jones Have to disagree to agree with you there: the degree of ideological straitjacketing has worsened by miles.
I would trace it (like many symptoms) to the decline of any solid mass politics in the post-industrial west. It's made it far too easy to stop the career of public figures who break ranks.
A few decades ago it was far more possible for western scholars to compare the dispossession of Palestinians to WWII atrocities.
My fave Deleuze published the "The Grandeur of Yasser Arafat" in 1983. The text opens with a plain and clear statement about the Nakba, comparing it directly to a multiplication of the Waffen-SS massacre that took place in Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944.
A few Zionists today hang around continental philosophy circles trying to jacket Deleuze retrospectively as antisemitic … it's a tricky task because Deleuze wrote or co-wrote monographs on Proust and Kafka, and is also the scholar most responsible for sustaining philosophical interest in Spinoza and Bergson.
I half doubt Said would get far out the gate these days, Trump's crew would certainly be turfing him out of Columbia with the rest of the "Middle East Studies" faculty were he there in 2025.
