Civility and the bounds of the permissible: Scholars of color embodying the very social-political dynamics at the heart of their critiques

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.