The tears have not yet dried, and the Linor Municipality has already determined that the Israeli Anthropological Association is to blame: the Israeli Anthropological Association. If I hadn't cried during these terrible days, I would have laughed bitterly.
At the outset of the struggle against the academic boycott imposed on Israeli academic institutions by the American Anthropological Association, we, members of the Israeli Anthropological Association, are accused at home of national feebleness and are required to do some soul-searching. This is not a requirement for soul-searching. It's just slime casting.
The Israeli Anthropological Association is comprised of a variety of scholars whose common denominator is not political opinion, but rather their unique research and analysis tools. Entire theoretical disciplines in the social sciences and humanities use and will continue to use these tools, including practical fields such as law, social work, advertising, marketing, and certainly journalism.
Alongside its extensive professional work, in recent decades the Israeli Anthropological Association has been very alert to what is happening within the borders of small and expanded Israel. There are those in the association who lead a radical position that echoes the radical discourse from the outside, but not out of motivation to crush society viciously, but out of a humane desire to correct it.
Is there something wrong with this ambition? Not! Is it realistic? This is a complex question involving many beliefs and opinions that rub shoulders, as anthropologists are accustomed to directly and across borders, with the difficult, painful and complex reality to which they are exposed in their research. But when it comes to describing and analyzing the reality that we as citizens now encounter, anthropology, and certainly the Israeli Anthropological Society and its professional church, has hitherto had a role that should not be taken lightly. Here are two brief examples:
In light of the war forced upon us, we are witnessing the disappearance of the state in the areas of civilian management. Is this surprising? The fields of knowledge of Israeli anthropology and sociology, with their various civic applications, have been warning for many years about the privatization of the state and its prices. This critical stance was publicly expressed but was often labeled by some circles as debilitating.
These circles not only completely ignored privatization processes and their national and security cost, but saw it as an inseparable part of the political will imagined as dismantling the "old regime" even at the cost of dismantling solidarity. Now the price becomes clear.
Another example: This war burns into the national consciousness the heroism of the female fighters. Is it possible to take away from fields of knowledge such as anthropology and sociology in Israel the early, research-based call for gender equality in the military? Quite a few of the ideological circles on which critical writing now relies on the discourse of the Israeli Anthropological Association as finding a great deal of spoils, did everything possible to halt this revolution, arguing, among other things, that it might weaken the fighting spirit. Now reality is shining.
When it comes to describing and analyzing the reality that we as citizens now encounter, anthropology, and certainly the Israeli Anthropological Society and its professional church, has hitherto had a role that should not be underestimated
I will sum up: Closing the account at home with one world of knowledge or another during a war, in which there are authors and authors of that world of knowledge who were harmed by it or survived its beginning, is sinful at best by simplification and at worst by manipulation, and this is what we have been saturated with in recent years. Intellectual soul-searching - yes. Casting slime under the guise of a national position - so far. We were in this movie. It ended badly.
As for colleagues – as far as I am concerned in the former – abroad who support the boycott movement against Israel, and some of whom even support the Palestinian position without significant condemnation of the massacre of innocents in storms in the western Negev, I will say that their position has not only desecrated the word "morality," but has become Faustic for all intents and purposes. This is a real intellectual tragedy. This, too, we will have to take seriously in the future.
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