Steven
Salaita's Historiography of Victimhood
by Winfield Myers
American Thinker
November 23, 2014
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[Ed. note: American Thinker title is "The Historiography
of Victimhood."]
Had the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign not nixed
Steven Salaita's appointment as professor of American Indian studies
after his extended string of vituperative, vulgar Tweets, blog posts, and
other communications
exposed his anti-Semitism and radicalism to a broad audience, he would
have likely remained an obscure academic. Today his legions of
professorial supporters view him as a cause
célèbre and alleged
victim of the "Israel lobby" and rich alumni.
Salaita may not have presented himself as a victim of academe's
alleged perfidy before Chancellor Phyllis Wise's action in August, but his
fields of study assume the victimhood of indigenous peoples worldwide.
Since world history is replete with conquests, intermarriage,
assimilation, and the rise and fall of expansive empires, separating
victims from victimizers through the millennia is a difficult process --
unless, that is, the purpose of one's academic work has less to do with
the pursuit of truth than with achieving political goals through a
quixotic, politicized reading of history.
Salaita embodies these incongruities. Given his would-be appointment
in American Indian studies, one would assume that the bulk of his
scholarly work treats the cultures and history of the various tribes of
North America. In fact, all six of his
books deal with modern Arab studies, Arab Americans, or Israel. How
this West Virginia native
of Arab ancestry could be offered a position in American Indian studies
in spite of this fact is illustrated through the convoluted, jargon-laden
work of Salaita's mentors. His greatest, or most immediate, intellectual
debt is to Robert
Warrior, the director of American Indian studies at UI who served on
Salaita's dissertation committee at the University of Oklahoma.
Warrior is a member of the Osage Nation "who stands
in solidarity with other tribal peoples around the world." In
contemporary ethnic studies this signifies that he, like Salaita the
Palestinian, can claim victimhood and oppression at the hands of
conquering powers -- the European colonizers of North America, and the
Jewish "colonizers" of modern Israel, respectively. This
alliance of the oppressed unites in theory if not in fact these disparate
fields of study.
This is made explicit in the most accessible and concise example of
Warrior's historiography, his influential 1989 article,
"Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians: Deliverance, Conquest, and Liberation
Theology Today." Drawing on Edward Said's critical 1988 review
of Michael Walzer's Exodus and Revolution, Warrior argues that the
story of Exodus, the liberation of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt and
their settlement in the Promised Land, is an unsatisfactory archetype for
other oppressed peoples to follow. Because God gave the land of the
indigenous Canaanites to the Hebrew invaders and told them to "have
no mercy" on them, the narrative is in fact one of conquest, not of
liberation. Therefore, oppressed indigenous peoples, like Warrior
himself, are typologically like the Canaanites rather than the Hebrews.
Moreover, the use of the Exodus narrative by the Pilgrims and others
in the New World gave them leave to slaughter the Indians and conquer
their lands. Native Americans, therefore, and all others who have been
oppressed, are Canaanites, while their oppressors are the Israelis. The God
of the Hebrews and later Christians is therefore unsuitable for Native
Americans, who are victims of this same religious tradition.
In his 2006
book The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for
Canaan, Salaita transfers this typology from antiquity to the modern
world to argue that Palestinians are typologically indigenous Canaanites,
while Zionists are typologically ancient Israelites. While he does not
deny "Jewish Indigeneity" in Palestine, he writes that Zionism
was and is:
…a separatist colonial movement that far from being an innocent foray
into an empty land promised by God, in reality led to a brutal and
well-planned displacement replete with atrocities Israel continues to
deny.
He cites alleged Israeli brutality as a central element of his
intellectual development:
My entire life has thus been dedicated to Palestinian politics and
activism, and nothing has occupied my thoughts more than Israeli
brutality. …
Yet Salaita thought little about Native Americans until, during an
American Indian literature seminar, he had an epiphany. For as he read
for the class
I gradually realized that I had seen all the concepts before and that
I had already read the history inspiring those novels' creation. And
indeed I had. It was simply in the form of Palestinian history.
Then he "discovered that Zionist leaders drew inspiration from
American history in conceptualizing ways to rid Palestine of its
Indigenes," and, one could posit, his life's work was found. Put
simply: America/Israel are the oppressors;
Palestinians/Canaanites/American Indians are the victims.
His latest book, Israel's Dead Soul (2011),
purports to examine Zionism's "irreconcilable contradictions. It
promises liberation through colonization. … one cannot support Zionism
without eventually encountering its ugly side." Throughout the book,
Salaita resorts to hackneyed stereotypes and tendentious, ahistorical
assertions that draw on the settler/colonial model, such as
"[Palestinians] are indigenous to the land that foreign Jews
settled," and "Since the advent of Western colonization, it has
been remarkably difficult for white subjects in the metropole to access
their deepest psychological sensibilities." As Liel Leibovitz has noted,
although history offers myriad examples of nations founded in
"bloody conflict with an indigenous population," for Salaita,
"Israel stands alone, an unparalleled and monstrous offender like no
other, logical and historical demands be damned."
Logical and historical demands are damned throughout the work of
Salaita and his fellow travelers. They have no patience for a philosophy
of history that attempts to account for the morally compromised human
agent at the heart of any people's past, or the necessity for the
historian to learn to live with doubt. In their Manichaean view, there
are the good people (politically chosen indigenous tribes), and the bad
(politically chosen conquerors). Their compromised historiography is
written less to enlighten than to motivate, less to discover the past
than to demand retribution in the present.
Winfield Myers is director of academic affairs and of Campus Watch, a project
of the Middle East Forum.
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