Israel Hamas war: Ritesh Shah - Dehumanisation a threat to meaningful peace

Wounded Palestinians arrive to al-Shifa hospital, following Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City, central Gaza Strip, on Monday. Photo / AP

OPINION:

Many of us watching the horrors unfolding in Israel and Gaza right now are likely wondering, how can such violence be inflicted on others? We’ve witnessed this time and again throughout recent history; from the killing fields of Cambodia to the Final Solution of the Nazis in World War II, hoping history won’t repeat itself. Too often it does. Unless we take time to stop and pause before responding in anger, vengeance or grief.

This is not what is currently happening. Israel’s defence minister has labelled Hamas “human animals” as a pretext for denying all residents of Gaza access to electricity, water, food, or petrol indefinitely. Likewise, its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, referred to Hamas as “savages”, noting this as justification for Israel to “exact a price” on the peoples of Gaza that “will be remembered ... for decades to come”.

There is no doubt the brutal killing, torture, and kidnapping of innocent civilians as Hamas militants swept into Israel are heinous and immoral. But to dehumanise an entire population as justification for retaliation and further violence is equally problematic.

Such dehumanisation is used by regimes the world over to normalise state-inflicted violence. It has long been used to justify racial or ethnic inequities, by portraying marginalised groups as animals or objects rather than people.

One of the strongest examples of both, which continued for centuries, was the trans-Atlantic slave trade. More recent manifestations were reflected in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, where many parts of the Muslim world were characterised as barbaric, brutish, and savage.

Israelis inspect the rubble of a building a day after it was hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, in Tel Aviv on October 8. Photo / AP

As described by Judith Butler, in her book, Precarious Life, this assisted the US and its allies to justify its use of torture, violence, and disproportional force in its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

In Palestine and Israel you can witness this on an almost daily basis. Israelis refer to Palestinians as the generic “Arab” and Palestinians refer to Israelis as the “Jews”.

Students in schools are presented with unilateral national narratives, which selectively present historical events, dehumanise the “other”, and work to promote a message of self-preservation and perceived threat of the enemy.

I have spent time in Gaza — doing research for humanitarian organisations — and in Israel, visiting the Jewish family of my partner. I can see the common humanity across the militarised borders that divide these populations.

On my last visit to Gaza, at the end of 2022, a group of boys told me how the cycles of violence, poverty and economic despair they experienced had left them feeling, “... afraid of the future, and not trusting it will bring us any more hope ... We can’t forget the events we have been through and feel insecure all the time.”

Palestinian boys sit on the rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in Nuseirat camp in the central Gaza Strip on Monday. Photo / AP

In the past week, we’ve read deeply personal tales of loss and survival from victims and their families on the Israeli side. These include harrowing stories of young ravers fleeing gunfire in the desert, or of entire families being slaughtered in their homes in a kibbutz.

But what about the stories from within Gaza, of the hundreds of thousands forcibly displaced from their homes thus far? Or the 800,000 children and young people, who have never experienced life outside the world’s largest open-air prison, due to the unrelenting Israeli blockade? Or the 60 children who were innocent victims of Israeli bombing last year?

We must distinguish between the individuals and groups who committed the acts of brutality in Israel, and the population in Gaza (or Palestine) writ large. Collective punishment for the crimes of a few is immoral and irresponsible. It is a breach of international humanitarian law, and the basic rules of engagement in conflict.

The seeds of discontent which led to this latest escalation need to be acknowledged. Israel has been inflicting violence on the Palestinian population for decades. It has erected walls, illegally annexed lands, taken hostages, detained thousands indefinitely and deprived millions of livelihoods and opportunity.

According to the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Palestine, this “political system of entrenched rule satisfies the prevailing evidentiary standard for the existence of apartheid.”

Until we stop separating and differently valuing people based on racial, ethnic or sectarian lines, and start seeing them for the individuals they are, our hopes for meaningful peace in the Middle East or anywhere else remain limited.

• Dr Ritesh Shah is a senior lecturer in international and comparative education at the University of Auckland. He specialises in education for children and young people displaced by natural disasters and conflict.