In addition to raining bombs on Gaza, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared a complete blockade of the 16-mile strip of land. Gallant said, “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” He continued to say that Israel is “fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
Although the dehumanizing language against Palestinians is not new, when it becomes raison d’etre for the scale and brutality of Israel’s carpet bombarding of the entire area to kill kids, men, and women of innocent people, it’s nothing less than Hitlerian and Nazism with disdain human values. Such language is nothing less that blank check to squash Palestinians in their own homeland.
Along with that Israeli raison d’etre, the political spectrum, from the far left to the extreme right and spanning racial and ethnic groups, nearly everyone who has to say something about the raging Israeli war against Gaza, feels to appease Israel by failing even to recognize Palestinian humanity.
To put all of this into perspective with the ongoing Israeli genocide war against Gaza, and to shed some background on how Palestinians have been, all along, struggling against such stigma. The following opinions shed historical and cultural background on why “dehumanization” is a major component of Israel’s raison d’etre in its continued atrocities in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
In” Dehumanization, lack of Empathy for Palestinians Is Alarming -and Dangerous” Khalid Elgendy, the director of the Middle East Institute’s Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs and an adjunct professor in Arab Studies at Georgetown University says that Israeli ongoing war against Gaza affirms that Israeli resin “affirms the status of Palestinians as a “lesser that”
In The Persistent Global Dehumanization of Palestinians Is Part of the Problem Tamara Kharroub, ACW Deputy Executive Director, Believes the war on Gaza is an example of the continued dehumanization of Palestinians, She says” As the world woke up to extensive and nonstop Western media coverage of Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel, which was labeled “unprovoked,” it was not surprising to see yet another example of the complete dehumanization of the Palestinian people. Palestinians experience this and many other forms of violence at the hands of the Israeli military and Israeli settlers daily, including home raids and the killing and kidnapping of civilians, women, and children, not to mention a crippling 16-year siege of the Gaza Strip that has rendered it essentially an open-air prison. Once again, the double standards are evident: the world has ignored Palestinian suffering for more than five decades and only pays attention to violence when the victims are Israeli.”
Israel’s dehumanization of Palestinians enables oppressive occupation RA’FAT AL-DAJANI stated that dehumanization of Palestinians is “based on three basic tenets; the belief that Israelis are the chosen people, and the portrayal of Israel is the victim, and is the systematic dehumanization of the Palestinians.
The first tenet is the belief that Israelis are the “chosen people” and ipso facto, the Palestinians are not. This principle allows the justification of uprooting and denying the rights of the Palestinians who have continuously lived on the land for a couple of thousand years. Israelis are chosen so their right supersedes that of Palestinians.
The third, and most insidious tenet, is the systematic dehumanization of the Palestinians. The dehumanization of Palestinian society at large, and Palestinians as individuals, allows Israel to justify its oppressive treatment of the Palestinians who are under its control.
Dehumanization works on two basic levels. The first level denigrates Palestinian morality and basic character, charging that Palestinians don’t react violently on occasion because of the oppression and violence of the Israeli occupation, rather they do so out of a deep-seated hatred of the Jews that is inseparable from their identity.
In other words, the misconception perpetuated by dehumanization is that Palestinians are violent because of who they are —because of something intrinsic in their very nature and culture, or as Israeli Police Commissioner Roni Alsheich has framed it, because Palestinian society has chosen to sanctify death in contrast to Israeli society which sanctifies life.
This is very effective in advancing the Israeli argument that since Palestinians are not moral like us, they are not entitled to the same rights we have.
The second level of dehumanization works in legitimizing violence against Palestinians. Since Palestinians lack basic standards of morality, it is easy to portray them as irrational, brutish, and even less than human. There is no way to reason with such people [Palestinians] and the only way to interact with them is through the use of force, whether state-sponsored force by the Israeli security forces or non-state actors such as Israeli settlers. Force is the only language they understand.
Consequently, we see no real and sustained international outrage over Israeli actions that would be considered outrageous should any other country engage in them. These include the demolition of the houses of family members of individuals accused of violence against Israelis, imprisonment of children for extended periods without explaining charges against them, use of excessive and sometimes deadly force and munition against stone-throwers, and extrajudicial executions of Palestinians by Israeli forces.
Dehumanization is a convenient narrative, particularly if you are the oppressor and the occupier. It is also a critical element of maintaining an occupation that by all standards of international law, humanity and justice should be sanctioned and condemned. That is why any attempt to humanize the Palestinians is considered deadly as it would inevitably result in ending the occupation and evacuating Israeli settlements, or in granting Palestinians full and equal rights, both of which Israel in its current political makeup refuses to do.
In How Low Can the Dehumanization of the Palestinians Go? Dr. Adnan Abdelrazek is a Palestinian scholar and researcher and a former political affairs officer at the United Nations, confirms that Israel’s “policies and actions by the settlers, the army, and the Israeli authorities” are “part of an ideology and intention” to “dehumanization of the Palestinians in their native land “which “is deeply rooted in the ideology and vision of the founders of the Jewish state.”
“Since the beginning of the Zionist project in Europe, the secular nationalistic leaders claimed to have a historical right to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine at the expense of the native Palestinians. The Jews, they claimed, are democratic and enlightened, and are the extension of Western culture, while the native people are primitive and inferior, and thus there was no need to take into consideration their wishes and aspirations. The religious Zionists, on the other hand, believe in the Jewish land (holy land) which was promised to the Jewish people by God, Abraham, and Yitzhak to be for the Jews and the Jews only. They consider the native people of the land to be passing strangers. There is no doubt that these two approaches, together or separate, as well as other factors, have had a profound and direct impact on the practice of dehumanizing the Palestinians at both the official and the popular levels. The children of the Daana family are only a small example of this dehumanization.”
For the full texts of the above mentioned opinions, click on the the hyperlinks below;
Dehumanization, lack of Empathy for Palestinians Is Alarming -and Dangerous
The Persistent Global Dehumanization of Palestinians Is Part of the Problem
Israel’s dehumanization of Palestinians enables oppressive occupation