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This chapter focuses on Steven Salaita’s tweets from the summer of 2014 to illustrate how civility becomes deployed in a larger struggle to control scholars of color seeking to bring clarity to, and shed light on, the various material and intellectual complicities informing the US-Israel-Palestinian conflict. It also focuses on what happened to Salaita with the self-promoting exercises of Jason Hill, which represent a predictable but nonetheless harmful form of political and intellectual opportunism. Expressing anger at the killing and maiming of Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli munitions is, by definition, uncivilized – and for some – anti-Semitic because to recognize Palestinian pain and loss is to condemn Israel’s role in producing that pain and loss. To have given Salaita a place among the faculty at Illinois would be to grant the Palestinians, what the late Edward Said called, “the permission to narrate” – which supposedly represents an existential threat to Israel.

What is the concept of academic freedom, what are the justifications for its existence, and to whom does it belong? These are important questions to ask in determining what, if any, special protect...

This essay argues that the reception of Noam Chomsky's political scholarship by progressive academics demonstrates that the state of theory in the humanities has reached a point of crisis; that is, Chomsky's unpopularity in certain academic circles indicates that conceptions of intellectual labor have been radically reconfigured within the academy since the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the wake of much of his political writing about 9/11, an interesting phenomenon has emerged: Chomsky repels his onetime allies within progressive circles, while attracting more and more people among the general public to his point of view, providing an extremely interesting commentary on the state of intellectual labor in the academy. Chomsky's popular base seems to have expanded while his academic base has contracted. How can we account for these opposed tendencies? Is it that Chomsky has embarrassed “elite educated opinion” in a way that some can no longer tolerate? In “Crude Wars,” Timothy Brennan and Keya Ganguly write, “It has become fashionable for cultural critics to reject supposedly outmoded theories of political economy, to disdain the simple exposure of hidden agendas, to scoff at the likes of Noam Chomsky or Armand Mattelart on the grounds that their notions have been superseded by the ever-inventive strategies of the market.” To what within current conceptions of intellectual labor can we really attribute this tendency? It is this question to which my essay turns.

In an interview in the summer of 2000 concerning the 1947–1948 Palestinian dispossession at the hands of the yet-to-be-formed Israeli Defense Forces in the form of the Haganah and the Irgun (IZL), Ha’aretz’s Ari Shavit and the famed cultural critic Edward Said reflected on the possibilities of an Israeli-Palestinian binational state, something Said had advocated for quite some time— long before the failure of the Oslo Accords and Camp David II. This interview took place just a few months before the outbreak of violence that began the Second Intifada in the occupied territories, a possible reaction to the failure of Camp David II talks where, brought together by then-president Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak had supposedly offered Arafat (in exchange for the Palestinian recognition of “Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state”) nearly 80 percent of the West Bank for a viable Palestinian state, a deal of a lifetime. Many, however, considered the offer a call for Palestinian submission to a Bantustan arrangement reminiscent of the South African national territories.1 As he came to fully understand Said’s nuanced position, which clearly placed reconciliation between the Israelis and the Palestinians ahead of revenge or retribution for either group’s historical grievances and the identification of a mutual interest in peace and coexistence in a future binational state before the assignment of blame, Shavit proclaimed, “You sound very Jewish.”

The US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the disastrous results of the ensuing occupation placed American Jewry in a difficult and undeserving position. As the US occupation seemed to descend into increasingly more chaos, and as the original justifications for the war emerged as untenable, an unfortunate caricature emerged of American Jews’ political perspectives, which are presumably as diverse as those of any ethnoreligious group might be.1 Such caricaturing enabled reactionaries to resurrect, and to deploy with great effectiveness, the nasty “dual loyalty” charge against prominent American Jewish neoconservatives who served in the Bush administration, which unfairly suggested that— within the context of formulating Middle East policy as US officials— these figures will always place Israel’s interests ahead of those of the United States.2 While “Richard Perle,” “Paul Wolfowitz,” “Douglas Feith,” “Scooter Libby,” “Eliot Abrams,” “Dov Zakheim,” and “Eliot Cohen” are the names offered up as examples of high-standing American Jewish neo-conservatives in the Bush administration who were eager to see the United States invade Iraq, they very well may have believed that US and Israeli interests coincided with respect to toppling Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, Ari Shavit of Israel’s leading daily newspaper Ha’aretz spent three days in New York interviewing Edward W. Said in the summer of 2000. In this interview, which was— in Said’s words— “eminently fair” and accurately reproduced in print throughout Israel— he traced the events surrounding the 1947–1949 expulsions of nearly 800,000 Arab inhabitants in an area known simply as “Palestine,” culminating in the birth of Israel.1 He also stressed the necessity of acknowledging what so many are pained to admit: the existence of nearly three million people, currently living under military occupation, who share among themselves the “Palestinian” identity, an identity that— while continuously contested— represents a suffering and tragic dispossession that stands at the very heart of the present Middle East conflict.