“Crisis” is one of the most widely-used terms to describe the tragedies currently unfolding in Gaza, Palestine/Israel, and the Middle East. Western media commentators, humanitarian professionals, policy-makers, academics, and civil society leaders all often deploy crisis as a heuristic for the conditions facing the people of the Palestinian Territories. In this essay, I problematize the logics underlying this heuristic as well as its implications, namely the resulting elision of Israel’s military occupation and the normalization of Palestinian oppression. The field of anthropology provides rich conceptual frameworks to understand the limits and possibilities of discourse on crisis.

As we speak, Israel’s genocidal violence in the Gaza Strip and its incremental genocide in the West Bank are transforming the Occupied Palestinian Territories into zones of apocalyptic collapse. Death and destruction have become omnipresent in Gaza, with tens of thousands of majority civilians (and a minority of Hamas militants) murdered, injured, and trapped under the rubble. The Israeli army has targeted doctors, nurses, scholars, journalists, poets, aid workers, and countless others with assassinations. All universities are now destroyed, most schools shattered, mosques and churches under attack, and major infrastructure in ruins such as hospitals, apartment buildings, sewage and water facilities, electricity and communication networks, and even bakeries. The international community is deeply concerned about outbreaks of disease and severe shortages in food and pharmaceuticals in Gaza. And the erasure of so many archives in Palestine, alongside the destruction of systems of Palestinian knowledge production, is now manifesting in epistemicide (Moaswes 2024).

Meanwhile, we are also witnessing the Gazafication of the northern West Bank, where Israel’s campaigns of siege and invasions are devastating areas such as Jenin and Tulkarem. Across the West Bank, Israeli settlers run amuck, terrorizing Palestinians as the latter attempt to travel from one place to another in their ancestral lands, attacking entire villages, and continuing to colonize more and more space and natural resources.

Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7, 2023, while arresting thousands of individuals from the West Bank and Gaza in Israeli dungeons, and subjecting inmates to different forms of torture, including rape. All of these human rights violations are systematically documented by international organizations, many of them livestreamed and documented on social media, including by Israeli soldiers themselves, even as Israel has almost eliminated the presence of all foreign journalists from Gaza. Deploying the language of crisis to encapsulate the micro and macro dynamics that Palestinians are enduring as a result of this brutality has obfuscated more than it has revealed.

The obfuscation of Israeli power and domination through the heuristic of crisis is intimately tied to the humanitarianization of Palestine since the creation of Israel in 1948. The birth of Israel on the land of Palestine led to the Nakba, or catastrophe, marking the displacement, dispossession, and disenfranchisement of the Palestinian people, a process that Palestinians recognize continues through the present.

Western humanitarian institutions throughout these seventy-six years of Israeli settler-colonialism have responded with aid policies that have led to the humanitarianization of the Palestinian Territories (Feldman 2018). Whether in providing relief to refugees internally and externally displaced in 1948, or again to those displaced in 1967, or again in 2024, and at critical junctures in between, the aid industry has been codified and professionalized, with Palestinian suffering as its central commodity to be marketed and addressed. This industry and its concomitant political economy of de-development and dependency is promulgated by all major actors in the conflict, including multinational institutions, Western donors, the Israeli state, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and nongovernmental organizations in the West Bank and Gaza. Their appeals for aid to Palestinians can be traced to 1948, always with a sense of urgency, with chronic emergencies, and therefore a chronicity of crisis. This discourse of crisis continues to the present.

The question of whether the current “crisis” in Gaza is particularly acute is a legitimate one as questions of scale collapse. Thresholds and scales of loss of life and livelihoods in the Palestinian Territories have been reaching unprecedented rates. The humanitarian discourse on Palestine has arrived at a new level of superlative language being used to capture the cruelty of Israel’s assaults on the children, women, and men of Gaza, with fears of looming threats to the West Bank, and a U.S.-backed, far-right Israeli state fantasizing on the transfer of Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt and from the West Bank to Jordan. While both of these neighboring states reject such complicity in ethnic cleansing, one hundred thousand Gazans are estimated to have fled to Egypt since October 7, 2023, and the majority of Jordan’s population have long been Palestinian.

Israel’s official rhetoric on these matters has posited that nothing preceding October 7 could justify the events of that day, and also that the events of that day justify all events thereafter. The rhetoric of exceptionality is consistent with the logics of “crisis.” Hamas’ war crimes are morally reprehensible yet the history of Palestine/Israel did not commence on October 7. And nothing can justify Israel’s slaughter of children in Gaza in the name of fighting Hamas, the latter of which for years had been bolstered by Netanyahu and Israeli leaders before him.

Yet just as reducing Palestine to a humanitarian emergency elides Israeli settler-colonialism that has rendered so many Palestinians vulnerable and destitute, reducing the current iteration of the Nakba to a crisis elides the Israeli processes that have systematically engineered the conditions of genocide impacting the entire Palestinian nation.

Anthropologists have long theorized crises in societies (Roitman 2013), including the differences between natural versus cultural crises, as well as the realities of moral crises. The apocalypse in Gaza is the not the result of a hurricane but rather a man-made storm engineered by American imperial and Israeli colonial machinery. This crisis is not a rupture in temporality or an episodic discontinuity but a symptom of political and economic engines endemic to Palestine as a collection of space, time, and human beings.

Anthropology reminds us that the “humanitarian crisis” facing the Palestinian people is the culmination of power that aims to “manage rather than remove” and to “stabilize rather than resolve the status quo” (Masco 2017). The tragedy of Gaza is fundamentally a moral crisis of a global system entrenching Israeli impunity where humanitarianism has become a substitute for politics and accountability.

Anthropological scholarship also reveals how crisis as a discursive formation can be part of social change as an “affect-generating idiom” (Masco 2017) where political imaginaries enable a reckoning with the historical roots of crisis through collective memory and the need for resistance and structural change. Crisis can ultimately catalyze the “re-ordering of society” (Beck and Knecht 2016) and its hierarchies as well as the affirmation of sovereignty at individual and group levels. The humanitarianization of Palestine through chronic crises has led to a paralysis of the future. A re-formulation of crisis as a precipitant of social change can lead Palestinians towards decolonization, self-determination, and dignity.