Dehumanization was a well-known tactic of Nazi propaganda used to deny the humanity of the Jewish people in order to perpetuate and rationalize the mass murders committed during the Holocaust. Dehumanization can be defined as a process by which a powerful individual or group (the victimizers) actively denies or withdraws a second individual’s or group’s (the victim’s) sense of human worth or personal value.
The goal of the Nazis was clear- complete elimination of Jews from Germany (and eventually all of Europe) either by forcing them to leave or, as seen in the latter part of the Nazi era, by various forms of murder. However, these murders could not be carried out without first garnering support from the general public. In order to achieve this, the Nazis had to convince everyone that Jews were subhuman and inferior people, incapable of human emotions or sensations, and not deserving of compassion. This entailed restricting the livelihood of the Jews, isolating them from the rest of the population, and infringing on their freedoms and rights. But perhaps the biggest contributors to the dehumanization of the Jews, and thus to the Holocaust, were the master propagandists of the Nazis, who utilized every resource available to, not merely suggest, but ingrain into the minds of the people that Jews were fundamentally evil and that every single one of their men, women, and children, needed to be completely exterminated. These types of psycholinguistic tools paved the way for the Holocaust as the world stood by and watched with apathy and indifference.
And yet, here we are, eighty years later, allowing history to repeat itself. But instead of Nazi propaganda, it is Israeli propaganda. This time, the dehumanization is not of Jews, but by Jews of the Palestinian people. The concentration camps of our time are places like Gaza, whose 2 million trapped residents have been subjected to a 17 year blockade by the Israeli government, cutting them off from the rest of the world, limiting their resources, withholding from them basic necessities such as food, water, medical supplies and electricity on a regular basis, and denying its residents of access to necessary healthcare or the opportunity to work or study outside of Gaza. And instead of the Holocaust of the 1940s, it is the Gaza Genocide of 2023.
At this very moment, as I am writing this, we just received news of the bombing of the Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza City which has killed over 800 Palestinians, targeting doctors, patients, and hundreds of other innocent men, women and children seeking shelter inside. Human Rights
Watch has confirmed reports of Israel using white phosphorus in Gaza. Nearly 3,000 Palestinians have been killed, with over 1,000 being children (numbers that will surely have risen by the time you read this), and Israeli airstrikes have wiped out entire families and reduced neighborhoods to rubble. At one point, Israel gave the order for Palestinians to evacuate (another psychological warfare propaganda tactic), knowing very well that there was nowhere for them to go and then bombing them as they tried to escape.
So where is the international outrage? Why has the narrative been accepted that Israel, the occupying force, is the victim while the occupied Palestinians are the aggressors? Why is the
worldwide consensus that the Ukranians who are defending their lands from Russia are deserving of international support and are considered freedom fighters, while Palestinians who have been fighting an occupying apartheid regime for over 75 years are terrorists? Why has the U.S. government responded to the genocide of the Palestinians by supplying the very people responsible for this atrocity with military aid?
The answer is simple- propaganda and the long-term and strategic dehumanization of Arabs, Muslims, and the Palestinian people as well as the constant effort to portray Israelis, the colonizers, as victims and equating any form of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The latter is a strategy used to silence criticism and avoid any type of accountability.
No doubt, there is a large discrepancy between the choices of words used in the media when reporting on Palestinians versus Israelis, the types of interview questions asked of either side, and the level of sympathy that is expressed during times of turmoil and violence. And the differences, though vast, are usually so subtle that they go unnoticed by the general public, which is perhaps the very reason that this form of propaganda and mind control has been effective thus far. For instance, Palestinians are regularly reported as having “died” while Israelis are reported as being “killed.” Israeli “military officials” launch “retaliatory strikes” while Hamas “terrorists” carry out “unprovoked violent attacks on Israeli civilians.” There is so much to unpack in that last statement alone.
Let’s begin with the word “terrorist”, for example, a term that has virtually become synonymous with the words “Arab” or “Muslim” thanks to a successful campaign led by the western media. How often do you hear the term used when describing a white, Christian who has carried out a mass shooting? The answer is almost never and the white man’s crime is usually reduced to being described as a lone wolf crime by someone suffering from a mental illness, even before the motive is established.
Likewise, the Israeli government has “military officials” while Hamas is composed of “violent militants”, even though both were democratically elected. Now let’s examine the word “unprovoked,” a word that completely ignores the wider political historical context of the situation- a seven decade long brutal and illegal occupation, forced expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, led by a racist ideology called Zionism. Seventy-five years of oppression, land theft, massacres, torture, humiliation, checkpoints, raids, apartheid and collective punishment inflicted on the Palestinians by the Israeli government. And in 2023 alone, in the months immediately leading up to October 7th, over 200 Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces, a fact that was barely reported by western media. And let’s not forget the Great March of Return, a peaceful 20 month protest organized by Palestinians in an effort to bring awareness to the dire conditions in Gaza and the human rights violations being inflicted on them by the Israeli government. During that time, over 1700 unarmed Palestinian protesters, including medics, journalists, and hundreds of women and children were killed by Israeli snipers, simply for voicing their grievances. 1700 unarmed, peaceful protesters murdered in broad daylight and barely a peep from the international community. When it’s contextualized in terms of history, one can hardly conclude that any of it was “unprovoked.”
Only when Israelis became the victims, was there international outcry, messages of solidarity, displays of support, and public speeches made by world leaders condemning the attacks. This is not said to condone any acts of violence by any group, but rather to put things in perspective and point out the blatant bias.
To further illustrate the absurdity, as if the questionable amount of support displayed by the world and the monetary aid pledged to further the Zionist agenda was not enough, a false story created by a CNN reporter about 40 Israeli babies being beheaded by Hamas quickly began to spread, including making its way into the speech of the President of the United States, fueling the anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim/Arab sentiment. The story was later retracted by the reporter who apologized for her carelessness, but the damage was already done. The false claim had reinforced the idea of Palestinians being subhuman, leading to a young Palestinian boy and his mother in a suburb of Chicago being stabbed multiple times by their landlord, leaving the young boy dead and his mother hospitalized in critical condition. The sad reality is that there was a resounding international outrage over 40 fake babies dying, but silence in response to the hundreds of real Palestinian babies killed thus far in this week’s air strikes.
Let’s revisit the definition of dehumanization in terms of the current genocide taking place in Gaza: a process by which a powerful individual or group (Israel) actively denies or withdraws a second individual’s or group’s (the Palestinians) sense of human worth or personal value. And just as the Nazis of Germany applied this type of sick propaganda to justify the atrocities of the Holocaust, we are witnessing the Zionists and Israeli regime using the exact same tactics against the Palestinian people. It is an unfortunate tragedy when the only lessons learned by a group of victims from their past oppressors is how to victimize others and become oppressors themselves. What, if anything, actually differentiates the two groups of oppressors? I remember learning about the Holocaust as a child thinking, “How was it allowed to go on for so long without anyone doing anything to stop it?” Eighty years from now, will our grandchildren read about the Gaza Genocide of 2023 and wonder how the entire world just stood by and let it happen?