Israeli democracy threatened under right‐wing extremists: A “native anthropologist's” perspective from 2023

Abstract

This narrative offers a personal and impressionistic account of a few major historical transformations of Israeli society seen through the lens of ethnographic observation. Anthropologists are trained to observe and analyze the “other”, whether individuals or groups, situated within the limited borders of space and time without judging their subjects' moral conduct in terms of their own ethical norms. That prescriptive guideline has been called into question in Geertz's iconic account of revisiting his old fields in Indonesia and Morocco, claiming that it was not only the ethnographer’s field sites that had changed but also the ethnographer himself and the discipline of anthropology. Geertz, one leading voice of anthropology, nevertheless adhered to “normative” ethnographic reporting. The present account is informed by the author's decades of ethnographic research, including, at a few critical moments, observations on the complex Israeli national saga. But—unlike my earlier ethnographic reports—the following captures the perspective and interpretations of the anthropologist as informant, that is, taking the role of an engaged Israeli. Note also that my political‐ideological orientation is considered as on the left of Israeli politics.