The views and opinions expressed in the following article are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect those of North by Northwestern or its staff. Our news coverage of Salaita's speech can be found here.
Let me start off by saying this: I am firmly pro-Israel. I attended a small, private Jewish high school in New Jersey (my graduating class had 37 seniors) and recently spent three months of my senior year in Israel along with the majority of my classmates.
So when I heard that recently unhired University of Illinois professor Steven Salaita was coming to speak at Northwestern, I became intrigued. Salaita, a staunch opponent of the July Israeli military operation in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip known as Operation Protective Edge, had his job offer at U of I revoked in August because of his critical tweets (see here, here and here) about Israel’s military policies. I attended the speech under the assumption that Salaita would talk mostly about the Israel-Gaza conflict itself and prepared myself to listen to an hour-and-a-half of anti-Semitic hogwash.
Salaita ended up surprising me.
Instead of rambling about the “genocide” he labeled Protective Edge on Twitter, Salaita spoke about how he was terminated for expressing his opinions on social media. He accused the University of Illinois of being “bush-league” and said that the decision to fire him was “egregious” and out of “sheer arrogance.” At one point he sounded downright frustrated, claiming that the “corporatization of academe” is what ultimately cost him his professorship, how the basis of the University of Illinois’s decision was the possibility of decreased funding from private donors.
At this point of the speech, I found myself deeply conflicted. While his remarks on Twitter were certainly incendiary, and even though he left out the fact that Hamas’s rocket launching sites were situated in civilian areas when he mentioned the number of schools and hospitals Israel bombed over the summer, Salaita touched on a few excellent points regarding freedom of speech. I wanted to irrationally disagree with everything he said, but his arguments held some merit.
The most prominent point he made, I think, was how people cannot be jailed for expressing their opinions, yet they can be fired for them. Obviously, cases of intolerance and racism should be fireable offenses, but on Twitter Salaita never collectively held all Jews as responsible for the actions of the state of Israel, nor did he compare Israeli policies to those of Nazi Germany. He just voiced his political opinions in the simplest way he knew how – in under 140 characters. And I don’t believe Salaita should have lost his job because of his views, especially since they were voiced outside the context of a classroom setting.
After the question-and-answer session concluded, Salaita stayed behind to give a chance for people in the audience to speak to him individually. I waited in a fairly long line, and when I finally reached the front, I asked him more about his views on the conflict.
While we discussed our differing opinions, I realized the whole point of Salaita’s speech in the first place: encouraging others to engage in cordial discourse about sensitive topics.
Speaking with Salaita opened my eyes. He didn’t change any of my opinions, but that isn’t (and shouldn’t be) the principle of dialogue. No, my conversation with Salaita showed me that there are so many different perspectives about this issue such that trying to prove yourself correct is futile. There can’t be one right answer because the morality of Israel’s actions is inherently subjective. “Israel murdered hundreds of children in cold blood!” and “Israel has the right to defend itself against terrorists!” are just two of the many viewpoints held by Israeli critics and proponents, respectively.
Now, Salaita’s tweets can be construed as anti-Semitic, especially those where he calls Protective Edge “genocide.” However, I’m willing to give Salaita the benefit of the doubt here, after he seemed unaware that Hamas admitted to using human shields when I spoke with him. When I unfortunately had to finish speaking with him due to the long line behind me, I was left with more questions than when I began. I wanted to know everything about his views and was tempted to get in line again.
I exited Harris Hall with a feeling of curiosity that I hadn’t felt before. Salaita’s opinions had created an opportunity for discussion between everyone in attendance. We won’t be able to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without the discussion Salaita inspired, and for that Salaita deserves the highest of praise.