Anthropology, Palestine, and the Present Moment
A Vital Topics Forum
The ongoing attacks in the Gaza strip, what Holocaust scholar Raz Segal has described as a “textbook case of genocide”, have raised many issues for anthropology as a discipline and for individual anthropologists. For example, an open letter urging AAA leadership to issue a statement amassed more than 700 signatures. Anthropologists from every subdiscipline have knowledge relevant to current conditions whether health, cultural preservation, refugees or technologies of war, and have brought their expertise to bear on these conversations. As teachers, we have seen the impact this genocide has had on our students. As faculty we have seen our campuses being transformed into securitized spaces surveilled by astounding numbers of police. We have witnessed fellow anthropologists who have been censored, disciplined, and subject to smear campaigns. Anthropologists have a responsibility to bring their knowledge to bear on these discussions and to respond to the deliberate and pervasive targeting of formerly out-of-bounds targets including institutions of health and education, sites of religious importance, and cultural heritage locations.
In Gaza, a targeted campaign of “scholasticide” has placed education as a whole at risk. These attacks have killed university students and academics in Gaza, including 3 University Presidents and 95 deans and professors. [For a list (dated March 11, 2024) of Palestinian archives, cultural heritage, libraries, and museums destroyed during the ongoing attack on Gaza by the Israeli military, you can click here and go to the Annex 5 of the statement by the Middle East Studies Association.] And in the US and Canada, university students and faculty have demanded that their universities disclose and divest from investments in the Israeli military industry, and in companies that sustain Israeli apartheid. These campus protests have put numerous faculty and students in precarious positions in ways we have not seen since 1968. Several US and Canadian universities have responded to student and faculty protests by terminating or threatening to terminate employment contracts and by authorizing police to enter their campuses, to brutally detain and violently arrest members of their community. [A minority of universities, in responding to demands by students to disclose and divest, have chosen more peaceful paths and have engaged in good faith dialogues; these include Rutgers University, Brown University, Wesleyan University, Northwestern University, Johns Hopkins, UC Riverside, and the University of Minnesota.
This vital topics forum asks: how are anthropologists across the globe engaging with or responding to Gaza? What disciplinary lessons are being learned? What ethical imperatives are – or should be – at work? What have we learned, or not, from anthropological entanglements with atrocities in other parts of the world, including past and present forms of settler/colonial violence?
Contributions
Nisrin Elamin - From Palestine to Sudan: Solidarity with Our Students
Madiha Tahir - Palestine Should Have Been Easy
Georgia Andreou and Anonymous Student - What is Heritage without People?