Steven Salaita Imagines a Palestinian Garden of Eden
by Andrew Harrod
Palestine “will never be decolonized unless it is first demythologized,” stated Steven Salaita, a controversial academic whose job offer from the University of Illinois was rescinded last summer after a series of anti-Semitic tweets came to light. Speaking on “Natural History Under Siege” before an audience of about twenty-five persons at Washington, DC’s anti-Israeli Jerusalem Fund think tank on February 13, Salaita employed pseudo-intellectual rhetoric to apply his own mythology of hackneyed postcolonial themes to his ancestral Palestinians.
For those who have come to expect puerile packaging of anti-Israel screeds with fact-free, high-flown, often incoherent verbiage on the basis of his past writings, Salaita did not disappoint. In his introduction, he described the geography of a “Palestine” (including apparently Israel) as a “cacophony, but also an ensemble,” even though “not everybody can see it.” This geography “is a simulation of ideology,” a “diversion into mythic cultural adventure,” and “for the crooked and pious alike it is always in some way holy.” Despite “continuous reinvention . . . we can still speak of Palestine as an actual place” whose soil once “was rendered tactile and knowable” to him when he got dirt under his fingernails during a visit as a graduate student. Sometimes it’s the little things.
Yet “colonization and conflict” from Israel, Salaita lamented, created a situation in which “human habitation partners with military occupation to destroy the . . . tenuous existence of flora and fauna . . . Palestine’s natural history.” “Palestine is forever shrinking” under Israeli settlement and security installation building, but Palestinians have a supposedly “luminous, living history” that “no bulldozer can destroy.” His father-in-law would speak of a “West Bank devoid of Jewish settlement” (Judenrein?) in a “narrative . . . filled with flora and fauna.” In this imagined pristine Palestinian Eden, “children . . . could explore the surrounding environment for miles,” while today “there is no area of the West Bank wild enough for children to explore unfettered.”
Salaita focused on olive trees, a staple of the Palestinian economy and an iconic cultural symbol, to argue that “Israelis are fundamentally outsiders to the land.” “Palestine endures in the way” diaspora Palestinians “select olives from the grocery store,” while Palestinians often possess olive wood icons. He condemned the alleged Israeli destruction of 800,000 olive trees since 1967 in territories won by Israel in that year’s Six Day War, although 2010 estimates count some ten million olive trees under Palestinian cultivation. He only briefly mentioned security concerns as one Israeli motive for their destruction, even though Palestinian ambushes of Israelis from olive groves have prompted their occasional clearcutting.
His claim that a “Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree” ostensibly answered questions such as “who is indigenous, Jews or Palestinians . . . who is the aggressor . . . who wrecks the environment?” Yet Salaita neglects the fact that Palestinians and their leftist allies have destroyed olive trees in order to falsely blame Israelis in the disputed territories. Simultaneously, Israeli olive oil production in recent years has equaled Palestinian output with a fruit that has great significance for Judaism and whose trees enjoy Israeli legal protection.
Refuting Salaita’s illusion of Palestinians living harmoniously in a beloved environment, population growth, overgrazing, and poor sewage treatment have had deleterious effects such as deforestation in Palestinian territories. Tree cutting for firewood, particularly by the Ottoman Empire in the years before and during World War I, has also caused significant damage to the region. By contrast, Jewish National Fund (JNF) planting of 240 million trees (sometimes targeted by terrorist organizations like Hezbollah) since 1901 has made Israel one of only two countries worldwide with more trees today than a century ago.
Salaita’s fictions support his slanderous depiction of an Israeli Jewish state fundamentally foreign to its region. Absurdly, this supposed nature lover criticized the JNF in Israel because it “facilitates development” and “plants trees” to create “geostrategic gentrification” in an “Orientalized theme park” for “those of a certain ethnic background.” In incomprehensible jargon he asserted that “incongruities of biological determinism” created modern Israel, whose Jewish people supposedly revived the Hebrew language to sound artificially like Arabic. “Zionists play Arab to inscribe themselves as indigenous to a foreign geography,” he ranted, while condemning a Virginia Tech Hillel presentation on Israel for using a camel as Middle Eastern “orientalist imagery.” Yet Camels, brought to the region by ancient Egypt, are not at all foreign to Judaism’s biblical scriptures.
Equally hostile to the United States, Salaita compared Israel to an “American landscape . . . still undergoing a process of colonization.” Therefore, a “squandering,” capitalistic “commodification of natural resources” is a “central feature” of colonialism everywhere. He ignored considerable evidence for the benefits of efficient market societies on the environment, as exhibited in Israel’s environmental ratings, which are superior to its Arab neighbors’. Israeli know-how, for example, has improved the region’s water economy and benefitted Palestinians, which contradicts Salaita’s repetition of the canard that Israel deprives them of water.
Despite his politicized, counterfactual assertions, Salaita maintains credibility and influence within great swaths of academe. One audience member bemoaned how Salaita was “really discriminated against for his views” when rejected by the University of Illinois. Reflecting upon the lecture, the audience member quipped that “nobody’s perfect” when discussing whether Palestinian groups like Hamas or Israel better represent “American values” like democracy. In a shocking display of moral equivalence, he criticized the “power imbalance” between Hamas terrorists and Israeli democracy.
Salaita admitted to being at times a “terrible classroom student”—a fact no one subjected to his intellectually vacuous, poorly delivered lecture could doubt. Nonetheless, his tired, cliché-ridden theme of evil Westerners exploiting indigenous peoples and environments—narratives now applied to Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land—are common in academia and beyond. The depressing, undeserved respect enjoyed by Salaita and his ilk in academe deserves exposure to a wider audience.
Andrew E. Harrod is a freelance researcher and writer who holds a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a JD from George Washington University Law School. He is a fellow with the Lawfare Project; follow him on twitter at @AEHarrod. He wrote this essay for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.
Jay Boo says
The vines of his parasitic Palestinian Garden of Eden creep.
In his garden, jihad is the smiley faced snake in a cool morning breeze.
No need to struggle against that trickle of blood.
Intellectual jihad is like a reassuring branch grafted upon an old olive tree.
Just relax like trusting sleeping sheep.
Jihad is the excuse for whatever a Muslim wants it to be.
cs says
Is he 13 and just had his circumcision? He sounds like it, childish and embarrassing.
Rob says
Didn’t Gazans destroy countless tomato glasshouses left to benefit them by the departing Israelis in 2005?
Nicu says
as long as Arabs live there there will never be Peace – or even a ” Garden of Eden ” .
Wellington says
Being Arab is not the problem, Nicu. Being Muslim is. The 10% of so of Arab Christians pose no threat, never have, to the existence of Israel. If 90% of Arabs were Christian, then about 90% of the existential threats which Israel faces would have never materialized in the first place. Add to this a Zoroastrian Iran instead of a Muslim Iran, where Magis prevailed and Mullahs did not, and I would “up” the threat to Israel “down” to about 1% or 2.
jewdog says
If Palestine is the Garden of Eden then this guy must be the snake.
KenD says
Eden, Huh?
http://eradication-of-malaria.com/
No comment.
Angemon says
Can we please crowdfund a creative writing course for this Salaita hack? His prose is terrible.
Carol Ann says
Great article. I appreciate the hyperlinks to support the author’s POV. Has the author considered a debate with Salaita?
Andrew Harrod says
I doubt that Steven Salaita would accept. I am glad that you enjoyed the article.
somehistory says
The Garden of Eden was the “Garden of God.” Since muslims don’t worship the True God, they could not have the Garden of Eden no matter how many *flora and fauna* the children had to run around in and explore. As long as they continue to worship the beast of satan, they will “steal, kill and destroy (John 10:10)” just as Christ said.
dumbledoresarmy says
This guy Salaita is a total fake.
There’s a brilliant Canadian Metis guy, a *real* indigenous person and first nations activist – Ryan Bellerose – who totally demolishes Salaita and is *furious* with the way Salaita ‘hijacks’ the cause of *real* indigenous peoples in order to further the Muslim Jihad against the Jews.
Here’s Bellerose doing a takedown on Salaita – whom he tackled face to face.
http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/14430
Excerpt:
“…The organizer (a professor at the U of A) walked over and asked me to be quiet. I said I would wait for the question period but if Steven continued to lie I would call him out.
“This mollified her and she walked away, but that’s when Steven started lying again. I could tell because his lips were moving.
“He referred again to “indigenous Palestinians” so I again said loudly “What qualifies you to grant indigenous status to Arabs in the Levant when you are colonizers, not indigenous.”
“He then yelled that I was wrong, so I responded “Anyone can Google ‘Arab conquest in the Seventh Century’.”
“His response was to yell “This is what they do, they attack us,” as though he was the Indian and I was the colonizer.
“I simply responded “Steven, I thought you said you never raise your voice?”
“Some people behind me started laughing.
“The organiser then asked me to leave, and I replied I was no longer willing to sit through so much BS and packed up my stuff and left.
“As I was leaving, several people were filming me on their phones so I said “Arab conquest, Seventh Century, Google it for yourselves.””…
*Bellerose* has been to Israel and is totally pro-Israel and pro-Jewish; not least because he’s capable of reading real history, he’s done his homework and he correctly recognises the Jews as an indigenous people, a people who have survived against crushing odds both within exile and also as a remnant in their homeland, and who have by heroic effort regained part of their ancestral homeland and claimed their sovereignty; he sees them as an inspiration, a model for other – real – indigenous people. He sees clearly that the Arab Muslims are the *imperialists*, the invaders and colonisers, now whining and squawking because they’ve lost some of their ill-gotten gains. He sees right through all the Muslim lies.
Mirren10 says
**Excellent** !
I *love* Ryan Bellerose – you were the one who pointed me to his blog originally ! Israel is cool, and so is he.
Angemon says
Eh!
I tip my hat to Mr. Bellerose . Well played, sir. Well played. 😀
DRDIAS says
What I cannot fathom how and still can not comprehend why these male dominated Islamic cretins are continually allowed to rewrite modern history about their prefabricated peaceful and tolerant ideological existence!
The truth is never ever stated or reference, that there is no known Palestinian identity until 1970!
“Palestine is a Geographical Area, Not a Nationality!”
“There Has Never Been a Sovereign Arab State in Palestine.”
“The artificiality of a Palestinian identity is reflected in the attitudes and actions of neighboring Arab nations who never established a Palestinian state themselves.”
There are no known UN achieves found on the so-called Palestinian people before 1970:
The first United Nations document using the term “Palestinians” as it is used today, is an eye-opening: three years after 1967’s Six-Day War. In his research into the entire UN archive dealing with the Arab war against Israel, no reference to the putatively Paleolithic Palestinian people before 1970.
Do some real research, then spout off about who is being discriminated against and denied their historical ancestral rights!
I am not Jewish, Muslim, or Christian; I am a citizen of this planet!
Why is it so hard for all the malcontented Muslims, Arabs, and the rest of all the malcontented Pro-Palestinians supporters to comprehend and understand these legally based facts and truths?
Hoekom Jy My Haat says
It took the Jews to make Israel/Palestine something worth writing about. What had the local arabs done with it for CENTURIES before the creation of Israel. Nada… Bupkis… Zilch.
And let us not forget that there never was a country called Palestine. It was just a vaguely defined geographical area for near two millennia, first controlled by the Romans, then the Byzantines, then various moslem empires, and finally the Ottomans. Finally, after WWI, it wound up as the British Mandate of Palestine, at the behest of the League of Nations.
“Palestine” as the madmen, moslem mullahs now describe, is nothing but a fiction. The so callee “Palestinians” are culturally, linguistically and historically indistince from the surrounding local arab/moslem populations.