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

On October 17, 2023, ten days into Israel’s most recent siege on Gaza and seventy-five years into an ongoing genocide in Palestine, known in Arabic as “the Nakba,” I was called into a meeting with my college’s provost.

“You need to tell me exactly what you said in class and what you told your students,” said the provost, “The students think you were teaching them your opinion, and I would agree with them.”

I was used to being told any Palestinian story of occupation and genocide was “opinion.” By that point, I had been writing on and teaching about Palestine for years. I had travelled to Palestine and spent time moving back and forth between the checkpoints that separated East Jerusalem from the West Bank. The provost, however, knew nothing of Palestine. She only knew that in her world, a liberal world, Palestinian perspectives were automatically wrong, biased, bad. Opinion.

At the time, I was an associate professor of anthropology and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at a small liberal arts college fifty miles northwest of Philadelphia. The college where I worked identified itself as a “safe place for Zionists” and I was struggling to communicate with my students and colleagues while the administration worked hard to silence dissent. The campus was cloaked in a chilly silence.

As an anthropology professor, I create my classroom as an ethnographic space, meaning I center the voices of the communities I teach about. When I teach about Palestine, I teach the work of Palestinian writers and scholars. In the United States, this is dangerous work and after October 7, 2023, it became even riskier.

Still, the week before our meeting, on October 12, I had dedicated both of my classes to contextualizing the events unfolding in Gaza and giving my students space to ask questions. I had already covered material about Palestine in both of my classes, which made these conversations particularly pressing. In our first meeting, the provost told me that several Title VI complaints had come to her through the college’s Title IX office; “Multiple students felt you created an unsafe atmosphere and that you have been targeting and harassing them.”

This accusation is not unique to my college—across the United States, the ADL, Hillel International, and other Zionist groups have been weaponizing Title VI against faculty who teach, write, and speak out against Israeli occupation and in support of Palestinian liberation.

What does it mean to create an “unsafe atmosphere” in the context of talking about Palestine? And, more broadly, what is the job of college professors, particularly anthropology professors, who teach about the world? I have been asking myself both questions for twelve years now, as first an adjunct, then a tenure-track, and finally tenured professor of anthropology who teaches about Palestine.

Teaching can be transformative, it can be revolutionary, it can open up spaces of liberation. If we are doing our jobs, if we are really teaching, then the work we are doing is not just conveying information and assigning grades. Rather, we are helping our students think about the world in ways they have never been able to do before. When we are really teaching, we are imagining a world otherwise, alongside our students. I didn’t always get it right but, throughout my twelve-year career, this is what I was always striving to do and it’s one of the main reasons I committed to including material on Palestine in almost all my classes.

When I teach, I rely on the scholarship of Palestinian anthropologists and anthropologists of Palestine to provide me and my students with a framework through which to understand the region. We should all be doing this—no matter what our region or subfield training, Palestine is relevant. If we teach about infrastructure, we should be talking about checkpoints and the West Bank. If we are in environmental studies we can be teaching about Gaza’s lack of access to decent drinking water; if we are in disability studies, medical anthropology or global health, we should be teaching about the overwhelming number of Palestinian amputees targeted by Israeli snipers during the March of Return in Gaza or routinely in the West Bank. If we teach about childhood and education, we should be teaching about scholasticide in Gaza. If we teach about the global weapons trade or policing, we should be teaching about U.S. arms sales and military funding to Israel. Especially with the advent of multi-sited ethnography, there’s no topic we can teach that doesn’t link to Palestine.

In U.S. classrooms, perspectives like these—informed by the work of Palestinian scholars and scholars of Palestine—are uncommon. As a result, any engagement with the region that doesn’t begin and end with Israel’s narrative can be disregarded as opinion. We can change this by centering Palestine in all of our teaching. We can change this by taking control of the discourse and imagining a new frame for knowledge production about the region.

The provost fiddled with a pile of papers on her desk, then asked the question I knew was coming. “I guess what I really want to know,” she said, “is are you teaching both sides?” In asking this question, the provost revealed how the construction of “Israel-Palestine” is actually an asymmetrical construction, as it not only makes invisible Palestinian perspectives, it also renders anti-Zionist perspectives like mine either impossible or inherently antisemitic.

Despite the veneer of “balance,” this insistence on “both sides” is actually a “one-side” approach that privileges Israel and erases the asymmetry of the colonizer-colonized dynamic. As anthropologists we are not charged with finding equivalences in profoundly unequal situations; rather, through ethnography, we are charged with showing and explaining how that system of inequality came to be. There is no substitute here for the voices, thoughts, feelings, and analytical understanding of Palestinians that live through this devastating system of apartheid and settler colonialism administered by the state of Israel.

As the months passed, the meetings with the provost (which grew to include the college’s Title IX lawyer) became a weekly occurrence. I eventually learned that only one student filed a complaint against me in my classes. After that case fizzled out when the student in question chose not to pursue an investigation, the college administration turned its attention first to my publications, and then to my social media presence.

In early November, I was forced to change classrooms. In mid-November, I was barred from my office and department for a week. In mid-January 2024, I was placed on administrative leave. My classes were reassigned to an adjunct, I was locked out of my college email, I was barred from campus, and I was subjected to a months-long investigation to determine whether my anti-Zionism was also antisemitism. My college determined it was and I was told I was fired in May, just after the end of the spring semester. I won’t be back in the classroom for the fall 2024 semester.

Given the chance, I would do everything again, exactly the same way. Despite my college’s actions, or maybe because of them, the past year has made one thing abundantly clear to me—every single anthropology professor should be teaching about Palestine now. We must learn from our students, whose encampments are making history—we are vulnerable in isolation but powerful as a collective. If every anthropology professor, regardless of subfield, regional expertise, or training, went into their classrooms this fall and devoted the year to teaching the work of Palestinian scholars and scholars of Palestine, we could help change the discourse around Palestine, Israeli settler colonialism, and the genocide in Gaza.

This is, after all, our job—to acknowledge the “power in the story” (to draw on Michel-Rolph Trouillot) and ask: What stories are we centering? Whose voices are we privileging? Our classrooms must become a truly ethnographic space, where we center Palestinian perspectives and insist that Palestinians be recognized as narrators of their own experience—not just one of devastation and death, but also one of survival, joy, and beauty.