Steve Salaita
The following is a reproduction, with slight modifications, of an article recently published in a special issue of Middle East Critique, “The Academic Question of Palestine,” edited by Walaa Alqaisiya and Nicola Perugini.
Now that (even moderate) pro-Palestine sentiment has been effectively outlawed in both the public and private sectors, I hope we can say goodbye to the Western myth of “free speech” from which so many reactionaries built their careers.
No group among the oppressed is made disposable for the sake of political expediency. Zionists aren’t welcome at the table. We’ll seek answers where questions are verboten. “Free speech” is not a fair exchange for our silence.
The title of this essay inverts a common phrase, “the Palestine exception to free speech,” first used by civil rights attorney Michael Ratner (2013) and later popularized by Maria LaHood of the Center for Constitutional Rights. While it is true that free speech protections often fail to accommodate criticism of Israel in various Western countries, the phrase assumes that the failure is out of character. An alternate view would suggest that exclusion of Palestine results from the limitations of free speech itself. As is often the case, the issue of Palestine exposes hypocrisy, myth, or deceit in the USA’s exceptional self-image.
Free speech seems like a simple concept, and is often spoken of as a universal good, but it traverses various historical, political, and rhetorical strata, which aren’t always in harmony. It also suffers a definitional ambiguity that leads to endless debate. More than anything, free speech is unruly because it is always ideological. Affinity often dictates who is seen as worthy of defense. The courts may (dubiously) view free speech independently of politics, and absolutists may (disingenuously) stand for the rights of their antagonists, but in the public sphere nothing informs approaches to free speech more than crude political affiliation. In this environment, “free speech” is neither a right nor a resource; it is a rhetorical instrument. I denote its presence as a rhetorical instrument when putting the term in quotation marks.
Free speech, in any of its forms, is situational, relying on publicity, jurisprudence, public sentiment, individual will, and dynamics of power in order to function. (These phenomena can also render it unable to function.) In the Global North, “free speech” has become a commercial enterprise, a resource to be extracted from the silences of dispossession. Under capitalism, all public goods eventually accede to schemes of privatization. Free speech is no exception. It has been privatized in various ways: as a branding device to solicit patronage in the subscription economy; as a lazy ploy for political advantage; and as a civilizational imperative.
Let’s spend a moment with each.
Nowhere is free speech more inflexible than in the mainstream narratives fixated on its defense. A raft of big-name pundits with libertarian tendencies have made it their business to decry the decline of free speech by citing their own persecution. In this sense, censorship, narrowly defined, is a commodity to be advertised in a self-indulgent marketplace. Far from being a universal value in decline, “free speech” is a rhetorical gimmick to sell opinions, one tethered to individualistic sensibilities in the metropole. “Free speech” is likewise mobilized by politicians, or aspirants to political office, as a way to burnish patriotic credibility or to generate sympathy from a victim position. “Free speech” is a cipher for ideological caterwauling.
Free speech, then, gets lost in a lot of hullabaloo. Consumers can choose to avoid certain outlets or commentators, based on numerous factors: ideology, time management, level of interest, emotional comfort. Despite the complaints of online salespeople, the consumers’ proclivities do not constitute censorship. The economics at play make it such that consumer choice can be interpreted as an abdication of civil liberties. Another economy is at play, too: that of the pundit’s competitive disposition in a marketplace saturated with intellectual products. If a pundit manages to transform repression into a growth economy, amenable to wealthy funders and corporate media, then that pundit is not being censored. Upward mobility is the counterevidence to the pundit’s assertion. Thought-leaders do not come about through meaningful disobedience. The same mechanism for enticing subscribers consigns free speech to mere predilection—choose the correct pundit to patronize and you become a bona fide civil libertarian.
Through this process, “censorship” has become a strawman for rightwing proselytizing. If somebody vigorously brands as “censored”—I’m blacklisted! I’m banished! I’m dangerous! (Therefore I’m brave!)—then there’s a good chance you have a garden-variety conservative on your hands. The discourse has come to be dominated by economic populism with reactionary undertones. Once it proved effective at building an audience in the subscriber economy, it was taken up by a succession of established journalists, disgruntled academics, aging creatives, and aspiring influencers: Matt Taibbi, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Glenn Loury, David Mamet, Aayan Hirsi Ali, Jonathan Chait, Lee Fang, Larry Summers, Sohrab Ahmari, Jonathan Haidt (along with a corresponding set of publications such as Compact, Persuasion, and Quillette that complement heavy coverage in legacy magazines such as The Atlantic and New York). This category of pundit spans a superficially wide swath of the U.S. political spectrum, but all share a connection in approach and purpose. They earn income and prestige by decrying a supposed decline of free expression due to social justice tomfoolery or identity politics run amok (normally presented under the term “cancel culture”). Underlying the shared sensibility is an aversion to transgender activism (or people) and a near-complete silence about the demonstrable epidemic of Zionist repression, in which many of the aforementioned civil libertarians have participated.
Regarding free speech as a civilizational imperative: the idea, sometimes unacknowledged, is that an erosion of civil liberties represents or is synonymous with a decline of Western values. (It isn’t actually an erosion, but a perception of change based on personal grievance, for during no period of U.S. history have civil liberties been universally applied.) In this worldview, free speech or expression functions as a bellwether of modernity, pursuant to the status of the civilization at large. It is less a metric of freedom than a lament about a receding cultural superiority due to the unwelcome presence of demographics against which the West has traditionally defined itself as superior, an analysis Gavan Titley takes up to great effect in his book Is Free Speech Racist? The threats arise from a cross-section of the uncivilized: Black people, trans people, Muslims, communists, migrants, antifascists, queers of varying stripes—coded as the woke, the deviant, the dogmatic.
Does illiberalism exist in these supposedly “woke” environs? In abundance. Yet it is of no greater magnitude than the competing (or complementary) versions of illiberalism exhibited by those who decry civilizational decline. Illiberalism, in any case, can be defined in a lot of ways. On the one hand, it gestures toward intolerance or even totalitarianism: an unwillingness to entertain different viewpoints, expressions of dissent, and socio-economic systems. Of this variety of illiberalism, all discourses authorized by the ruling class are implicated. On the other hand, illiberalism suggests a rejection of the entire civil rights framework as a bourgeois triviality—that is, a rejection of liberalism as both an organizing and philosophical doctrine. Today’s crusaders against censorship position themselves in contradistinction to liberals while maintaining the same civic framework from which liberals derive ideological coherence. Both parties, broadly defined, uphold the logic of American exceptionalism.
As such, they tend to view speech through an inherently colonialist framework, mired in the anti-communal notion of individual liberty. In this individualistic point of view, speech isn’t a public good, but a vanishing commodity due to overregulation—a kind of property to be accessed through enterprise and competition. The point of view drives much of today’s information economy.
Free speech, thus dispossessed of liberatory properties, becomes a pretext for reactionary agitation.
***
Defense of speech, like speaking itself, is enmeshed in networks of power. There are lots of ways to illuminate the point, none more effective than Palestine. Much of today’s rhetoric around civil liberties operates in a hermetic and self-referential capacity (usually by design). Palestine’s frequent absence from conversations about repression and censorship brings up important questions. In particular, we have to consider whether that absence is deliberate, and, if so, to what purpose Palestine is absent.
Palestine is not some abstract barometer of hypocrisy. Nor is Palestine an intrusion into unrelated matters. Palestine is the actual site of contestation despite (or maybe because of) its studied exclusion from the discourse. Its exclusion from the discourse isn’t always deliberate, but it is never unmeaningful.
Actual free speech, like its mythologized iterations, has been deeply unkind to Palestinians in Europe and North America. The unkindness came into full display after October 7, 2023, when Israel unleashed a genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip that dominated news coverage for many months. Despite public opinion in the West being largely favorable to the Palestinians—support is overwhelming in the Global South—corporate media generally present Zionist points of view. This disparity has been in evidence for some time and can be explained in large part by two factors: 1) a reflection of state policies to which corporate media are beholden; and 2) a systematic pattern of Zionist recrimination.
The first factor informs the second, but the second is essential to the first because it illustrates how “free speech” benefits the ruling class. During the genocide in Gaza, repression of pro-Palestine sentiment—or, inversely, criticism of Israel—reached an unprecedented level. Campus management shut down student groups across the country and admonished, suspended, or fired staff and instructional faculty. Private and governmental forces converged to essentially criminalize dissent, particularly in the U.S., UK, Canada, France, and Germany. Various governments conducted inquiries against writers and activists. Authorities cancelled numerous lectures, music performances, and art exhibits. Pro-Israel outfits—with some help from faculty and administrators—doxed and defamed Palestinian students. Public pressure, including from Congress, forced two Ivy League presidents to resign their positions for being inadequately Zionist.
Nonstate violence also increased. In December, 2023, a white reactionary shot three Palestinians in Vermont, paralyzing one of them. A month earlier, another white reactionary stabbed a six-year-old Palestinian child to death in suburban Chicago. Two Israeli students at Columbia University released skunk spray on pro-Palestine demonstrators, sending one of them to the hospital. In one widely circulated video, a Jewish woman assaulted a Palestinian child in New York City. A similar incident occurred less than a month later.
It is unclear what the long-term effect of this era will be, but without doubt the customs of free speech, along with “free speech” discourse, have been permanently altered. There is simply too much evidence of repression, some of it violent, to make a career of decrying illiberalism and censorship while simultaneously avoiding (or abetting) an epidemic of Zionist recrimination. A few things are already comprehensible, though: the repression isn’t a byproduct of the genocide, but a feature of its strategy. Genocide requires control of information and messaging; using punishment to dissuade expression of unpopular opinions, especially those representing a majority, was necessary as both an individual deterrent and to validate institutional hostility. We learn also that if the profiteers of “cancel culture” or “censorship” were motivated by any sort of moral consistency, then they would spend a majority of their time writing indignant letters to bourgeois publications about the fired, disabled, and murdered Palestinians to be found across Europe and North America. Instead, they haven’t lifted a finger except in some cases to facilitate this culture of unprecedented repression.
It would be a mistake to confuse “unprecedented” with “novel,” however, for systematic repression of pro-Palestine (or anti-Zionist) sentiment long predates October 7. In Germany, for example, broadcaster Deutche Welle fired eight Palestinian employees within the span of a few months, many of whom would go on to win court cases against the company. The same year, Fidaa Wishah was fired from her job as a pediatric radiologist at Arizona Children’s Hospital in Phoenix after a Twitter account, @StopAntisemites—an account run by Liora Rez (nee Reznichenko), which has spearheaded numerous doxing and defamation campaigns—dug up old tweets calling for the end of Zionism. Shortly after, Agnes Irwin, a private all-girls school in suburban Philadelphia, fired Natalie Abulhawa as its athletic trainer when administrators encountered her profile on Canary Mission, a shadowy outfit that compiles online dossiers of students and young professionals who criticize Israel with the express purpose of ruining their careers. (The site features tweets Abulhawa had sent when she was fourteen.) In the postsecondary realm, Cabrini University outside of Philadelphia fired professor Kareem Tannous after having conducted a prolonged investigation at the behest of @StopAntisemites and similar outfits. He joined a long list of Palestinian and anti-Zionist faculty who have been fired from U.S. academic institutions since the 1960s.
The defamation campaigns cited here were deliberate and well-funded, which is crucial because it shows that institutions often value public relations over civil liberties. Each of the campaigns largely escaped the attention of the online “free-speech” commentariat (or was deliberately ignored). Much is omitted from the list of punishments elucidated above—not a few random or outlying cases, but omissions by the dozen. Across the so-called industrial democracies of the USA, Canada, Germany, the UK, France, and Holland, Palestinians face extraordinary levels of repression. That repression cuts across economic categories and isn’t always perceived in material terms. The omissions highlight the gravity of the problem. Punishment of dissentient Palestinians (or even quiet Palestinians) is rarely a one-time affair. The defamation follows them, making it difficult to get other jobs or capping their upward mobility. It also endures through the persistence of their martinets. Numerous Zionist scholars have dragged colleagues into multi-year lawsuits that are expensive and time-consuming and induce long-term reputational damage, which should be viewed as an aggressive violation of professional etiquette. (Disclosure: I am one of the defendants to these lawsuits.)
If Palestine is appended to your profile, then it can be difficult to overcome a simple Google search. Such is the power of Palestine as a semiotic device: its very name evokes controversy and that name in turn evokes a latent set of managerial fears about disorder and subversion. That’s why so many Zionist outfits create online profiles of people involved in the Palestine solidarity community. The information needn’t be accurate. It needn’t be explained. It needn’t be fair. It simply needs to be found. Those profiles speak to reactionary elements already lodged in the managerial culture of higher education.
Accusations of bloodlust and antisemitism are in themselves damning, but they only reach full efficacy in relation to the identity of the victim. Smear campaigns get traction against subjects who match the preconceptions from which the defamation procures its authority. Maligning Palestinians is easier if the audience is inclined to view them as bloodthirsty and antisemitic in the first place.
***
In addition to the Palestinian victims of Zionist defamation cited above, numerous Arabs and Muslims have faced similar contretemps. (The Zionist genocide has made the tally practically incalculable.) Black people too have inordinately suffered Zionist recrimination (e.g., Marc Lamont Hill, Russell Rickford, Cornel West, Achille Mbembe, Taurean Webb, Carlton Williams, Christina Sharpe, and Kwame Ture). Anti-Zionist Jews comprise the other major target of Zionist organizations. Jewish critics of Israel, including some who can rightly be called liberal Zionists, often come in for vicious denigration or discipline (e.g., Joel Kovel, Terri Ginsburg, Emily Wilder, Kenneth Roth, and Valentina Azerova).
Zionist defamation campaigns are not limited to media, politics, and academe. Zionists target ideological antagonists wherever they are vulnerable, no matter if the speech in question has any impact on professional conduct. The fact of supporting Palestine is itself objectionable. That a few anonymous Twitter accounts have enough power to destroy careers in a variety of professions is less a reflection on the impact of social media than on the fealty to Zionism that predominates in both corporate and academic cultures (to the extent that the two are anymore distinct). Centers of power are eager to banish anything perceived as subversive. Anti-Zionism inherently fits the category.
These Twitter accounts aren’t random, though. Rez and others, for example, have the ear of legislators and college administrators and exist in the same orbit as various far-right outfits. Their claim to opposing antisemitism is therefore dubious. The actual priority is defense of Israel, a task for which even neo-Nazis are considered suitable allies. According to the European Legal Support Center, instances of repression against Palestinians are by far the most notable outcome of Zionist efforts to codify definitions of “antisemitism” for implementation in campus and company bylaws, a project that in reality targets criticism of Israel. Punishment for criticizing Israel is a common occurrence in academe. There is no record of any professor within the past three decades being disciplined expressly for supporting Israel.
Much of the public debate centers around the nature and style of the criticism, so a word about the tweets that generate controversy might be worthwhile. They are often vitriolic and hostile, rejecting the existence of the Zionist state or affirming Palestinian resistance. They aren’t, in other words, polite expressions of displeasure. In this sense, critics of anti-Zionist commentary are correct in saying that Israel comes in for harsh rebuke. But it is foolish and unfair to decontextualize the commentary from the political context in which it exists. The tweets condemning Israel that so upset establishment sensibilities aren’t mere provocations in a milieu of disembodied ideas. They speak against real displacement, real home demolition, real assassination, real racism, real ecocide, real abrogation of international law. They speak, in short, against demonstrable practices of ethnic cleansing. Emphasis on civility in tone elides brutality in action.
Those condemning Israel possess no moral obligation to politeness. Personal comportment is beside the point, anyway. Decolonization is never a polite affair and any oppressor expecting civility from the oppressed is merely rationalizing their social and economic primacy. The entire purpose of decolonization is to undo dominant notions of civility. Moreover, there is an issue of situational power at play here: Palestinians are the aggrieved party and in turn maintain the prerogative to speak freely about their oppressor. Doing so is a mechanism for catharsis and affirmation. The speech is often ugly. It is often ungracious. But it is also a reality that cannot be diminished by the oppressor’s arrogance and self-involvement. One cannot ill-treat others and expect adulation in return.
Another important point is that audiences, adhering to the logic of their acculturation, tend to judge speech less by diction and delivery than by its threat to centers of power. Because Zionism represents a normative ideological position among the economic and political elite, pro-Palestine speech threatens powerful figures beyond the so-called Israel lobby. Outlandishness or profanity becomes a problem only when an audience considers the content of the speech outlandish or profane. You can issue completely ghoulish opinions in the register of Paulie Walnuts if your message is suitable to the ruling class. Punishment, then, doesn’t derive from how offensive you sound, but by how your comments either appease or agitate orthodoxies aligned with the State Department and CIA.
Take the case of former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth, who was denied a fellowship at Harvard University’s Kennedy School in 2023 after some donors complained about his supposed anti-Israel bias. Harvard’s refusal to appoint Roth was grotesque insofar as Zionist donors again meddled in an academic hiring decision, something to be opposed on principle. But what Roth suffered is objectively different than the other cases discussed in this essay. To begin with, the denial of Roth’s fellowship became an enormous news story. Numerous organizations that remained silent when Palestinians faced even harsher consequences, such as PEN America and the ACLU, rushed to Roth’s defense with no mention of Zionism’s most visible and consistent victims. (PEN America would prove incontrovertibly Zionist following October 7, though its affinities were never any great secret to the Palestinians it had long refused to support.) Many Palestinians have been fired or otherwise punished with scarcely any media attention. They certainly didn’t attract the attention of individuals and organizations tethered to the political establishment.
My purpose isn’t to complain about inconsistent news coverage, something for which Roth isn’t responsible, anyway. Certain factors will always drive interest, and Roth’s high profile, along with Harvard’s brand recognition, were two major ingredients of a viral story. The difference of coverage highlights essential disparities of race, access, pedigree, and ideology. Most commenters about Roth’s situation, including those entrenched in the Palestine solidarity movement, flattened those disparities. Roth was another tragedy, a cautionary tale, an avatar of justice, a victim of cancel culture. In reality, though, none of these designations applied. Even upon being denied the Harvard fellowship, Roth was never devoid of lucrative career options. He will always be in demand based on a long history of repeating State Department bromides and tacitly supporting Israel’s existence as an ethnocratic state. Palestinian victims of Zionist defamation are rarely offered reinstatement into jobs from which they were fired, but Harvard reversed its decision after a few weeks and invited Roth to sit the fellowship. Roth accepted an endowed faculty position in Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, instead.
I’m not especially concerned with Roth as an individual. I’m more concerned with who gets lost to the discourse when we insist on conceptualizing establishment liberals as the true victim of Zionist repression, or as somehow exemplary of anti-Zionists who have suffered the brunt of that repression (and worse types of repression). By omitting Palestinians and eliding Zionism’s ideological priorities, the outrage isolates Palestine from its historical position as an anti-imperialist concern. There are degrees to Zionist repression that operate in direct proportion to the target’s perceived friendliness to U.S. statecraft. It was precisely his obedience to specific networks of imperialism that salvaged Roth’s position in the Ivy League. Zionist operatives create the commotion, but imperialists ultimately impose the punishment.
***
Common wisdom suggests that there’s equal ostracism of both rightwing and leftwing elements on campus. Accepting that truism would be a mistake. Critics of an expansionist and imperialist status quo have suffered the lion’s share of systemic repression in U.S. universities, as in the broader society. From the early 20th century onward, nothing has generated more hostility among the elite than perceived communist sympathies.
The repression is especially vicious in relation to Black revolutionaries and Indigenous nationalists (by which I mean Indigenous leaders who support national liberation). In these cases, repression goes quite beyond ostracism or employment termination. It has historically involved mass imprisonment and extrajudicial murder. Too much analysis of “free speech” focuses on individual travails, many of them with tabloid characteristics, while ignoring the insidious role of carcerality as an antidote to dissidence.
Complaints about anti-conservative bias in academe are at best naïve. First of all, if we conceptualize universities as organs of capitalist extraction and reproduction, then we can judge the entire enterprise as conservative. But even on its face, the idea that conservatives face hardship on campus is not backed by evidence. It’s a category issue. Classic conservatives—that is to say, modern-day liberals—get on quite well in academe; they fill presidential offices and administrative ranks and governing boards. Most trustees are business executives. When we hear of somebody with conservative viewpoints getting into trouble, “conservative” generally stands in for racism, sexism, homophobia, hawkishness, or some variety of fascism.
So, yes, rightwing individuals occasionally suffer punishment (implicit or formal), but only in cases of extraordinary offence, in which they elicit moral condemnation according to a violation of normative social codes. In other words, they invite trouble by violating the discursive norms in which racism or sexism or some other stigma is typically couched. The trouble tends to be intense because the speaker renders explicit the structural aspects of injustice, thus disrupting liberal patinas of tolerance and hospitality. It is perfectly acceptable to be anti-Black and in fact one might be rewarded for it, but using the N-word, say, or disparaging the perceived features of Blackness, abrogates the rhetorical etiquette of liberal democracy. (Anti-Palestinian racism, by and large, can be openly expressed without recrimination because the philosophical foundations of Zionism are concordant to the practices of North American colonization.) In contrast, leftwing politics—by which I mean positions oriented toward revolutionary change, an admittedly crude definition—are in themselves unwelcome and tend to attract hostility. Proponents—or, better still, practitioners—of revolutionary politics from the left are rare in prominent universities and scarcely exist in the Ivy League. Administrative ranks, however, are filled with exactly the kind of people conservative pundits proclaim to be banished from the modern university.
Certain deeds and positions in particular are apt to produce recrimination: anti-police and -military sentiment (Joshua Clover, Faryha Salim, Jesse Goldberg); disparaging whiteness (Tommie Curry, Saida Grundy, Zandria Robinson, George Cicarrielo-Maher, Uju Anya); rejection of U.S. exceptionalism (Nicholas De Genova, H. Bruce Franklin); approval of revolutionary violence (Jodi Dean); fidelity to Indigenous liberation (Lorgia Garcia Pena, Ward Churchill); union organizing (but only appended to a radical vision); opposition to Zionism (condemnation of Israeli policy can lead to pushback, but opposition to Zionism evokes a particular antagonism).
Thus we have on the one hand campaigns to discipline rightwing elements, primarily rooted in violations of rhetorical custom, and on the other hand campaigns targeting leftwing elements, overtly conducted in service to the ruling class. In both cases, a seemingly disparate force controls the action. In reality, though, those forces are congruent, if not consistent. In the end, they both ensure that capitalism goes unchallenged. These campaigns operate from a fundamental discord between the individual and the collective: they claim to uphold social probity while pursuing subjects who are considered vulnerable—that is, unmoored from a caste or community strong enough to safeguard those subjects from punishment. Punishment for disobedience or unpopularity is an old phenomenon, but it now manifests according to a technological economy in which information is decentralized and individual media brands predominate. (Hence Twitter’s notoriety for being the source of so many employment controversies.) Ideology is less an intellectual transaction than a saleable product. And consumers demand an accounting of the inventory in this purchase of ideological goods. The subscription economy is a textbook example of capitalist competition. Public figures aren’t “cancelled” or “censored” according to a consistent set of social codes; they are ideologically repurposed in a subjective and temperamental marketplace.
In recent years, the political right has effectively sold the idea that censorship is now the domain of an unrecognizable left (ranging from liberal to communist) that has betrayed its own courageous history. There’s much to criticize in this narrative—foremost the fact that “censorship” as it is so defined occurs across the ideological spectrum and will be supported or opposed largely based on the audience’s predilections—but its main problem is flattening complex political and rhetorical geographies into self-serving gotchas packaged for social media engagement, precisely what happens when one’s notion of “free speech” and “censorship” is predicated on access to corporate media. The large cohort of pundits decrying “cancel culture” are actually banging on about consumer choice, not censorship. Self-martyrdom at the hands of race-conscious and transgender malcontents is a terrific boost to one’s notoriety, especially in the subscription economy. Large online communities well-represented in old-money publications and feted by various start-ups looking to capitalize on brand recognition operate based almost entirely on this conceit. We end up with the spectacle of luminaries such as J.K. Rowling and Margaret Atwood grousing about their inability to reach the masses. Reacting to a controversy, no matter its provenance, by lurching to the right nearly guarantees a major platform (Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, Bari Weiss, Peter Boghossian). For the aspiring thought-leader, getting cancelled is an excellent career move.
In this environment, “free speech” is transactional and operates according to consumer preference. While quaint analyses of free speech will define it as a fundamental absence of government interference (subject to certain conditions), the new online civil libertarians focus on the inherent right to a platform and a subscription fee. (“I have to go on a reactionary’s program because liberal outlets refuse to host me”; “I’m being censored by private corporations”; “not enough of the world gets to listen to me.”) Civil liberties, then, aren’t simply appended to ideology; they are themselves ideological lodestars.
The guiding force of these lodestars is reaction. “Free speech” discourses have always reified mythologies about the sanctity of the American project, but in a public domain dominated by social media those discourses increasingly present as a rightwing project. There is nothing inherent to free speech that makes it more practicable or virtuous from the left or right, so pointing to its rightward creep isn’t meant to discard the concept altogether. The point is to illustrate that defense of “free speech” on its own is no guarantee of a decent politics. Free speech is contingent on the circumstances of its deployment and interpretation.
Let’s look at some of the circumstances in today’s North America (which, to a smaller degree, apply to Europe). The current media disaggregation, in which individual corporations solicit subscriptions (to podcasts, newsletters, and the like), incentivizes rightward movement because such a trajectory offers the greatest growth potential. Pundits aren’t illuminating the world; they’re concocting saleable opinions. This is nothing new. Pundits have always been salespeople. The difference now is in the advertising. “Free speech” is the patter of online proprietors who promise to salvage a civilization in decline. In fact, civilizational decline is the discursive foundation of today’s subscription economy—only the proprietors skipped the salvation part and went directly to the every-man-for-himself stage.
In order to soft-sell Nazis (for Nazism has made a tremendous comeback in this environment), the proprietors like to declare, in a bizarre inversion of Bonhoeffer, “If we allow repression of Nazis, then they’ll come for the left!” This logic is unjustifiable on its face (Nazism is never acceptable), but the spirit of the comment is misguided, as well. There has never been a time during the last century in which anti-imperialists were more palatable to the ruling class than Nazis. Self-described absolutists of free speech posit that a liberty enshrined in law guarantees appositeness when in fact repression is conducted according to the needs of capital. To disengage civil liberties from practices of force and coercion requires belief in the virtuousness of the system. The absolutism thus derives from an unacknowledged fidelity to American exceptionalism (although sometimes it is happily acknowledged). The affinity for settler colonial norms is further illustrated by usage of coded terms such as “thought police” and “woke mob” to describe the unloved and downtrodden expressing displeasure about their oppression.
As to the tolerance of Nazism for the good of society, it seems notable that Palestinians are rarely on the receiving end of this noble gesture.
***
The myth of a rapacious censorship targeting contrarians and free-thinkers—what comedian Russell Brand unironically calls the “censorship industrial complex” to enormous audiences—has become its own kind of information monopoly. This strange new censoriousness leads to lucrative opportunities defending the interests of the supposed censor. By eliding the government’s obscene investment in police and its virulent tactics to infiltrate and destroy any movement that shows revolutionary potential, the approach not only ignores a huge body of evidence and history of scholarship; more crucially, it offers no threat to capitalism and in fact keeps it from harm. In the imperium, censorship is a nonquestion. Of course it happens. The business and political classes won’t allow for anything that disrupts commerce, extraction, and production. Directing analysis of repression anywhere else is a lot of hullabaloo that never quite amounts to dissent, and is in fact a negation of speech’s importance in the public domain. Going on every libertarian, social democrat, and “intellectual dark web” podcast to complain about having been cancelled is no expression of courage; it is old-fashioned narcissism. The ruling class is happy to welcome the complaint.
Again, turning to Palestine is instructive, in this case as a contrast to the self-proclaimed victims of wokeness and casualties of the censorship industrial complex. It’s clear, for example, that Zionism is incompatible with academic freedom, which also means that academic freedom is inimical to the corporate university. Both academic freedom and free speech vary according to material contexts outside of their control. Both are outcomes of preexisting conflicts, rarely their progenitors. Social limits of speech, enforced according to the profit motive, tend to govern discursive cultures in academe. The upshot, whatever the details, is that centers of power remain unmolested. Zionists have so capably manipulated perceptions of offensive speech on campus because it has been to the benefit of wealthy alumni and upper administrators.
Even if academic freedom worked optimally, it is more and more a limited commodity. As such, its value increases as more people compete for access. Increased value produces upper-class sensibilities. More tangibly, the competition induces conformity and disincentivizes unorthodoxy and dissent. Tenure has been devitalized by scarcity. Without tenure, academic freedom cannot do its job.
Zionism abets the process, both discursively and materially. Discursively, Zionism doesn’t appear to be a huge concern of the “free speech” pundit class, but it is critical to the enterprise. The explosion of angst about “cancel culture” has settled into a particular ideological dimension, inclusive of Zionism and in certain ways reliant on it. Let’s take as an example the infamous 2020 Harper’s statement, “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” which quickly became known as “the cancel culture letter.” Signed by dozens of luminaries representing an array industries and professions, the letter purported to deplore increasing repression in public discourse, for which blame can be placed on an intolerant and anachronistic political left. A return to more robust Enlightenment principles of free inquiry was in order, including the right to offend. The letter dominated online discussion for many days and continues to be referenced as a pertinent moment in an ongoing culture war. Although there is some ideological diversity among the signatories, the brain trust behind the letter (or its most adamant proponents) belong to a coterie deeply hostile to analysis of race, gender, colonization, poverty, and similar matters, following the example of its main organizer, Thomas Chatterton Williams.
I won’t rehearse the debate, but want to assess its most explicit ideological failing: a misplaced analysis of both the origin and function of systematic repression. In these discursive environs, Zionism goes unmentioned as a source of intolerance or censorship. Thus when signatories and supporters of the letter began pointing to me, once fired from a tenured position in a very public manner, as a victim of cancel culture in response to criticism that Palestinians were being ignored, I was terribly annoyed. In general, I refuse to accept characterization as somebody who was “cancelled” because I recognize in the project a reactionary undercurrent deeply hostile to Palestinians and to national liberation more broadly. Repression of anti-Zionists shouldn’t be categorized as an expression of “cancel culture.” Such repression long precedes the term and has less to do with public outrage than with systemic ostracism of radical thought under regimes of imperialism.
My academic career was destroyed by the same institutional forces the vast majority of signatories uphold (and from which they benefit). If the letter had meant to be in support of people punished for criticizing Israel, then its authors would have invoked Zionism as the biggest threat to free speech in the West. Yet the signatory list is filled with pro-Israel operatives: Chloe Valdery, David Greenberg, Cary Nelson, Cathy Young, Bari Weiss, Paul Berman, Todd Gitlin, Michael Walzer. Nearly all signatories are some variety of Zionist even if Israel is not their primary concern. At least two, Weiss and Nelson, are implicated in campaigns to defame and fire Palestinian scholars.
In fact, the signatories are little concerned with free speech. They care about “free speech,” the raw material from which they extract influence. What really has them worked up is a perceived decline of Western civilization, of which Zionism is part and parcel. It’s a dull, insidious lament as old as modernity itself. Most of the luminaries complaining about “cancel culture” don’t ignore Zionist repression because of some incomprehensible blind spot. They ignore it because they’re Zionists working on behalf of multiple settler colonies.
Zionism, then, is easily put into service of corporate orthodoxy. We have to be careful of appeals within and beyond campus to preserve the sanctity of speech rights because often they’re little more than attempts to reify transphobia, Zionism, anti-Black racism, Indigenous genocide, and nativism. The predominance of Zionism on campus is part of a deeper architecture of reaction. Zionists like to position themselves as antithetical to the far-right and other unsavory elements, but in actuality their deeds and functions are complementary—not so much through rhetoric or programming (although there is overlap), but by satisfying the same set of class interests. The Zionists’ self-image as a paragon of liberal multiculturalism isn’t inaccurate per se; it’s simply misapprehended because there’s no recognition within their intellectual environs that liberal multiculturalism usually rows in the same direction as its reactionary counterparts when it comes to maintaining the systems of extraction and dispossession central to U.S. capitalism.
We have seen too many racist and antisemitic individuals operate freely within institutional settings (as instructors, student leaders, visiting dignitaries, and so forth) to accept the myth of rightwing marginalization on campus. (Neither is there a shortage of war criminals: Henry Kissinger, Madeline Albright, David Petraeus, John Yoo, Meghan L. O’Sullivan.) Yet is it Palestinian, Black, Muslim, Indigenous, and Jewish radicals against whom Zionist organizations devote their resources. (Sometimes the target isn’t the least bit radical, simply Palestinian or Black or Native to an uncomfortable degree—i.e., visible as a factual counterpoint to the settler’s desire for racial homogeneity.) The notion of battling antisemitism, long the rallying cry of mainstream Jewish groups, thus assumes a curious dimension. Their focus on antisemitism is coterminous with robust defense of Israel. Facilitating Zionist colonization is actually the main concern. It is no accident that rightwing elements traditionally hostile to Judaism or Jewish people, or in league with despotic Arab regimes, or amenable to Nazi outfits in Ukraine, generally avoid their radar. “Antisemitism” is an acceptable or at least unalarming attitude when paired with support for the Israeli state, or for the geopolitical order in which that state operates. In the Zionist imagination, the structural basis for antisemitism and all other forms of racism is off-limits because the same structure provides an existential justification for the Israeli state itself.
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In keeping with the times, many universities encourage their faculty to create positive brands in the public sphere. This too is a feature of corporatization, for social capital can readily lead to material benefit. The brand can’t be too unruly, though. It can rant about the indignities of daily life, but the moment stakeholders take offense it becomes a potential target of discipline. Universities, like the systems they serve, have become adept at managing flows of information. An elaborate system of punishment regulates dissent into something innocuous and marketable.
Such is the work of civic society. Every movement—Occupy Wall Street, the Bernie Sanders campaign, Black Lives Matter—eventually turns into a business opportunity through a combination of cooptation and careerism. Those who refuse to be coopted are either castigated or exiled to the margin. The movements then become a shiny expanse of astroturf where opportunists convene for social capital. Speech might appear to be free in these spaces, but it’s always paid for either in disrepute or rewards.
For those of us interested in deploying speech for reasons other than self-gratification, and interested in more imaginative notions of human freedom, it is unnecessary to concede to the bourgeois logic of civil liberties. Freedom to speak about the world, to engage in rigorous inquiry, is the byproduct of a decent society, one fundamentally at odds with the U.S. elite. We should remain concerned with those who cannot access civil society because they exist as moral antagonists or economic surplus. If a vision of free speech requires assent to Nazism, hostility to the transgender community, disregard of Palestinians, private ownership of data networks, or Elon Musk’s stewardship, then it would be wise to consider what type of society we are trying to preserve. We should always ask to what end uncritical defense of civil liberties is conducted. Liberties are universal, after all, only in a classless society.
Spend a bit of time exploring contemporary “free speech” discourses and they look more and more like extravagant rationalizations for the status quo. If we’re concerned with the liberation of Palestine, then the status quo of the United States is an enemy and its shopworn dicta needn’t be entertained. For instance, known snitches or cops don’t in fact get a say. Human dignity supersedes abstract notions of civil society.
No group among the oppressed is made disposable for the sake of political expediency. Zionists aren’t welcome at the table. We’ll seek answers where questions are verboten. “Free speech” is not a fair exchange for our silence.
Like any service promising salvation, free speech is only as good as its exceptions. It is dangerous to speak freely about Palestine. So it might be wise for us to seek ideas of freedom that aren’t hellbent on vanquishing the wretched in order to redeem the United States.
INTERNATIONALIST 360° 