On Speaking Out: Refusing Complicity with Genocide

This Special Issue of Public Anthropologist asserts the necessity of speaking out against the intensification of genocide in Palestine.The tactics of silencing, and the repression of all forms of solidarity and empathy with a livestreamed genocide in most academic institutions in the Global North, in tandem with the political establishment, have made evident the moral ambivalences within anthropology (and beyond).The repression around anti-genocidal sensibilities has unveiled the disjuncture between the worlds we teach, work in, and have developed expertise on.This historical moment where the brutality of a genocidal occupation is supported, supplied by, and normalised by most governments in the Global North has revealed the duplicity of geopolitical discourse in which the assertion of and the pedagogy of human rights have long been utilised as tools of geopolitical dominance.This is a time characterized by a significant deterioration of intellectual freedom and freedom of expression at the global level.The shrinking space for critical analyses can partially be explained by increasingly repressive policies.In Europe and the United States of America, for instance, scholarsincluding many anthropologists -have lost their jobs or have been harassed or marginalized for signing petitions, for using the word "genocide" in describing the actions of Israel, or even for sympathizing with the suffering of the Palestinians.The degree of impunity for the massacres committed by Israel in Palestine, primarily in Gaza and increasingly in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen has been accompanied by transnationally imposed silencing mechanisms.In the United States of America, Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, and most of the Global North, scholars who have tried to raise