Eur-Asian Border Lab Researcher and Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam, Polly Pallister-Wilkins, has co-authored a new contribution with James Smith in Public Anthropologist (Vol. 7, No. 2, 2025). Their essay, titled “Humanitarianism in the Genocide,” appears in the forum “Confronting the Genocide of Palestinians and Refusing Repression,” edited by Lori Allen and Heidi Mogstad.
In this timely and urgent piece, Pallister-Wilkins and Smith interrogate the role of humanitarianism amid Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians. They trace the longstanding critiques of humanitarian complicity in sustaining Israel’s occupation, while also reflecting on the indispensable yet deeply constrained nature of humanitarian aid in conditions of systematic destruction.
The contribution argues that humanitarianism in the face of genocide is profoundly ambivalent: essential to the preservation of life under conditions of mass dehumanisation, yet structurally unable to address the political violence at the root of Palestinian suffering. The authors situate this ambivalence within longer histories of Zionist settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and the repeated instrumentalisation of humanitarian action as a means of pacification and political containment.
Drawing on their combined experience as researcher and humanitarian practitioner, Pallister-Wilkins and Smith ask what it means to practice care and critique in a moment defined by extreme brutality, and what role humanitarianism might or might not play in shaping Palestinian futures after genocide.
Read the full contribution here (open access).