A sin­gle word holds the key to the myr­i­ad crises plagu­ing the world  – dehu­man­i­sa­tion. It is omnipresent in wars, poli­cies on migrants and short­falls in human­i­tar­i­an aid. It has also become the bedrock of those who per­pet­u­ate the ills.

Abas­ing your oppo­nents is an unfor­tu­nate tool of the cut and thrust of cam­paign­ing and the warp and woof of pol­i­tics in gen­er­al. Using vit­ri­ol and ven­om to paint and car­i­ca­ture fel­low human beings for polit­i­cal gain how­ev­er, is cow­ard­ly and craven to the point of evil.
Gaza and the West Bank are the  site of a world cham­pi­onship morals lim­bo com­pe­ti­tion, as in “how low can you go”.
In a recent BBC World Ser­vice  radio inter­view, a for­mer Israeli gen­er­al nev­er once referred to Pales­tin­ian civil­ians when dis­cussing Gaza. He did, how­ev­er con­tend that the strip had been com­plete­ly radicalised.
One has to assume he hasn’t seen the end­less images of Gazan civil­ians. They can hard­ly be fault­ed if they hold no love for Israel or its peo­ple, But it’s a fair bet that  pol­i­tics, ide­ol­o­gy and vengeance are far from the top of the list for men, women and chil­dren whose most press­ing real­i­ty is a des­per­ate need for food, queu­ing for a buck­et of water or scrab­bling in rub­ble for what­ev­er bits of their lives  they can sal­vage, while lis­ten­ing to shelling, shoot­ing and the sound of drones seek­ing targets.
How­ev­er, Israeli Finance Min­is­ter Beza­lel Smotrich seems to be of the opin­ion that all Pales­tini­ans, includ­ing chil­dren,  are mon­sters and mur­der­ers. In a speech jus­ti­fy­ing his call for all Pales­tini­ans to be “reset­tled” some­where oth­er than the place they see as home, he said Israel “ can­not afford a real­i­ty where four min­utes away from our com­mu­ni­ties there is a hotbed of hatred and ter­ror­ism, where two mil­lion peo­ple wake up every morn­ing with aspi­ra­tion for the destruc­tion of the State of Israel and with a desire to slaugh­ter and mass rape and mur­der Jews wher­ev­er they are.”

                     GUESS WHO ELSE

If the min­is­ter and his sup­port­ers don’t hear an echo from 90 years ago in that kind of dehu­man­i­sa­tion, maybe they should lis­ten to the speeches of Don­ald Trump.
In phras­ing that more than a few com­men­ta­tors have not­ed reflects speech­es and writ­ing by Adolph Hitler, he por­trayed migrants as  “poi­son­ing the blood of our coun­try,”  and warned that if elect­ed, he would car­ry out mass deportations.
Hamas talks about “Jews” but not the “Jew­ish peo­ple”. It lumps any and all as Zion­ists, as if that was an eth­nic descrip­tion. Its found­ing Covenant  “is  a  com­pre­hen­sive man­i­festo com­prised of 36 sep­a­rate arti­cles, all of which pro­mote the goal of destroy­ing the  State  of  Israel  through  Jihad (Islam­ic  Holy  War).
That’s dehu­man­is­ing tak­en to Nazi­ism level.

                               SEE NO FEEL NO

But is it any more dehu­man­is­ing than, for all intents and pur­pos­es, and on avail­able evi­dence, the world’s human­i­tar­i­an crises are perceived?
The UN High Com­mis­sion­er for Refuges (UNHCR)  report­ed that by the end of 2023 “as a result of per­se­cu­tion, con­flict, vio­lence, human rights vio­la­tions or events seri­ous­ly dis­turb­ing pub­lic order.” there were 117.3‑million forcibly dis­placed people.
And yet, there is lit­tle or no inter­na­tion­al pres­sure to end most of the con­flicts,  or ame­lio­rate the con­di­tions that pro­voke famine. It’s fair to  con­clude that images of women and chil­dren hud­dling in front of tents and  makeshift shel­ters in refugee camps, or entire fam­i­lies trudg­ing from Hell-to-who-knows-where with the arche­typ­i­cal “pathet­ic bun­dles”, don’t prompt  West­ern TV view­ers to make a psy­cho­log­i­cal nev­er mind vis­cer­al con­nec­tion between the peo­ple on the screen and their own sit­u­a­tion and children.
That’s dehu­man­is­ing on an uncon­scious, and per­haps defence mech­a­nism level.
Don’t relate to it and you don’t have to deal with feel­ing it.
A U.S. Army Apache heli­copter pilot once told me how in Gulf War 1 he hit an Iraqi tank at night, from a mile away, with a mis­sile that “blew it right off the top of my screen”, a ref­er­ence to the fact that mod­ern war­fare is often more video-game dis­tant than up close and personal.
When I remarked that it must have vapourised the men inside, he looked away and mur­mured: “You wouldn’t feel a thing.”
It seemed to me that say­ing “you” rather than “they” was his way of  deper­son­al­is­ing what he had done. A form of dehu­man­is­ing that ‚giv­en what sol­diers sent  into  com­bat are expect­ed to, and by orders and job def­i­n­i­tion must do, is both an under­stand­able and in many ways nec­es­sary, even jus­ti­fi­able  defence mech­a­nism. For politi­cians and the rest of us to dehu­man­ise, how­ev­er, is unfog­give­able to the point of  inhuman.

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