here we are: thanks to a coalition of executives, administrators, politicos, lobbyists, consultants, and technocrats, the demolition of civil liberties is nearly complete and Palestine, as anticipated, was the frontline victim. The cancel culture luminaries, having banked more subscription income than a real job would ever afford, are suddenly unbothered about “free speech” amid the greatest period of repression since the Eisenhower era.
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Effective resistance begins with effective recognition. The persecution of anti-Zionism throughout the Global North isn’t simply conducted at the behest of Israel. Rather, the recent Zionist mobilization has facilitated a decades-long effort to wipe away any impediment to ruling class accumulation. A symbiotic relationship exists between Zionism and the Trumpian nightmare of the current United States.
It is important to be skeptical about buzzwords that flatter a deep-seated propensity to American exceptionalism. Democracy. Human rights. Free speech. International law. These words sound nice, and theoretically portend a livable world, but in practice they are implicated in cultures of Western imperialism. The terrain on which they operate depletes them of any benevolent characteristics. Instead, they become signifiers of military intervention, reactionary populism, cooptation of radical energy, and coups in enemy countries. Palestine’s liberation will happen on a different terrain.
Moreover, these buzzwords are a poor basis for mobilization. They implicate us in the rationale for U.S. obtrusion throughout the Global South rather than freeing us to think alongside the oppressed and downtrodden. There are militant intellectual traditions to consult, across continents, offering brilliant theories of subversion and resistance, many from Palestine and many beyond, a literal world of revolutionary possibility. We don’t need to repurpose the flaccid clichés of Western liberalism.
Working within the U.S. system might not be merely futile, then; it also might cause harm. Israel is currently disposing of Palestinians through genocide. We don’t need supposed anti-Zionists in the West to dispose of Palestine simply to join a losing game of realpolitik or to set up a few offices on Capitol Hill. Much of the Palestine Solidarity movement in the West has been devoted to the proposition that the natives too deserve these elusive “rights” and “laws” we hear so much about, this democratized speech apparently emanating from the tongue of the masses to the ears of power. By this point the movement should better understand that the natives were never meant to be heard or included, that in fact the system was carefully designed to exclude them.
One looks at the United States right now and wonders, What democracy? Which law? Where free speech? Whose human rights? If these existential treats can’t be located in the metropole, then we certainly won’t find them anywhere on the periphery.
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It’s helpful to think of free speech in capitalist societies as a commodity limited by the market demands of an inequitable political economy. To put it more plainly: money and power, not God or country, grant freedom. Commerce has priority over free speech–indeed, the legal system codifies that principle. And part of imperialism’s mandate is to eliminate dissent using extralegal means if necessary. Sometimes changing the law will suffice.
Take the case of Palestine Action in the UK. Its members, who used direct action in order to gum up the machinery of imperialism, kept getting arrested and subsequently winning their court cases. In response, the government proscribed Palestine Action, along with other groups, as a terrorist organization. Problem solved.
That the main force of today’s repression targets opposition to genocide is not bad luck or happenstance. Zionists have always sought a monopoly on speech and by now they have more or less succeeded. It is a cardinal feature of the current genocide. While curtailing or criminalizing the voices of their enemies, Zionists freely speak in the U.S. Congress, in the White House, in the Canadian and British Parliaments, in the Bundestag, in the European Union, in the palaces of the Arab Gulf, in the tech economy, in university administrative offices, in the military, in the intelligence services, in the weapons manufacturing industry. They defame and vilify Palestinians as a stepping-stone into lucrative media careers. Whatever success they achieve is a direct consequence of Palestinian oppression. The genocide in Gaza facilitates capital accumulation among the metropole’s business and intellectual classes. Mere Palestinians cannot be allowed to disrupt the windfall.
The repression also highlights the inability (or unwillingness) of many Western societies to transcend the Nazi sensibilities that inform their self-image as enlightened and urbane. For what is this systematic effort to obliterate anti-genocide sentiment other than an artifact of supremacist thinking? The mentality is to maintain a world order that prioritizes extraction of wealth into the Global North over and above anything else. It is impossible to accomplish this task without a deep-seated contempt for the lesser races.
Zionists complain about their own speech and expression being curtailed. This too is a feature of their genocide. For decades they have positioned themselves as victims of the very injustices they visit upon others. Even if they were correct, however, there would be no basis for sympathy. It was they, after all, who led the charge into the current era of violent suppression.
The suppression is probably most visible on campus, although it doesn’t end there. One could argue that the brutality infesting all facets of American life (except for the wealthy) has been actualized through the genocide in Gaza; it is therefore unwise to view that genocide as a “foreign” issue. The rapid surrender of U.S. campuses to fascism would not have been possible without the destruction of academe in Palestine.
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The current world order cannot accommodate Palestine. If Palestine continues to exist, then persecution of its supporters will exist, as well. No amount of bluster about democracy, human rights, free speech, or international law will stop it. In fact, these notions will evolve as needed to better justify the persecution. The last five decades have given us plenty of examples.
Support of Palestine is inherently subversive in the West because Israel is essential to Europe and America’s idea of themselves. Even if we assiduously focus on Palestine in isolation from other issues, its liberation is necessarily a world-building project. Sooner or later, attention to Palestine will force us to confront questions of accumulation and dispossession throughout the world. And it should ultimately inspire skepticism about the parlance of liberal democracy, which has accompanied the genocide from its outset. Repression of Palestinians is above all a form of self-preservation in the West.
Leftist thought-leaders are so willing to abandon Palestine for their electoral fantasies not simply from a desire to append themselves to sites of power, but also from an entrenched belief in the inherent virtue of U.S. democracy. The inability to shake off the belief means that eventually Palestine will be made expendable in the name of pragmatism, influence, access, or grown-up thinking.
To date no evidence suggests that abandoning Palestine has helped the cause of socialism in the United States. All evidence, in fact, shows that chasing electoral success produces excellent outcomes for careerists and social climbers at the expense of rank-and-file activists. Recall that every major faction on the U.S. left with its own media niche and celebrity commentariat, many of them now at loggerheads, emerged from the 2015-16 Bernie Sanders campaign. Those who rightly pegged Sanders as a weak-willed Zionist were exiled to the margins of an already-marginalized left. No wonder, then, that folks who pretend to know better keep trying to redeem the United States.
Palestine deserves a more serious effort—demands one, in fact. We can’t force Palestine into a political structure that is constitutionally hostile to its existence, a structure that anyway has no moral legitimacy. We need to cultivate the spaces where Palestine is celebrated without equivocation or qualification. These spaces, not for nothing, host the best version of humanity.
Two years of genocide, with its relentless cruelty, has made people in the United States less tolerant of the usual dissembling and more attuned to the insidiousness of the world’s supposed democracies. Nothing good comes of genocide, but this increased skepticism is nevertheless a welcome development.
And yet what is widely considered to be a great sign of progress, the Zohran Mamdani mayoral campaign in New York City, has functioned to impede this necessary skepticism. The campaign, which sounds more like a reboot of the Bernie craze by the day, has a detrimental effect on anti-Zionist consciousness. Instead of inspiring (or reinforcing) a stronger stance against Israel, the campaign has people once again defending the appeasement of Zionists as a necessary condition of political success—without really questioning what political success means for socialists in the United States.
My critique isn’t about voting or organizing, per se; maybe it’s not about those things at all. Mostly, I’m thinking about how Palestine can be instrumentalized or diminished by a popular movement depending on the conceits of a single politician. I’m not condemning the Mamdani campaign, which is after all limited by the rigid constraints of the Democratic Party; I’m condemning the blowhards trying to convince everyone that the Mamdani campaign is a meaningful expression of anti-Zionism.
When thinking about political participation in the United States (and the larger West), it’s critical to keep returning to the same question: which outcomes to my approach would justify the disposal of Palestine or the betrayal of a people suffering genocide? If you find an answer to this question, then go ahead and disqualify the approach as worthless.
Steven Salaita is the author of "An Honest Living: A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries," and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo.
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