Palestinians are being dehumanised to justify occupation and genocide

It has been more than a month since a former president of the United States, Donald Trump, used my identity as an insult in a televised debate. He called his opponent, current US President Joe Biden, a “very bad Palestinian” for his alleged failure to help Israel “finish the job” of killing everyone in Gaza and stealing the land. He received zero pushback. Biden, the person who is directly funding and supplying the weapons for the ongoing genocide of my people, clearly had no issue with our identity being turned into a slur.  But the nation’s liberal commentariat, always ready to call out Trump’s racism, did not really care either. There were a few articles on how Trump’s “racist insult” has upset human rights advocates, but in a matter of days if not hours, the incident was completely forgotten.
This came after months of Palestinians in Gaza being indiscriminately bombed, shot at, imprisoned and starved. After the complete decimation of the strip’s hospitals and universities. After the despicable murder of six-year-old Hind Rajab with 355 bullets shot directly at the car she was in.
And since Trump used my identity as a slur on national TV, the killing, maiming and repeated displacement of Palestinians continued, not only in Gaza but all across Palestine. Various investigations concluded that Palestinians being held without charge or legal representation in Israeli prisons and detention camps, like the notorious Sde Teiman in the Negev desert, are being tortured, starved, raped and left to die. The official death toll of this latest round of Israeli slaughter in Gaza has surpassed 40,000 with many more thousands still buried under the rubble. And after all this, the US government approved weapons sales to the genocidal state of Israel totalling $20bn.
A brutal, systematic war is being waged on my people, in open view of the world, to deprive us of our land and our basic right to dignity. And yet, it seems, the global community has became numb to our suffering, our pain and the injustice we have been subjected to for many decades. Especially those in the West appear indifferent to what Israel, with the help of their governments, is doing to us. This is why Israel has been able to continue this genocide with impunity for 10 long months, and this is why no one even flinched when two of the most powerful men in the world casually used “Palestinian” as a slur on national television.
How did this happen? How did we get here? Since October 7, anyone who has access to social media has undoubtedly seen the mangled corpses of Palestinian children killed by Israeli bombs and bullets. They have seen the starvation, the desperation and the endless destruction. So how can they still turn a blind eye to this carnage? How can they still support politicians who are funding and facilitating a blatant attempt to exterminate an entire people?
The answer, of course, is dehumanisation. Many in the West, especially many in positions of power, do not believe Palestinian life has value – they do not see us as human beings. If Palestinians are somehow proved to be inherently violent beasts in a man-made cage, then our slaughter can be justified.
This dehumanisation obviously did not begin on October 7 but went into overdrive in the past 10 months. Palestinian voices were erased almost completely from political and media spheres. Us Palestinians were not only banned from speaking for ourselves in the public sphere but were yet again branded violent terrorists, beasts and savages for merely resisting our slaughter.
In this context, the relentless stream of images of death and suffering emerging from Gaza numbed outside observers to Palestinian suffering even further. Seeing these images, some doubled down on their belief that Palestinian suffering does not matter because we are all “violent” “terrorists” who cannot be controlled or reasoned with anyway. Others became desensitised to our suffering as an emotional defence mechanism. With a genocide being livestreamed on our phones, each life extinguished has become just another tally mark, another statistic in a war that seems without end.
This atrocity fatigue, which has affected everyone, including those who truly care about Palestinians, also has had a heartbreaking impact on people who are currently in Gaza facing this genocide.
In a desperate bid to be heard, to make the world recognise their humanity and acknowledge their suffering, Palestinians themselves have been forced to commodify their grief. Fathers began to hold the bodies of their murdered children up to the cameras to say, “Do you see this?” “Do you understand what is being done to us?” In Palestine, private mourning becomes public spectacle. This dehumanising process – where even grief becomes a form of advocacy – further normalises Palestinian death in the public consciousness.
Alongside politicians like Biden and Trump, the party that is responsible the most for this dehumanisation and consequent desensitisation is Western media.
Beyond silencing, ignoring and at times wholly misrepresenting Palestinian voices, Western journalists and pundits have consistently been using language that implies Palestinians are not fully human and never truly innocent.
This malicious editorialisation of news from Palestine undoubtedly has increased in the past 10 months but has been shaping the narrative on Palestine for decades.
In Western reports, Israeli violence against Palestinians is always framed as a war against resistance groups branded as “terrorists” with no mention of the suffering of Palestinian civilians or the causes and conditions that led to the formation of these groups in the first place.
In these news reports, Israeli children are “killed” in “terror attacks”, and long essays are published, rightfully so, about their lives, their interests, their dreams and lost potential. They always have a name. Palestinian children, however, are almost never “killed” – they just “die”. Their names are rarely mentioned, their shattered dreams ignored. They are often reduced to a statistic, a footnote. More disturbingly, the often violent deaths of Palestinian children are routinely blamed on Palestinians themselves. Reports talk of “human shields”, “threats to security”, “earlier attacks and altercations”. They rarely even mention who fired the bullet or dropped the bomb that killed them – Israel.
This dehumanisation allows Israel to continue its genocide with impunity. Western media’s casting of Palestinians as inherently violent subhumans not only helps Israel blame them for their own deaths but also frame the armed resistance against its occupation and apartheid as “terrorism”.
If people perceive Palestinians as fully human with inherent rights to freedom, dignity and self-determination, Israel cannot convince anyone that Palestinian armed resistance against decades of dispossession, oppression and abuse is anything but righteous and justified.
Dehumanisation of Palestinians harms not only Palestinians but every single member of the global community. Erasure of the humanity of millions of people for the sole “crime” of being Indigenous to a land arbitrarily claimed by another also erodes our collective humanity and capacity for empathy. When any society becomes numb to the eradication of an entire nation and begins to see its members as “less than human”, it always leads to further violence and human rights abuses. When we accept a group to be less than human, we risk losing our moral compass, our ability to recognise and respond to injustice. Once dispossession, enslavement and slaughter come to be seen as acceptable when directed at one group of people, soon all rights, values and norms become meaningless.
This is why we must actively resist dehumanisation of Palestinians.
Palestinians killed by Israel in this genocide must not be reduced to statistics. They were all unique human beings with hopes and dreams. They were all loved by people who were left broken by their loss. And Palestinians who survive this genocide are not “subhuman” “potential terrorists”. If we cannot resist dehumanisation of Palestinians, we cannot bring an end to this greatest source of human suffering and injustice. To end this, we must recognise the Palestinian right to resistance, to self-determination, and to live free from occupation and never-ending drone strikes.
To break this cycle of violence and apathy, we must actively engage with the human stories behind the headlines. We must not ignore or hide from the boy who had to put his brother’s remains in a plastic bag, the father who went to register the birth of his twins only to return to find them bombed to pieces or the mother who had to watch her children burn alive. These are not just nameless characters in a story made up to shock us. They are real people.
If we, the Palestinians, do nothing, we are killed, our houses are demolished or taken, and the world looks away – refuses to see or care. If we resist, fight back, then it starts talking about the “two sides”. Does the world expect us to offer ourselves for murder without objection?
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.