Palestine as exception, Palestine as norm—Critical perspectives on Gaza from North America

As decolonization is not a metaphor, we recognize that written expressions of solidarity fall short of the immediate action that is necessary to defend the Palestinian people (Tuck & Yang, 2012). As new coeditors of the Journal for the Anthropology of North America, we offer this special issue as a small contribution to the collective struggle against the ongoing genocidal war in Palestine and fights against colonialism and imperialism across the globe. There can be no talk of a “North American” anthropology without addressing how North America has constituted and continues to constitute itself: through wars of invasion on Indigenous lands on this continent and abroad. The grotesque reality of watching genocide unfold on our phones reflects back to us in real time the outcomes of these exterminative acts of self-constitution. The contributing authors to this Special Issue theorize longstanding and emergent aspects of the un/exceptional centrality of the Palestinian question to contemporary North American empire. As Alia Al-Sabi and Amany Khalifa argue in their essay “Passages: Rehearsals in Linguistic Returns,” existing scholarly frameworks “fail to capture the totality of ongoing [Palestinian] annihilation.” In the current moment, they argue, the logic has changed. Contributing authors Michele Friedner and Christine Sargent make a similar point in their Coming to Terms piece on “Gaza and Disability” when they highlight how the scale of this genocide as a mass disabling event challenges Jasbir Puar's (2017) theorization of Israel's perceived “right to maim.” As both pieces posit, Israel no longer operates under a strategy that, as Puar theorized, seeks to “evade the optic of collateral damage” (142). There are no terms yet for understanding what is unfolding before us. As Al-Sabi and Khalifa mournfully note, we can only participate in “rehearsal[s] that bring us closer to that which cannot be named.” At the same time, there are many ways in which conditions that facilitate the genocide are entirely unexceptional. Interlocking and well-worn violent foundations of settler colonies make mass killing possible, as they gift, sell, and loan killing technologies, as well as the expertise to maximize their lethal effects. The United States and other so-called superpowers funnel these technologies and knowledge to Israel, while further perfecting them through building militarized border walls to protect domestic interests (largely by keeping residents of the Global South out of or vulnerable to exploitation in the North). These terror exports and fortress architectures illuminate how settler colonies rely on and naturalize one another. Government and private industries are main drivers in the development of these settler colonial technologies, but the North American university is also fundamental to these efforts. Its funding is shot through with war profits, while the military industrial complex fortifies itself through academia. One of the coeditor's office at Georgetown University (the undergraduate home of the two other coeditors) sits across from a ROTC outpost. The offices of Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin—whose engineers produce the missiles murdering Gazans by the thousands and the surveillance technology aiding the IDF—are located just down the road from one of the editor's former employers, UC Santa Barbara. At UCSB and beyond, defense recruiters flood university job fairs and provide millions in funding to Engineering and other programs. The material connections are unapologetically heralded, with defense companies' names on sides of labs and buildings. Anti-Palestinian donors and university board members have withdrawn funds and bullied their rich cronies to do the same. As Keva Bui (2024) and Long Bui (2019) have respectively argued elsewhere, from the development of Napalm to drone and surveillance technology, the North American university is and historically has been the condition of possibility for the military industrial complex. The research and workers produced at universities make genocide materially possible, all the while articulating its goals and operating logics through principles of liberal humanitarianism. These pursuits are not contradictory. Rather, as Lisa Lowe (2015) has shown, they are of a piece. The apparatuses and discourses of liberal humanitarianism are instrumental to exercises of homegrown political violence abroad. This is what Lisa Bhungalia argues in her new book Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine, which Negar Ravazi reviews here. It is not just through bombs and checkpoints, but through the conditions imposed by USAID infrastructure projects or unfounded terrorist designations employed to justify withdrawal of humanitarian aid that the United States and its allies strive to control Palestinian life. A “strange dissonance” is produced as these “softer” disciplinary mechanisms enact violence through a discourse of care, argues the Ottawa Kuffiyeh Collective in their poetry collection included in this issue. Such dissonance can be felt when for example, in the Canadian institutions from which members of the Collective write, university leadership goes to great lengths to recite land acknowledgments “rippling with silent references to colonial thievery, mass deaths, and expulsion of Indigenous communities,” while censoring instruction on the violent colonial conditions that structure Palestinian life for fear that the topic is “too sensitive.” The recitation of land acknowledgments at universities highlights their role in the performance of a reckoning that rarely goes beyond words. As genocides unfold abroad, such performances of naming colonization and Indigenous erasure actually function to distance and silence Indigenous history and voices. North American mechanisms of colonial control may come in multiple forms, but they are never complete. As the war rages, the steadfastness and resolve of the Palestinian people, as well as their refusal to compromise on their dream of a free Palestine, remains our north star. As racial justice, disability justice, immigration, Indigenous, environmental, and LGBTQIATS spaces confront the inextricable connections between their movements and Palestinians' plight, there is a renewed call to internationalist struggle and solidarity against empire. Long histories of Black-Palestinian solidarity from South Africa to the West Bank, and from Ferguson to Gaza, underscore the need for transborder organizing and analysis in global movements too often framed as “domestic.” By learning from solidarities forged across oceans, over walls, and through prison cells, we return to the question that has plagued anthropologists since the post-structural turn: How can there be an anthropology that contains any one place? If the 1960s decolonial struggle exposed the discipline's reliance on what Trouillot (2021[2003]) called the “savage slot,” what is this current moment of anticolonial struggle doing to further destabilize anthropology's foundational claims and structures? Anthropology's well-worn tools cannot dismantle the master's house (Lorde, 1984). What theoretical tools are people developing despite the university to confront the enormity of terror and colonial interconnectedness that Gaza exposes? This issue reflects our commitment, as new editors of the Journal of the Anthropology of North America, to problematize North America as a coherent political geography. We are grateful to outgoing editors Meghan Raschig and David Flood, whose years of stewardship and generous guidance make it possible for us to take up the mantle. We will continue to interrogate assumed coherences of an “anthropology of North America” and turn our attention to its contested territories, ideologies, and cosmologies. Because the Western theory of North America is a site of contestation. The structures of colonialism do not just exist as an “elsewhere,” conceptualized as some foreign, distant land. The “elsewhere” of North America should take us to fieldsites located just down the block as much as it takes us to those that lie across oceans. Imperialist wars have everything to do with this land. It is the home project. We publish this Special Issue on the eve of the grim anniversary of October 7. One interminable year of genocide. One year of feeling in heightened ways like nothing and everything makes sense all at the same time. When it comes to the reaches of US imperialism and the professed doctrine of liberal humanitarianism, the past year has been both intensely clarifying and wildly disorienting. The contributions included here speak to this tension the contradictory task of attempting to employ the tools we have as ethnographers, trained in the art of naming and deconstructing the mechanisms power uses to disguise or justify itself, to describe an ongoing catastrophe that exceeds the words that are available to us. They speak to the insufficiency of extant paradigms to help us understand the terror of the last 11 months and they experiment in genre precisely because the traditional academic essay is ill-equipped for the task. Words are not enough. And yet we must try to write them anyway.

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