The deadly dehumanisation of Palestinians

Israel’s war on Gaza relies on the dehumanisation of the Palestinian people. We know about that in Somalia and we need to urgently use our voices to push back.  

In a conversation organised by Science and Nonduality between veteran activist and intellectual Angela Davis and physician and author Gabor Maté, the latter reflected on his experience as a person of Jewish heritage witnessing the horrors unfolding in Gaza. Maté described it as the “darkest time” of his adult life, telling Davis that seeing the images emerging from Gaza felt like watching “world history in fast-forward over a few months.” The processes of violence that subjugated and exterminated entire peoples in North America and Australia were now happening before our eyes. “It is almost as if we’re witnessing a horrendous version of our own pasts,” he said. 

That is the reason so many people of African heritage care so deeply about this issue. Whilst the scale is certainly different, there is a thread that runs through the logic that underpins the relationship the Palestinians have with their persecutors, and the relationship Somalis had with Italians. As Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant put it himself, his country was fighting “human animals”. He echoed Winston Churchill who once described Indians as a “beastly people”.  

Somalis became familiar with this attitude under Italian rule. As the activist and writer Sylvia Pankhurst put it in her seminal study Ex-Italian Somaliland, Rome went from neglecting its Somali colony because “Italy has no money to waste in Africa”; to the “bubble expansion” under Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime, “with its crescendo of racism, intensification of forced labour and brutal cruelties, with the period of further subjection, expropriation and terror, called the ‘reconquest’ of the colony by [Cesare Maria De] De Vecchi.” Abdi Ismail Samatar, a Somali politician and academic said: “With the rise of fascism the colony was transformed into a more brutal and racist arena.” De Vecchi sought to change Somalia through the cruce (the cross) and the aratro (plough).  

The big difference here is that this is the first “livestreamed genocide” in history as Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, an adviser to South Africa’s legal team said. Day after day, and night after night, we witness more loss of life, limbs, land as part of a project to humiliate and strip the Palestinian people of their dignity. It is impossible to calculate the grief, and we’re not even at the stage where the deed is done, and we can look back and take stock.  

Cities and villages have been completely razed to the ground, all of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed in what UN experts have termed “scholasticide,” graves have been desecrated, the 7th-century Great Mosque of Gaza lies in ruins, half of Gaza’s trees have been lost, and farmland has been devastated. As one young man told The Guardian: “Unfortunately, Israel destroyed everything beautiful in Gaza.” The UN estimates that clearing the rubble alone could take 15 years, at a cost of $500 million. Describing the damage, Corey Scher, an expert on the use of satellite imagery for assessing conflict at the CUNY Graduate Center, says: “Gaza is now a different colour from space.” 

However, I believe we would gladly sacrifice all of that to protect human life, despite how essential our cities and spaces are to our sense of identity. This is where Israel’s offensive has been most devastating. In early July, the UN declared that “Israel’s intentional and targeted starvation campaign” had caused famine across Gaza. Though Netanyahu has attempted to deflect responsibility for failure to deliver aid on to Hamas, his finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a cartoonish villain, reflected on whether it would be moral to starve Gaza, but said the “world won’t let us.” 

Loads of numbers are bandied around by newspapers and TV stations, estimating that around 40,000 Palestinian people have been killed since October. That is a truly stunning figure, if only it was just that bad. The press office of Gaza’s government says 70% of those killed are women (roughly 11,000 and children (16,300). Many people are still buried beneath the rubble in what American journalist Jeremy Scahill has described as “concrete tombs.”  

Though Biden met with Muslim Americans and told them he was “disappointed” for casting doubt on the figures in an attempt to downplay Israel’s brutality, he may have been right to. The only problem is that the figure is probably significantly higher than what the Gaza health ministry has been able to report. It only counts the names of people who have been pronounced dead by hospitals and morgues. The Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, who has reported from Palestine said the figures are a “vast undercount”. The prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet, attempted to provide a considered figure in July: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza”. That would be around 7% of Gaza’s population.  

The carnage in Gaza has distracted our attention away from the West Bank, which has been described by three reputable human rights organisations as a system of apartheid. People are routinely denied freedom of movement, use separate roads, have their houses demolished after evictions, are subjected to humiliating treatment at checkpoints throughout the territory, when they aren’t unfortunate enough to be killed outright. 2023 was the deadliest year on record in the West Bank and the deadliest specifically for children. Save the Children said the rate of killings equates to on average “more than one Palestinian child” a week. Nothing is more precious than human life but this also happens against a backdrop in which Israel has defied the US and approved its largest settlement expansion in the West Bank in decade, expropriating 12.7 square kilometers of land. That is about a seventh of the size of Mogadishu or almost a third of the size of Hargeisa. 

Palestinians are denied the fundamental right to return to their homeland, whilst any self-identified Jew around the globe is allowed citizenship irrespective of how tenuous his link to Israel. This is a travesty. And this isn’t new. In fact, Israeli ministers are aware of what they’re attack on Gaza is actually all about and there is no evidence not to take them on their word. Deputy Knesset speaker Nissim Vaturi loudly declared on X that, “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth,” was Israel’s end goal. Avi Dichter, an Israeli security cabinet member and agriculture minister, said his country was “rolling out the Gaza Nakba”, referring to 1948 ethnic cleansing of historic Palestinian of more than 750,000 when the state of Israel was formed. That is the only fitting way to describe this: “the Gaza Nakba”. The occupied land of Palestine has been a living hell since then. For 70 years, Palestinians have been forced to give up both their land and liberty as the governments of the Muslim world slowly lost interest and western countries became more indifferent to Israeli excesses.  

The cycle of violence began with Hamas’s deadly attack in southern Israel, which killed over 1,100 people, mostly civilians, and took 200 more captive. Many were shocked by the scenes. However, this attack has since been cynically exploited to unleash some of the worst violence we have seen in years. Every time Israel drops a bomb, it claims to have hit Hamas, despite continuously killing dozens of civilians. Every time a hospital is destroyed, it is declared by military spokespeople to have been a Hamas headquarters. The assertion that “Hamas hides among civilians” has become the deadliest weapon used against the Palestinians, lulling the world into complacency amidst the horror. 

This is only possible through a systematic campaign of dehumanisation, which is supported by the press, politicians, and governments. The US’s airdrops of aid, which have themselves resulted in Palestinian casualties, serve as a grim emblem and one of the enduring images that will come to mind when people ask in the future what the world did to help Gaza. The US, and the west more broadly, caught in a fit of anti-Palestinian racism, are throwing food at a population that is being starved. Gaza, mind you, is not on Mars or on the other side of some impassable canyon; it borders a close US ally that is wealthy and heavily dependent on its generous military aid and is currently enforcing a asphyxiating siege. Joe Biden, the US’s lawmakers and the intelligentsia which peddles the nonsense that has allowed this war to continue have closed their eyes and ears to the suffering of the Palestinian people. It is important we recognise how the west has dehumanised them and push back against it. The cost has already been too high.