Roberto Gonzalez

Overview

Roberto Gonzalez chairs the Department of Anthropology at San Jose State University (SJSU) in San Jose, California. He supports the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and is a sociocultural anthropologist with a focus on Latin America and the United States.

Gonzalez is a member of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and was part of a group that unsuccessfully lobbied in 2016 for an AAA boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Gonzalez also wrote blog posts for the website Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions (Anthro Boycott), which was the primary body advocating for the boycott.

On April 30, 2016, Gonzalez co-authored an Anthro Boycott blog post where he promoted the anti-Israel Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) organization and repeatedly accused Israel of "settler colonialism."

Portraying Terrorists as Victims to Promote BDS

On November 19, 2015 — during a period known as the Knife Intifada where Palestinians throughout Israel stabbed scores of Israeli civilians — Gonzalez portrayed the attackers as "victims" (13:41) in an Israeli “war on Palestinian youth” (13:50).

Gonzalez’s comments were made during a speech at an AAA meeting to promote a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions. Members voted the next day to have the full AAA membership vote on the measure.

Gonzalez highlighted the case of 16-year-old Ishaq Badran, who had stabbed two elderly Israeli men before attacking Israeli police officers who then shot him dead. Gonzalez said: "Most Israeli and Western media outlets predictably wrote him off as a terrorist because he stabbed an Israeli man but the story is more complex."

Gonzalez justified Badran’s attack on the basis of "daily injustices and indignities of occupation" (14:47), adding: “Ishaq was deeply upset by an incident in which an Israeli settler attempted to remove the hijab of a Muslim woman in Jerusalem’s Old City” (15:13). The British newspaper The Independent, however, reported that the alleged story “could not be independently confirmed” but was still “spread on Palestinian social media.”

Gonzalez later claimed that he was "stunned" at fellow anthropologists’ “ignorance” on Israel, part of which he blamed on a “lurking sense of fear” (1:16:20) which is “often unspoken.” He said: “Part of our task is on the collegial level and with students is to really overcome that ignorance that our media has done such a good job of cultivating over the decades.”

Gonzalez said that the violence of the Knife Intifada was justified since Israel has "Kafka-esque rules and regulations" (13:14), practices an “Orwellian silent transfer of Palestinians” (13:19), has a “slow motion process of ethnic cleansing” (16:20) and “institutionalized racism and economic subjugation” (16:23).

Social Media and Weblinks

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/roberto-gonzalez-0942a6119/

University Website:http://www.sjsu.edu/anthropology/people/permanent/gonzalez/