On Reversing Reality. The Cunning of Impartiality on Gaza

Abstract Those of us who live and work in the “West” have spent careers writing about life, death, resistance, love and pain, addressing desensitised audiences who have learned to see Palestinians as violent, backward, and less than human. Settler colonial power has long proceeded by dehumanising and absenting the colonised from its gaze. But while such multifaceted epistemic violence against Palestinians was once primarily the modality of Israel, today qualitatively novel structures of dehumanisation are being deployed, effecting a wider, deeper, and more systematic inversion of reality through innocuous-sounding rubrics such as “impartiality,” “scientific standards” and “ethics.” These perceptual prisms are increasingly applied across contexts including universities, government representatives, media outlets and certain strands of anthropological writing. There is an urgent need to name and challenge what paradoxically amounts to techniques of reality reversal and to understand not just their geopolitical aims but also the epistemic and affective structures that underpin them.