<\/p>\n
When the existence of an entire people is denied, when their humanity is denied again and again and again, when they are simultaneously cast as non-existent and terrorist \u2014 we see what is happening in Gaza.<\/p>\n
When the Soviets liberated the Majdanek concentration camp from the Nazis in the summer of 1944, it was the first real view the world had of the horrors of the Holocaust. And the world reacted with disbelief. \u201cMaybe \u2026 we should wait for further corroboration,\u201d wrote the New York Herald.<\/a> \u201cThis \u2026 sounds inconceivable.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, we see an endless stream of Israel\u2019s war crimes in Gaza. We see the brutalised bodies of men, women and children, and we see the broken souls left mourning them. We see schools, hospitals, refugee camps, mosques and churches being bombarded by Israeli airstrikes without discrimination. We see a land under siege, with no food or water, no medicine or fuel let in. We see what can be described as a genocide<\/a>, or at the very least an ethnic cleansing, of the people of Gaza. And once again it seems inconceivable.<\/p>\n It is inconceivable \u2014 the idea that anyone would deliberately kill other humans en masse in such a way. And this is often the question we are left asking: how is it humanly possible to treat thousands of other humans \u2014 even infants \u2014 in such a manner?<\/p>\n The immediate instinct might be to think the perpetrators were simply \u2018evil\u2019 or \u2018madmen\u2019. Yet we also find ordinary people, people like you and I, taking part in the violence, urging it on, reveling in it. This was the case in Nazi Germany. This was the case in Rwanda. This is the case in Palestine. How can they do it?<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy enough. You just have to know the right words. The ones that will allow both observers and perpetrators to think: This is fine. This is acceptable. This is what the victims deserve.<\/p>\n The first step in normalising death and destruction on such a massive scale lies in turning society against the victims \u2014 whip up the hatred that drives the juggernaut of violence forward.<\/p>\n How do you do that? The answer is dehumanisation.<\/p>\n The victims, as a group, are turned into a symbol of fear and loathing. With the help of propaganda, leaders steer the narrative to reduce them to subhuman creatures \u2014 vermin and savages and monsters who will only destroy society if allowed to remain. They\u2019re not really people, not in the sense that others are. They are less than human, they are dangerous to humans and so, enslaving them, torturing them, even killing them is justifiable.<\/p>\n Such stereotyping served as the foundation for colonial violence, with Orientalist perspectives of the colonised peoples as being \u2018less than\u2019 the European overlords too.<\/p>\n The \u2018merciless Indian savages\u2019 of America, the slavish Africans, the barbarian Arabs and Indians \u2014 the idea of \u2018civilising the natives\u2019 in these foreign lands served to justify massacres upon massacres, slavery and endless misery. The same stereotypes of the uncivilised Third World now serve to justify Western interventions here, saving \u2018helpless natives\u2019 from \u2018vicious terrorists\u2019 who must be destroyed.<\/p>\n The Nazi Third Reich, too, used tactics of dehumanisation as it came up with the label of Untermenschen<\/em> (subhuman) for the \u2018inferior\u2019 non-Aryan races \u2014 the Jews, the Roma, the Slavs. The European Jewish community was, of course, at the centre of their hatred, supported by the pre-existing anti-Semitism in the continent.<\/p>\n Considered immoral and corrupt, constantly scheming to take over the world, the Nazis denigrated them as vermin and racially inferior beings, with master propagandist Joseph Goebbels turning to caricatures, books and film to render German society amenable to their genocide.<\/p>\n The Eternal Jew, a \u2018documentary\u2019 produced at Goebbels\u2019 insistence, for example, emphasised the otherness of the European Jew, with one scene comparing Jews to rats<\/a> that spread disease and devour resources across the continent.<\/p>\n The comparison of victims to vermin is a common one for the perpetrators of genocide. The Nazis compared Jews to rats and serpents, with numerous cartoons showing these animals with exaggerated \u2018Jewish\u2019 features.<\/p>\n In Rwanda, the notorious Radio T\u00e9l\u00e9vision Libre des Mille Collines<\/em>, which played a vital role in inciting racial hatred against Tutsis during the genocide in 1994, frequently exhorted Hutus to \u2018kill the cockroaches\u2019. The idea behind comparisons to vermin is clear \u2014 when you have such an infestation plaguing society, what is one to do but exterminate them?<\/p>\n The hate is intrinsically tied to fear. The Nazis stoked fears of the \u2018insidious\u2019 nature of Jews taking over society. The leaders of the Rwandan genocide and the media convinced thousands of Hutu that the Tutsi were coming to take over the country \u2014 and to kill them; it was this fear that was one of the main factors<\/a> mobilising the genocidal attacks on the Tutsi.<\/p>\n In such a scenario, when your way of life \u2014 your very life, even \u2014 is at risk from the \u2018others\u2019, moral exclusion isn\u2019t difficult. The same morals and rules don\u2019t apply to the threatening group, and it makes sense to get rid of it.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no shortage in history of marginalised groups being dehumanised as a prelude to the justification of injustices towards them. Israel\u2019s history, too, shows numerous examples of the dehumanising caricaturisation of Palestinians and Arabs.<\/p>\n Today, Telegram channels<\/a> of Israelis cheering on the destruction in Gaza appear to refer to Palestinians as \u2018cockroaches\u2019, \u2018microbes\u2019 and \u2018pigs\u2019. But they are only following the lead of those in power.<\/p>\n Announcing a \u2018complete siege\u2019 of Gaza two days after Hamas\u2019 attack on Israel, the latter\u2019s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, was straightforward about his view of Palestinians. \u201cThere will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed. We are fighting against human animals and will act accordingly.\u201d<\/p>\n Even this is a throwback to earlier comparisons. In a speech to the Knesset in 1983, then IDF chief of staff Raphael Eitan declared:<\/a> \u201cWhen we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.\u201d<\/p>\n When stereotypes of hate, rooted in fear, are taught to society, dehumanisation is no surprise. It is no surprise when right-wing Israelis at the annual Jerusalem flag march shout:<\/a> \u201cA good Arab is a dead Arab.\u201d<\/p>\n It is no surprise when children sing:<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cAll the world hates the Arabs,<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n And the main thing is to kill them one by one!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n With these feet I stepped on my enemy,<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n With these teeth I bit his skin,<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n With these lips I sucked his blood,<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n And I still haven\u2019t had enough revenge.\u201c<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n It is no surprise when, in the ongoing massacres of Gazan citizens, the deaths of thousands of Palestinians were turned into a mocking meme<\/a> by Israeli TikTokers, complete with the exaggerated features of the \u2018stereotypical Arab.\u2019 Nor is it a surprise when Palestinians in the West Bank are rounded up and humiliated by Israeli soldiers and settlers \u2014 and when that too is turned into a grotesque meme.<\/a><\/p>\n When racist sentiment becomes so deeply embedded in society, it is fairly easy to convince the average citizen that the \u2018other\u2019 must be removed. The Hamas attack on October 7, vicious as it was, allowed hawks in the Israeli government \u2014 including Prime Minister Netanyahu himself \u2014 to justify the ongoing destruction of Gaza.<\/p>\n In this conflict, it becomes easy to see Gazans as one of two things: \u201csimply details\u201d<\/a>, as Israeli politician Benny Gantz said dismissively, or complicit with Hamas themselves.<\/p>\n Portraying the conflict as a biblical one, Netanyahu has called Hamas the \u2018children of darkness\u2019 \u2014 as compared to Israel, the \u2018children of light\u2019 \u2014 multiple times, insisting that<\/a> \u201cthe good will defeat the extreme evil that threatens us and the entire world.\u201d<\/p>\n Once again, we see the enemy as an inhuman threat \u2014 and it is an enemy that is equated with the Palestinian people as a whole.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an entire nation out there that is responsible [for the Hamas attack]. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it\u2019s absolutely not true. They could\u2019ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime,\u201d said Israel\u2019s president, Isaac Herzog,<\/a> in a speech rationalising his government\u2019s relentless bombing and siege of the Gaza strip.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the first time Israeli politicians have called for all Palestinians to be considered the enemy. In a deleted Facebook post in 2014, then-lawmaker Ayelet Shaked wrote:<\/a> \u201cWhat\u2019s so horrifying about understanding that the entire Palestinian people is the enemy?\u201d, arguing that dozens of civilians stand behind every terrorist, making them fair game too.<\/p>\n When an entire people is your foe, it makes perfect sense to target them all in any retaliatory actions.<\/p>\n It makes sense when members of the Knesset say \u201cGaza should be erased\u201d,<\/a> or when they call for \u201ca Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948!\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n It makes sense when an Israeli minister declares<\/a> that dropping a nuclear bomb on the \u201cmonsters in Gaza\u201d is an option; that anyone waving the Palestinian flag \u201cshouldn\u2019t continue living on the face of the earth\u201d.<\/p>\n It makes sense when Netanyahu tells his people<\/a> to \u201cremember what Amalek has done to you\u201d \u2014 a biblical reference to the rivals of ancient Israel, about whom the Israelites were commanded to \u201cgo, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.\u201d<\/p>\n There is, after all, a reason why dehumanisation is considered a preparatory stage for genocide. But it is still not enough to finish off the job. Ideally, the victims must be dehumanised further \u2014 enough to allow your troops to engage in mass violence against even civilians \u2014 even children, even infants.<\/p>\n In 1942, radio orders requested permission for a truck to be sent to Dessau, Germany, to \u201cfetch material for special treatment\u201d. An innocuous enough request \u2014 except that it came from the notorious Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. The \u2018material\u2019 in question? Detainees for the concentration camp. The \u2018special treatment\u2019 they were to receive? Extermination in the gas chambers.<\/p>\n The Nazis were experts at such euphemisms \u2014 a spade was never a spade, murder was never murder. Everything was clinical, sanitised. After all, they were the ones who came up with the term Endl\u00f6sung der Judenfrage<\/em> \u2014 the \u2018Final Solution to the Jewish Question\u2019. We know this better as the Holocaust, the mass slaughter of six million Europeans Jews.<\/p>\n Why? To make it easier to kill.<\/p>\n To make it easier for the bureaucrats at their desks to dissociate from what they were signing off on. To make it easier for society to digest what was happening. Why are the Jews, the Roma getting on the trains? Why, they\u2019re only being \u2018resettled to the East\u2019. And so, everyone else can go on with their lives.<\/p>\n We talk about the Nazi killing machine and its bureaucratic impassivity as if they were anomalies, but truth be told, we do the same when it comes to warfare and conflict nowadays too. \u2018Collateral damage\u2019<\/strong><\/em> to smooth over the loss of civilian life; \u2018interventions\u2019<\/strong><\/em> to make invasions more acceptable; \u2018enhanced interrogation techniques\u2019<\/strong><\/em> to make torture more palatable.<\/p>\n And in Gaza today \u2014 \u2018human shields\u2019<\/strong><\/em> to justify the bombarding of an entire territory. Not only does it reduce every single person in Gaza to pawns, it blames them for their own death \u2014 for why didn\u2019t they leave? Why did they allow themselves to be put in this position, to be used by Hamas?<\/p>\n The Gazan workers detained in Israel also revealed another chilling parallel of dehumanisation upon their release on Friday, with the numbered bracelets on their ankles<\/a> bringing to mind the tattoos used to identify prisoners at Auschwitz concentration camps.<\/p>\n What\u2019s the purpose of labelling and numbering victims in this way? The words we use influence our realities, they frame our narratives and mould our perceptions. If we describe victims in technical, ethically neutral ways and diminish them to nameless, faceless statistics, we can reduce them to inanimate objects.<\/p>\n Humanity, then, loses its distinctiveness \u2014 and once they are no longer human, once they have been dehumanised, empathy is no longer needed for them. Their suffering no longer matters. We can squash our ethical and moral impulses and look upon them with indifference. And ultimately, killing them becomes a matter of routine.<\/p>\n Even the method of murder for the vast majority of the Holocaust\u2019s victims was dispassionate and mechanical \u2014 gas chambers rather than killing up close. Why? Mass shootings in front of open pits had become too upsetting for the Nazi troops, who kept having nervous breakdowns. They needed a \u201cmore humane\u201d<\/a> way to go about it \u2014 more humane for the perpetrators, at least.<\/p>\n The Rwandan genocide was more hands-on, with machetes being a widely used weapon. But the killers would try to get the victims to turn away as they chopped them down. What frustrated them, according to genocide scholar James Edward Waller,<\/a> was when the victims refused to do so, when they looked at them squarely in the face \u2014 when the violence became too intimate.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easier to kill from a distance. It\u2019s easier to commit atrocities from a distance. This holds true for the Nazi gas chambers; it also holds true for aerial bombing and drone strikes. Sure, it makes it safer for the perpetrator too \u2014 the pilot is less likely to die than those involved in hand-to-hand combat.<\/p>\n But for pilots and especially for drone operators, the disconnect may be heightened too. Ethics experts have worried about how it may lead to a \u201cPlaystation mentality\u201d<\/a> for death, reducing human targets to mere blips \u2014 or \u2018bug splats\u2019<\/a> \u2014 on the screen. When you\u2019re hitting a target, a bug on a screen, instead of another human, it\u2019s easier to disengage from the enormity of taking a life.<\/p>\n The slogan is familiar. A land without a people for a people without a land. The project of Israel \u201cfrom beginning to end \u2026 involved acting as if the Palestinian people not only must not exist, but had never existed,\u201d according to French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.<\/a> And this is precisely what Israelis \u2014 such as former prime minister Golda Meir, who famously proclaimed<\/a> that \u201cthere was no such thing as Palestinians\u201d \u2014 have done throughout Israel\u2019s history.<\/p>\n When the existence of an entire people is denied, when their humanity is denied again and again and again, when they are simultaneously cast as non-existent and terrorist \u2014 we see what is happening in Gaza. As Palestinian-American writer Hala Alyan points out<\/a> in a New York Times<\/em> op-ed: \u201cA slaughter isn\u2019t a slaughter if those being slaughtered are at fault, if they\u2019ve been quietly and effectively dehumanised \u2014 in the media, through policy \u2014 for years. If nobody is a civilian, nobody can be a victim.\u201d<\/p>\n In Western media, we see Palestinians being asked, again and again, whether they condemn Hamas. Why? Because unless they, these terrorists, first disavow violence \u2014 violence they are not responsible for in the first place \u2014 they are not seen as rational. They are not seen as human.<\/p>\n And so, we also see what we have been seeing on social media every day for the past month, for the past years, for the past decades. Palestinians, forced to put their suffering on display to the entire world \u2014 so that maybe, just maybe, the world will rehumanise them.<\/p>\n Maybe, just maybe, it will see them as humans who deserve to live too.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nDehumanising the other<\/h2>\n
Fear and loathing in Israel<\/h2>\n
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Euphemisms of death<\/h2>\n
A land without a people<\/h2>\n