Front and Back Covers, Volume 26, Number 4. August 2010

Abstract

Front cover caption, volume 26 issue 4Front coverTHE GAZA FREEDOM FLOTILLAMohammed Rassas, a second‐generation Palestinian, sports a T‐shirt declaring his longing for the homeland he has never known. Mohammed's family was forced to leave Palestine long before he was born, with no opportunity for return. Instead, Mohammed has lived most of his life between Saudi Arabia and Greece, which became his second home.For three weeks Mohammed joined dozens of Greek, Arab and Western volunteers in preparing the Greek ship Eleftheri Mesogeios (‘Free Mediterranean’), to carry 2000 tons of humanitarian aid, including prefabricated houses and hospital equipment, to Gaza. The ship formed part of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, an international effort by volunteers from 36 countries that aimed to send eight ships to Gaza, carrying 700 passengers and 10,000 tonnes of humanitarian aid, in an attempt to prise open the strict embargo Israel has imposed on the Gaza strip since 2007.The Israeli army attacked the flotilla in international waters, killing eight Turkish nationals and one Turkish‐American national, and injuring many more. Flotilla participants were placed behind bars. Intending to propagate their own version of events, the Israeli authorities confiscated audio‐visual records made by witnesses.As an ethnographer invited to participate in the flotilla, Nikolas Kosmatopoulos was a witness to the events that took place. His notes are published in the form of a narrative in this issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY.Israel has so far rejected the UN's call for an international independent inquiry. The Turkish government has threatened to cut all ties with Israel unless it apologizes or agrees to such an inquiry.Back coverCLIMATE CHANGE‘There is no planet B’: an estimated 100,000 people demonstrate at the Copenhagen Climate talks, 12 December 2009.Since the débâcle of the UN Climate talks in Copenhagen last December, a broad new global coalition of resistance has begun to emerge. It includes the Climate Camp protesters who took direct action against the coal‐fired Kingsnorth power station and the fourth runway at Heathrow, the tens of thousands of demonstrators who joined the Wave in London in December and the estimated 100,000 who marched at Copenhagen.They join others who have intimate experience of melting sea ice and Andean glaciers, flooding in Bangladesh and New Orleans and droughts in Africa.In April, in Cochabamba, Bolivia, a conference of 35,000 people, many of them indigenous Americans, began to organize to protect themselves and Mother Earth – Pachamama – to avert catastrophic climate change.This new social movement poses a personal and professional challenge to anthropologists to integrate climate issues and global politics into the discipline and into their lives.