Palestine as exception, Palestine as norm—Critical perspectives on Gaza from North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".