Ali Abunimah, another Palestinian luminary, so robustly criticizes anti-Semitism that right-wing anti-Semites accuse him of being a covert Zionist, unaware perhaps that they’re reproducing a feature of Zionism.

In the months after being fired from a tenured professorship at the University of Illinois in August 2014, for condemning Israeli war crimes, I was periodically aggravated that some commentators were unwilling or unable to recognize that my supposedly anti-Semitic tweets actually defend Jews against essentialism. In those tweets, I warn against conflating an entire community with the behavior of a nation-state busy showering civilians with bombs and chemical weapons, a warning I offer in much of my work.

It was remarkably frustrating. These folks could obviously read, even if not competently. They all have impeccable credentials, but I tried not to hold that against them. I couldn’t understand their phonic malfunction until I forced myself to think like an apologist for ethnocracy. The political identity of liberal Zionists is filled with acute incongruity. They cannot consume or disseminate ideas without the magical benefit of denial. Disassociating Judaism from Israel renders Zionism superfluous. That kind of disassociation requires one to rethink the commonplaces of Israel’s self-image. It is more convenient to outsource failures of imagination to the Palestinian.

Nelson, a professor of English at UIUC, also spoke frankly about his affiliation with the Israel on Campus Coalition, a Zionist advocacy group funded by an extreme anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim ideologue. Nelson also revealed his own ties to the editor of a far-right website that has been monitoring Salaita.

In both of my conversations with him, Nelson insisted that he has never spoken to anyone in the UIUC administration about Salaita’s case. But he did acknowledge that he has given advice to off-campus Zionist groups since the Salaita story broke. “I’ve had at least fifty emails from people about the [Salaita] tweets and some of them are from people who I’m sure have a role in one organization or another,” Nelson said. “I had a call from someone who does represent an outside organization asking for my opinion about whether that organization or other organizations should approach the Board of Trustees to make some statement against Salaita’s appointment and I advised that they should not,” he added. “I said that the academic process should run its course and that while it was fine for people outside the university to comment negatively about any faculty’s work, they shouldn’t attempt to influence university decisions.”

Nelson’s advice is disingenuous to say the least. The Zionist group or groups he is counseling on strategy hardly need to intervene directly when Nelson is effectively doing their dirty work for them.

In blog posts, open letters and news story comment threads, Nelson’s critics -- some of whom were longtime friends -- accused him of abandoning his principles and twisting the definition of academic freedom to serve his own political beliefs. A vocal opponent of the Israel boycott, Nelson suffers from a “blind spot” about Israel, some have said.

I believe faculty members generally have a social responsibility to try to speak rationally, not just hurl insults, but the Israeli/Palestinian conflict regularly meets with abusive and counterproductive faculty remarks from both sides.”

Nelson believes it’s impossible to separate institutional boycotts from individual boycotts, and that no scholarly association has fully considered the long-term impacts of such actions, either geopolitically or in terms of academic freedom. He therefore opposes the boycott movement (the American Association of University Professors, of which Nelson is a past president, also opposes academic boycotts as incompatible with academic freedom).

This confirmed suspicions that the decision— taken without any academic consultation — had indeed been based on impassioned tweets that Salaita, a Palestinian-American, had posted during the first half of July as terrible destruction was wrought by the Israeli invasion of Gaza.

Such routine misuse of a serious charge runs the grave danger of diminishing the gravity and reality of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism itself, doings its actual victims a real disservice.

one of the most striking aspects of the affair has been the willingness of self-defined liberals to either mitigate or endorse the firing of Salaita. As such, the case has also thrown light on the limits of liberalism and its acquiescence to the encroaching depredations of the corporate managerial culture that now afflicts universities across the world. Apart from anything else, this is a case of high-handed administrative behaviour, increasing corporate influence (the Board of Trustees is composed of powerful business people who know little about scholarship or teaching) and the steady erosion of the vital principle of scholarly autonomy.