The essays in this series were written during the summer of 2024, and may not fully address rapidly escalating violence in the region.

This collection was sparked by a gathering marking Nakba Day 2024, organized by Insaniyyat, the Society of Palestinian Anthropologists, and cosponsored by the Middle East Section of the AAA. On that day in our virtual space, we heard about the iterative and layered quality of Palestinian dispossession and about how Palestinians defy history in the face of these dispossessions (Hammami); we heard about how we can imagine “ongoing return” even in the face of ongoing Nakba. Listening to Palestinian Gazan writer Andaleeb Adwan’s profound account of loss and insistence on return rooted in her experiences this year, we made space for mourning (see also hers and other accounts in the Voices from Gaza initiative).

The provocation for this Hot Spots series is also shared with Insaniyyat’s conference "Holding onto Palestine" last month. Many of our colleagues at that conference and the anthropologists included in this collection are writing and speaking courageously in the midst of intensified war and settler colonial genocide—under threat to their very livelihoods or lives. As we write, more than a year exactly after the Hamas attacks of Oct 7, 2023, the war on Gaza has spread to the West Bank, Lebanon, and other parts of West Asia. From the sorrowing, probing analysis of Andaleeb Adwan through the roundtable discussion of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s efforts to theorize the loss of the unburyable dead that brings in feminist (Ihmoud) and first-hand medical (Abu-Sittah) perspectives, to Hadeel Assali’s excavation of the meaning of the tunnels under Gaza, we see no clearer testimony to the power of ethnographic thinking than in this series of short essays.

Inviting us to engage our senses (Allan) and to make connections across histories of Palestinian dispossession (Barakat and Hammami), these essays offer a commitment to theorizing a present under erasure. Even as frontline medics, like Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, co-founder of the Conflict Medicine Program in Beirut, or humanitarian workers (described by Feldman) confront world-shattering violence, others confront the slow violence of military occupation that leads to armed resistance (Hermez) or steadfast struggles in Israeli prisons by Palestinian hunger strikers (Ajour). The essays encourage us to look at the geographies of dispossession and destruction for Palestinians from the Naqab to the Galilee (Switat and Bishara) and beyond (Ihmoud), including Lebanon (Allan, Feldman, and Mikdashi), and they insist also on connection and struggle. Alongside the production of “crisis” and failed humanitarianism (Atshan) complicit with the devastation and carnage, we also know that the war in Gaza is inseparable from academic institutions (Wind and Finkelstein) and North American high-tech circuits (Goodfriend).

The violence of 2023–2024—spreading and intensifying even as we write—has long roots in the Nakba of 1948 and global formations of colonialism and militarism. It crushes lives today, destroys treasured pasts as heritage sites are bombed, and steals hopes for the future. Anthropology has a stated commitment to supporting human rights, broadly conceived; as confirmed by the American Anthropological Association in 2020. This is a basic professional and human duty.

We write with the knowledge that no collection will represent the breadth of experiences or perspectives on these complex events, or the concepts used to make sense of them. We look forward to the myriad ways in which these articles can open pathways to further analysis. Here, we have gathered perspectives centered on Gazan and Palestinian experiences of this time to contribute to the many voices in struggle against genocide and to stand against the forces that would silence them. If we highlight Palestinian and global responses of protest, mobilization, legal action, and mutual aid, it is also clearer than ever that the lives and dignity of all people in the region—Palestinians, Lebanese, Israelis, migrant communities, and all others—depend on dismantling these formations of exclusion and state violence.