A Steven Salaita article from 2013 offers a glimpse of the anti-racist arguments that radicalized Peter Beinart but too few other liberal Zionists

Steven Salaita’s picture from the Haymarket Books website.

Steven Salaita’s 2013 article “Peter Beinart’s colonial logic: Opponents of Israel boycott make anti-democratic arguments” resonates with me and I wanted to share it here for four reasons.

1. It was written in 2013, at a time when opposition to Israeli apartheid wasn’t complicated by the horrors of October 7 and the ensuing revenge rampage and ethnic cleansing. With all the attention on the unrest caused by those horrors, I imagine that many people will be motivated to learn more about the underlying issues. This article is one place people could start. It gives a glimpse into an important era, one that is often glossed over in discussions of the history of Israel in favor of more cataclysmic events including the 2006 Hamas electoral victory and the 2008 Cast Lead campaign that marked the end of the previous era. The era in which this article was written was characterized in my mind by peaceful protest against Israeli apartheid, met with a punishing siege of Gaza and unimaginable propaganda. My own political awakening on Israel was prompted by shame at being a victim of this propaganda. I had reflexively bought into the Israeli narrative about the events on the 2010 Freedom Flotilla in which nine activists were killed by Israeli forces. A friend — a committed Zionist, ironically — asked me why I would unquestioningly believe the Israeli narrative. He knew me as a zealous promoter of skepticism and critical thinking and laughed at me for believing the statements of any state entity, which are inevitably self-serving. This set me to deeply researching the matter and discovering the depths of the Israeli-American propaganda machine. I then began learning the basics of the Palestinian plight. I was confused to learn that Palestinians were not allowed the right of return, because the reasoning was so plainly racist that I simply couldn’t believe it could be embraced by so many “respectable” people. Worse was the building of settlements: even my Zionist friends were upset that the world was allowing settlements in the West Bank to continue being built, as this was clearly a violation of international law that was undermining the possibility of a two-state solution — a solution I much later came to realize was, even then, an impossibility and undesirable besides. (Having two relatively peaceful ethnostates would obviously be preferable to the status quo of one monstrously deadly state, but ultimately a two-state solution project would still be a separatist anachronism.) This era ended with the 2018–19 Great March of Return. The extremely abhorrent response to this peaceful protest garnered barely any sympathy in America or other western countries, and it certainly didn’t bring liberation any closer to being realized. This era was important because it suggested to Palestinians that non-violent resistance was not going to work. To paraphrase JFK, it made another violent uprising inevitable. Meanwhile, by 2018, even the most committed American supporters were either giving up on the Palestinian cause (eg Norman Finkelstein) or being aggressively marginalized from polite society with accusations of antisemitism (eg DSA). This is important context for anyone trying to comprehend the October 7 attack and the responses from Israel and America.
2. The article is a good demonstration of the deep knowledge, analytical prowess, and thoughtfulness of the author, Steven Salaita, who became a symbol of the suppression of anti-Zionist speech when he was fired from his professorship at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. People should be familiar with him.
3. People should also be familiar with Peter Beinart, the Zionist to whom Salaita is responding in the article. I believe Beinart provides one of this generation’s most important and inspiring examples of the possibility for intellectual and spiritual growth. Criticized by Salaita in this 2013 article for thinking “that the Palestinians matter less — much less — than the Jews,” Beinart soon began a journey to anti-Zionism. Today, he writes articles that challenge and further radicalize me on the subject of Israel, such as I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State in the New York Times July 7 2020, There Is No Right to a State in Jewish Currents (which he founded) in 2021, and You Can’t Save Democracy in a Jewish State in February 2023, again in the New York Times. I hope you will seek out more of his contributions.
4. The content of Salaita’s article is itself essential. Here are a few of Salaita’s lines from the article that I think should resonate for any American who believes, as I do, in the universalist anti-racist lessons from the peaceful revolution led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that successfully overthrew American apartheid. These were the sorts of arguments against Israeli apartheid that were being rejected as antisemitic by American liberals at a time that proved to be our last chance to avoid this current conflagration. Salaita:

There is no such thing as real democracy in legal systems that create hierarchies of access and belonging based on nothing more than biology.

“Israel’s right to maintain the preferential immigration policy that makes it a refuge for Jews,” [is a] concession that he [Beinart] supports unequal immigration quotas based on ethnicity — that is, state-sponsored displacement of Palestinians to accommodate new Jewish settlers.

Israel is a “refuge for Jews” not in a geographical or historical vacuum, but directly in opposition to the basic rights of indigenous Palestinians, who themselves need refuge from state violence and racism as a result of the colonization incessantly sanitized by Beinart and others as innocent.

What the Palestinians say is instructive: that they accept nothing less than their full rights under international law. This self-evident assertion undercuts the noble rhetoric of democracy writers like Beinart attach solely to the Jewish population of Israel.