To my beloved supporters: I’m still working on various deadlines, and nearly dropping from exhaustion and stress, so thank you for your ongoing support as I near the goalposts (and kick a ball towards the net, or somethingsomething: look, please, this is the extent of my sports knowledge).
As I’ve said, I’ll average an essay a week, so expect three or more to come tumbling out sometime around the 10th (oh, I’ve been holding back on so much, soooooo much). But I couldn’t help firing off this short one. Happy weekend.
This week, The Intercept published a report titled, “Meet the First Tenured Professor to be Fired for Pro-Palestine Speech,” about the outrageous firing of Maura Finkelstein whose position as tenured professor was terminated by Muhlenberg College, because of her social media posts about Palestine. My eyebrows shot up to the ceiling and stayed there a while when the headline showed up in my feed because, like many of you, Dear Readers, I have vivid memories of Steven Salaita being fired from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). No, unlike what some have said, he was not “un-hired” (what is that, even?) but literally, actually fired: this factsheet and analysis from the Center for Constitutional Rights makes that clear, and Salaita has addressed the firing here.
First, a few points of clarification.
I’m not writing this at the behest of Steven Salaita, or anyone else. I have written for Electronic Intifada and one of my pieces was a review of his book, Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom. I’ve never met Steven Salaita in person: I attended a packed panel discussion about his firing at the University of Chicago some years ago, and that was the closest I came to seeing him, from a distance, in real life. We have had some collegial exchanges on social media, which is why I occasionally refer to him by his first name. He might well disagree with parts of this, or all of it, and that will be fine. If I’ve made any errors, I’ll make the necessary corrections.
I am, like many, many others, shocked and angered by the firing of Maura Finkelstein. I don’t know her in any capacity, but stand in solidarity with her and anyone else, including many Palestinian-American students and faculty who have seen their lives upended because they dared to speak out against an ongoing genocide. Like Steven Thrasher, Finkelstein is being unfairly and unjustly targeted by a neoliberal university with no commitment to anything than its donor base (on that, I have neither the time nor the energy to continue, but I suggest you read Salaita, Davarian Baldwin, and many others on the subject).
But, to return to the main point here: Finkelstein is not the first professor to be fired for her views on Palestine. The Intercept’s report now includes corrections, summarised at the end and now dated September 27, 2024:
“This story has been corrected to reflect that the University of Illinois fired Steven Salaita rather than withdrawing a job offer. This story has also been updated to include the case of Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian academic who was fired from the University of South Florida in 2002 for what the school said were campus safety concerns, but what academic freedom advocates said were related to comments critical of Israel.”
I should note that the point about Al-Arian literally came up as I was drafting this essay.
It’s excellent that they added that material, about Salaita and Al-Arian, but the headline remains unchanged. (As of 12:28 p.m, September 27).
Also unchanged is this section:
I’m baffled by Levy’s words because I witnessed, in real time, and here I repeat myself, Steven Salaita being fired for social media posts, back in the day when we all called it Twitter (as I still do).
The Intercept report, while providing much needed background on recent university decisions to hound and expel those who call for an end to the genocide, does what so much mainstream media does all the time: It decenters Palestinian experiences in favour of a liberal narrative about non-Palestinians (read, often, if not always, white) taking up “the cause of the Palestinian people” (that ubiquitous phrase).
This is not some petulant call for non-Palestinians (like me, in case you’re wondering) to step back. Everyone should care, and everyone should continue to march, post, speak out, whatever you can do, on what is going on. People like Finkelstein and Thrasher need and deserve our full support and outrage over what has been done to them. My issue here is with the fact that we rarely see or hear Palestinian voices or narratives that are strident, antagonistic, defiant, and angry about what is going on. Instead, we are more likely to see reports that centre outrage among non-Palestinians as if righteous rage and revolutionary anger might upset too many people in that nebulous space we like to call “middle America.” We don’t hear enough from and about people like Mohamed Abdou, the scholar who was thrown under the bus by Columbia University’s President Minouche Shafik (now comfortably ensconced in a new job in London). And, frankly, I’m more than a little tired of hearing about how wonderful it is that famous people like Masha Gessen and Judith Butler, who are little more than liberals, stand up for Palestine and against genocide. (Yes, yes, they are both liberals at best, though some of you mistake them for raging radicals, but that is for another day: I’m too tired to say more right now.) Trenchant and stinging critiques of Zionism, like the kind we see on Electronic Intifada or from the pens of Joseph Massad and Salaita, who writes regularly on his website, are rarely allowed or even mentioned in the pages of the Times or on shows like Democracy Now. Instead, we favour stories about sad Palestinians and dead children. We should, of course, remember and mourn them all, but we have to ask ourselves: why do we only decry the genocide when we can see the victims as sad and piteous? What might we do with rage and resistance?
The news about Maura Finkelstein is that she has been hired elsewhere in what is not likely to be a faculty position.
I have no doubt that losing an academic, tenure-track position is a loss in so many ways, but getting a new job relatively quickly, in these circumstances, is a rare thing and one that was not available to Salaita for a long while. Many Palestinian students and faculty and many non-Palestinians have seen their lives and careers upended in countless ways, and it would be petty and mean-spirited to do some Head Count of Oppression. But, again, I’m so tired of the framing and the near-excitement that arises when a non-Palestinian’s terrible, awful experience also becomes a liberal salve for those who look away from Palestinian anger. I’m not trying to pit Finkelstein and Salaita against each other, but stating that we have to question how and why The Intercept and many others like it keep erasing and de-centering Palestinian experiences. Maura Finkelstein is, to the best of our knowledge, the first Jewish professor to be fired and as many, many people have noted on Twitter, her firing is proof that the Zionist, anti-Palestine machine is bent on destroying all resistance to the genocide, no matter the religion or identity of dissidents. That’s a critical point to make, and that should be the focus of the Intercept story. The outlet needs to change its headline and also rewrite the report (with corrections properly noted) to reflect the fact that, no, actually Finkelstein is not the “first tenured professor to be fired.”
In these terrible times, we need solidarity, we need accountability, and most of all, we need the grace of memory.
You should follow Electronic Intifada, Steven Salaita, Joseph Massad, and Mohamed Abdou for more on rage and resistance. If I’ve made any errors, or use the wrong terms, feel free to correct me: I have no ego in these matters.
See this for a Current Affairs interview with Abdou.
You can read more of my own work here:
“On Palestine and Liberalism.”
“Thomas Friedman Is a Dinosaur, and a New World Is Here.”
“On Titan, Migrants, and Mourning.”
*Added shortly after publication: I thought I’d come up with “The grace of Memory,” but I see that it has been used by others and wanted to acknowledge their use of the term. This also confirms what I’ve said, in “On Originality,” that people can have startlingly similar thoughts, ideas, and come up with the same turns of phrase without seeing each other’s work. Here’s one example of the term, and here’s another.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
