The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

John Trimbur

History doesn’t exactly repeat itself. And it doesn’t necessarily lead from tragedy to farce either, like the Great Old Man said. But sometimes, read backwards, history reveals anticipatory traces of things to come. As in the case of Steven Salaita, whose appointment as a tenured associate professor in the American Indian Studies program at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana (UICU) was rescinded ten years ago on August 1, 2014, right before fall semester began. There were, indeed, compelling intellectual reasons to add Salaita’s comparative work on settler colonialism in Palestine to native American studies, to develop an internationalist framework to understand the experience of indigenous peoples around the world. If anything, Salaita’s appointment looked like an exciting fit. 

But that was beside the point for UIUC’s top administrators, who were under considerable pressure from pro-Israel alumni, trustees, public figures, and donors to cancel Salaita’s hiring because of his tweets protesting Israel’s ferocious bombing of Gaza during the summer of 2014. Waged in response to Hamas missile attacks, Operation Protective Edge killed over 2,000 Palestinians, nearly 70% of whom were civilians, and destroyed or damaged homes, schools, health facilities, and infrastructure in Gaza. According to UIUC provost Robin Wise, Salaita’s unhiring was not a matter of his pro-Palestinian politics but was due rather to the “incivility” of his tweets, such as these:

At this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anyone be surprised.

All life is sacred, unless you’re a Zionist, for whom most life is a mere inconvenience to ethnographic supremacy.

It’s simple: either condemn #Israel’s actions or embrace your identity as someone who’s ok with the wholesale slaughter of children.[1]

UIUC’s “civility” doctrine claimed that Salaita’s tweets, by breaking supposed norms of academic style and decorum, had in effect rendered him unemployable. This flimsiest of pretexts, to be sure, was invented after the fact, as a smokescreen to punish Salaita for the depth of his anger at the deaths of innocent Palestinians and the mass destruction of Gaza.

In any event, major professional associations in the US—including the Modern Language Association, Organization of American Historians, American Studies Association, National Women’s Studies Association, and Native American Studies, among others—issued statements condemning the rescinding of Salaita’s appointment.[2] In turn, following an in-depth investigation, AAUP censured UIUC for violating principles of academic freedom and fair practice in hiring. For the most part, these official statements and reports focused on UIUC’s violation of well-established rules of conduct in such academic matters as faculty rights and conditions of employment, not Palestinian lives and means of livelihood. 

I do not mean to diminish the importance of the professional associations’ defense of Salaita, for a key part of their mission is to protect faculty against unjust and arbitrary treatment. But still, if we read the Steven Salaita case as an anticipatory event rather than simply an isolated incident of injustice done to an individual faculty member, what we may see is the prelude to the role university leaders are playing today disciplining and punishing students and faculty who have raised their voices against Israel’s policies of ethnic cleansing and its genocidal attacks on Palestinian people. There is a pattern here: as the scale of Israeli violence and the number of Palestinian deaths increased horrifically between the wars on Gaza in 2014 and 2023-2024, a global anti-Zionist movement for a Free Palestine has emerged; predictably a wave of pro-Israel repression has followed. 

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Beginning with the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 and the establishment of Israel as a uniquely Jewish ethno-nationalist state, the Gaza Strip came into being as a geopolitical entity, administered initially by Egypt, that served as a place of refuge for over 200,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes by the Zionist militias that ultimately turned into the Israel Defense Force. From the late 1940s to mid-1950s, there were persistent skirmishes along the Israel-Gaza border, often involving refugees trying to return home. In 1956, during the Suez crisis, when Israel occupied Gaza, over a thousand Palestinians died, while many others were wounded, tortured, or imprisoned. In the Six Day War of 1967, Israel dramatically expanded its boundaries, seizing control of Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, along with the West Bank from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria.  

After the First and Second Intifadas (1987-1993 and 2001-2005)—the popular rebellions to “shake off” (in the literal meaning of intifada) the occupation of Palestine—Israeli policy took a decisive turn in 2005. Prime minister Ariel Sharon disengaged from the direct occupation of Gaza, removing troops and over 8,000 Israelis living on 21 settlements and relocating factories, workshops, and greenhouses inside Israel borders or simply destroying them. There were protests from Israel’s toughest hardliners, and Benjamin Netanyahu resigned from Sharon’s cabinet. But Sharon’s aims were strategically cunning. 

The disengagement was hardly a step forward on the “Road Map” to lasting peace, as many in the West saw it at the time. Rather, it was meant to isolate the 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza, thereby preserving a Jewish-majority polity in Israel and foreclosing the possibility of either a “one person, one vote” democracy in Israeli-held territory or an independent Palestinian state. What resulted was a stateless people with limited self-government living under Israel’s external control of Gaza’s borders. When Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, Israel imposed a blockade, restricting the flow of goods, fuel, and electricity and the movement of people. Trapped in Gaza with few means of livelihood, Palestinian unemployment approached 70%, and the majority of Gazans lived in desperate poverty. Gaza became, as many have observed, an “open air prison.”  And, as the wars of 2008-2009 and 2014 demonstrate, the confinement of Palestinians, along with the absence of Jewish settlers and economic development, made Gaza a sitting duck, a target of ruthless bombing and targeted assassinations without restraint.[3]

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What the Steven Salaita case anticipates is the growing recognition in 2023-2024 that US institutions like UIUC in 2014 and Columbia, Harvard, and UCLA today are, wittingly and unwittingly, legitimizing Israel’s longstanding pattern of warfare against Gaza by outlawing pro-Palestinian protest—expelling students, evicting them from dorms, firing faculty, calling in the cops, and letting pro-Israel vigilantes beat up peaceful protesters in the encampments. As the unhiring of Salaita anticipates, this repression of protest reveals, at a deeper level, the growing fear in ruling circles that a widespread disaffiliation from Israel is taking place, a withdrawal of affective attachment to the Zionist project signaled by BDS (the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement), the work of Jewish Voice for Peace and other anti-Zionist groups, and the heightened uneasiness in left and liberal sectors about Israel’s brutal human rights record. It is as though Salaita’s tweets have materialized and taken on a second life in the encampments of college students and others all over the world. 

The point is, for years, Israel has gotten away with it, praised as an outpost of Western democracy, admired by progressives for its drip agriculture and model day care centers. For many who should have known better (myself included), the socialist kibbutzniks who made the desert bloom seemed to promise a new way of life based on the collective labor of free men and women. Years ago, everyone I knew was reading Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” hallucination that a Jewish state could provide the grounds for a peaceful brotherhood of diverse peoples. 

Well, mass murder with genocidal intent accelerates learning. Ten years after the Salaita case, the unprecedented slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza has lifted Israel’s veil of immunity, producing the widespread defection that now names Israel as a pariah state. On the universities’ part, UICU’s doctrine of “civility” has turned into charges of antisemitism against pro-Palestinian protestors, at a moment when academic leadership should have been protesting the destruction of all of Gaza’s universities and divesting from the war industries that supply Israel with genocidal weapons. 

Things are out in the open now, in the panicky effort of pro-Israel opinion-makers to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. But the kids in the encampments, many of whom are Jewish, know this is nonsense—that history tells the tale instead of longstanding Jewish opposition to Zionism as a false step and a tool of European colonialism. As the Salaita case anticipates, today’s protesters now face the wrath of career-destroying university bureaucrats who have caved in to AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), Christian Zionists on the right, and pro-Israel Biden Democrats. I salute them for their courage, their understanding of the historic moment, and their moral clarity. 

VIVA STEVEN SALAITA      VIVA FREE PALESTINE