[Peace-discuss] Israel's Dead Soul

[David Green]

An excerpt from my summary of Salaita's book on Mondoweiss:

http://mondoweiss.net/2014/10/scholarship-dismissal-university/
Steven Salaita’s Israel’s Dead Soul (2011) merits serious attention and ultimately effusive praise. It contains five critical essays that not only offer brilliant insight into the cultural and ideological practices of Zionism in both Israel and the United States, but implicitly explain why his conscientious efforts would be denigrated and rejected by the ostensibly liberal aspects of this culture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Israel’s “dead soul” is not Salaita’s own accusation or conclusion; it is his way of framing the blatant and gruesome ironies entailed by Jewish Israelis’ own obsessions, and laying bare their pretentions to moral purity and political righteousness.
He concludes the introduction with two points central to the book’s argument:

"First, discussion of the state of Israel’s soul has been common for so long that it constitutes a relevant political and moral discourse of its own, one that illuminates numerous important features of Zionist identity and strategy. Those who chatter about Israel’s declining soul long ago killed it by agonizing it to death. However, in doing so they have brought other matters to life, most notably a commitment to protecting Israel from recognition of its inherent iniquities, which I endeavor to contextualize here. Second, I am working form the belief that Israel’s soul died at the moment of its invention. I do not believe that states have souls, metaphysically or metaphorically. There is no soul of Palestine, of Iraq, of Papua New Guinea, of Canada, or of any other geopolitical entity with a central government and an economic apparatus. (p. 10)

At the modern corporate university, and especially at public neoliberal high-tech research universities like UIUC, multiculturalism and diversity constitute the official ideology of identity (as opposed to class) politics; civility and respect, as they have been evoked by administrators and trustees in the Salaita affair, constitute its bureaucratic and disciplinary practices."


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