Steven Salaita’s Israel’s Dead Soul (2011) merits serious attention and ultimately effusive praise. It contains five critical essays that not only offer brilliant insight into the cultural and ideological practices of Zionism in both Israel and the United States, but implicitly explain why his conscientious efforts would be denigrated and rejected by the ostensibly liberal aspects of this culture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Israel’s “dead soul” is not Salaita’s own accusation or conclusion; it is his way of framing the blatant and gruesome ironies entailed by Jewish Israelis’ own obsessions, and laying bare their pretentions to moral purity and political righteousness. He concludes the introduction with two points central to the book’s argument: First, discussion of the state of Israel’s soul has been common for so long that it constitutes a relevant political and moral discourse of its own, one that illuminates numerous important features of Zionist identity and strategy. Those who chatter about Israel’s declining soul long ago killed it by agonizing it to death. However, in doing so they have brought other matters to life, most notably a commitment to protecting Israel from recognition of its inherent iniquities, which I endeavor to contextualize here. Second, I am working form the belief that Israel’s soul died at the moment of its invention. I do not believe that states have souls, metaphysically or metaphorically. There is no soul of Palestine, of Iraq, of Papua New Guinea, of Canada, or of any other geopolitical entity with a central government and an economic apparatus. (p. 10) At the modern corporate university, and especially at public neoliberal high-tech research universities like UIUC, multiculturalism and diversity constitute the official ideology of identity (as opposed to class) politics; civility and respect, as they have been evoked by administrators and trustees in the Salaita affair, constitute its bureaucratic and disciplinary practices. In the Chapter 1, “Israel as a Cultural Icon,” Salaita explores Zionists’ exploitation of multicultural spaces on campus: What are the ethical consequences of the coterminous relationship of Israel and Jewishness? They are many, none of them positive. First of all, it means that Israel cannot be included in multicultural celebrations without reflecting negatively on Jewish people, many of whom do not want to be identified in any way with the nation-state or who do not want the national-state to be their primary cultural identity. Second, it entraps Jewish people in an unsavory paradigm, one in which they perform gruesome acts because of their culture. … Herein lies the main problem of conjoining culture and national character. Hillel and other Jewish civic organizations render themselves distinctly responsible for Israel’s violence by proclaiming themselves guardians of the state’s consciousness. … It is never a good idea, even though the trope of strategic essentialism, to link an ethnic group to a military apparatus. Such a move automatically justifies discourses—in this case anti-Semitic ones—that should never be justifiable. (p. 23) In a manner that is rarely articulated in the belly of the beast, Salaita proceeds to place this critique in a larger educational/corporate/power context: The frequent inclusion of Zionism in multicultural spaces, both physical and metaphorical, enables us to think more closely about the utility of multiculturalism as a discourse and a practice. Zionism represents centers of power financially and politically. It is an ideology (or set of ideologies) deeply inscribed in state power all over the world. It supports an enormous military economy and an imperialism whose reach is capacious. It partakes of the capitalist structures of neoliberalism that expropriate resources from the Southern Hemisphere into the Northern. Zionism is inseparable from the forms of structural injustice that occur throughout the world. My point here is not to suggest that Zionism corrupts multiculturalism, though that is likely the case, at least in the abstract. I suggest instead the possibility that multiculturalism itself is problematic because it so easily accommodates Zionism (and other troublesome ideologies). Is the point of multiculturalism to oppose unjust power and racism? Or is it to provide spaces within institutions where ethnic minorities can escape racism? What is the point of using multicultural apparatuses to promote Israel as the apogee of Jewishness? Although I have rarely heard it stated that multiculturalism is supposed to oppose power, it frequently appeases it, a judgment I base on nothing more than its continued existence. Academic and corporate institutions are set up to regulate and efficiently eliminate both internal and external challenges to their modes of governance and authority. In many ways, the promotion of multiculturalism is a diversion or a delusion … deep seated racism still exists in the institutions wherein the idea of multiculturalism was invented. (p. 28-29) 41XN-ipMuQL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Salaita accurately and ironically describes the institutional context of his own demise at the University of Illinois, embodied in Chancellor Phyllis Wise’s assertion that “What we cannot and will not tolerate at the University of Illinois are personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them.” Institutional power has spoken, claiming that Salaita has not just challenged “viewpoints,” but demeaned and abused them. - See more at: mondoweiss.net/2014/10/scholarship-dismissal-university#sthash.g6mY22FU.dpuf
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 21:27:52 +0000
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