On Refusing to Disappear: Stanford Anthropology’s Collusion with Genocide Denial
by Sarah Ihmoud (College of the Holy Cross)
On International Women’s Day, just as I was preparing to board a flight to give a talk at Stanford University on Palestinian women’s testimonies of genocide in Gaza, I received notice that the talk had been abruptly ‘postponed’ due to Zionist threats and intimidation. While the Department of Anthropology, which had invited me to speak several months ago as part of a Spring Colloquium series, was apologetic, it was not forthcoming about the nature of the supposed threats, or why the decision to postpone the talk indefinitely was made. As I wrote in my response to the Department, Zionist tactics of fear and intimidation are typical due to a growing climate of anti-Palestinian racism and the repression of academic freedom for those who speak out against Israeli settler colonial violence. In fact, this repression is inseparable from the genocide itself. Just as the Israeli state destroyed all 12 universities in Gaza and systematically murdered thousands of Palestinian scholars, teachers, students, writers, poets, and other cultural workers over the past 16 months, it has a vested interest in destroying all capacities for Palestinians to produce and share our communal knowledge, memory and narrative as an Indigenous people. These narratives are the foundation of our intergenerational survival; they ensure that we keep our historical memory alive, both as an affirmation of Palestinian life against the force of colonial genocide, and as a vital record necessary to hold powerful institutions and actors accountable for the ongoing Nakba.
The assault on Palestinian narrative has a long history. The silencing of Nakba memory, centrally by the Israeli state, and supported by zionist academic institutions and scholars, has sought to erase the narratives of Palestinians in the efforts to delegitimize Palestinian identity and belonging to their homeland, which the settler colony claims as its own. Indeed, the suppression of the Nakba story is not merely a historical oversight but a deliberate act of colonial violence that extends into the present through legal, cultural, and educational mechanisms designed to marginalize Palestinian voices–attempts to make us disappear. This erasure extends beyond the borders of historical narrative and manifests in the ongoing denial of Palestinians’ rights to return and reclaim their homes and land.
U.S. institutions of higher education have been complicit in the denial of Palestinian narratives, both in suppressing academic freedom related to Palestine, and in helping foment the “Palestine exception” to free speech. For decades, Zionist lobby groups have targeted students and faculty with surveillance and defamation campaigns, weaponizing antisemitism claims to censor speech on campus. The logic of making Palestinians disappear is beyond academic complicity in the erasure of Palestinian voices of dissent; it is constitutive of the settler state’s academia. It is not lost on me as an anthropologist, the cruel irony of the fact that a discipline steeped in the colonial encounter, one that has enabled the genocide of Indigenous people in previous eras, and that has worked in recent decades to revive its image as one committed to Indigenous survivance, can so easily collude with a modern day settler colonial project and its genocide denial. As a feminist scholar I find it doubly troublesome that fellow anthropologists at Stanford University have chosen to discard of me as a Palestinian woman, along with the narratives and life histories of those Palestinian women my talk held center, an extension of the very logics of colonial gendered violence that make the ongoing genocide in Gaza possible.
As a feminist scholar of Palestine, my primary commitment in this moment is to follow the lessons of my sisters in Gaza – those who have survived forced displacement, the destruction of their home spaces, the loss of their children, forced starvation, and lack of medical care–who are continuing to birth, nurture and grow Palestinian life in the face of reproductive genocide, resist their own–our collective–disappearance. Gathering our stories and memories, whether through writing, speaking, or dreaming, are powerful acts in the face of genocide and repression. They help us to sustain Palestinian life across generations, mapping our way towards liberatory futures.
Teaching as a form of liberation is stronger than our academic institutions of higher education that insist on embodying hatred. I refuse to disappear as a Palestinian woman, as a scholar, and as an educator. My talk at Stanford was rooted in, and inspired by, the daily practices and theories of Palestinian women in Gaza who have been teaching the world lessons on Indigenous intergenerational survival, love, and liberation for decades. As I write this, more than 12,300 Palestinian women have been killed in Gaza, nearly 14,000 widowed and 17,000 mothers have lost their children during the genocide thus far. Thousands of others are held captive, being starved to death by Israeli occupation forces.
In the end, perhaps my discipline as a liberation-minded Palestinian scholar digs deeper than anthropology or even feminism. Yet institutions of higher education across the U.S. and allied colonial nation-states continue to affirm a racist mentality that seeks to silence or even lynch Palestinian teachings and understandings. As U.S. universities face militarized assaults on freedom of speech, the dismantling of DEI initiatives, funding freezes, and attacks on books, courses and research, faculty and students must resist the urge to disappear. We must continue our attempts to hold university institutions, administrators, and our colleagues accountable for their role in the attempts to suppress and erase our Palestinian voices and narratives. If my talk would have moved forward, despite the threats, perhaps I would have ended with a series of questions. One of them might have been: what happens to higher education prepared to erase teachings from below? Education disappears.
But, since my talk was not able to move forward, since zionist threats were effective, in this instance, in garnering the fear of faculty and administrators, I am forced to ask instead: What happens when 21st century anthropology erases teachings from below? What does it say about the liberal anti-racist conceit that the discipline has prided itself to be? Stanford, as we are witnessing, is answering these questions in real time. While faculty might think that anticipatory obedience to zionist threats is a form of protection, it is also the anticipatory recommitment to the discipline’s origins. As anthropologists, we are witnessing a doubling down on the discipline’s classical roots where a Palestinian woman can only occupy the savage slot–she can only speak as an object of research, through the colonizer’s narrative of her–not as a producer of knowledge.