Cultural Anthropology joins the global wave of mourning for the loss of life in Palestine and Israel, and the global condemnation of genocide in Gaza. We join voices from around the world calling for an immediate ceasefire. This war on Gaza is a war on Palestine, including the accelerated onslaught of the settler regime’s expropriation of Palestinian land, water, trees, wells, and homes in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

We stand in solidarity with our sister organization of Palestinian anthropologists, Insaniyyat. We follow the call of our colleagues at Birzeit University for academic institutions to “fulfill our intellectual and academic duty of seeking truth” and take “concrete action to stop the genocidal war on the Palestinian people.” We stand with all people of good will who reject any instance of what Hortense Spillers has called “dehumanized naming” that paves the way to mass killing and genocide. We lend our voices and words to “voices from Gaza” fighting for humanity and human decency in the worst of circumstances.

To designate some people as “not fully human,” “children of darkness,” or outside the “civilized enlightened world,” to quote some phrases of the Israeli settler government, has a long and bloody history. The notion that some people have lower “civilizational status” and deserve to be consigned to a total siege with no access to water, food, or electricity as the bombs fall and eliminate entire families, blocks, schools, and hospitals, is all too familiar to anthropologists as students of colonialism and enslavement. We reject such logic and its genocidal implications in the present as well as in the past, and support the Resolution on Palestine advanced by the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association in November 2023.

Further inspired by journals such as the Journal for Palestine Studies and MERIP, Middle East Research and Information Project who have made the knowledge contained in their pages available for broader access and use in this terrifying historic moment, we gather articles published in the pages of Cultural Anthropology on Palestine/Israel.