November 1, 2024

What Makes One a Human? Reflections on the Dehumanization of the People of Palestine and Lebanon

Jad Dilati

“What makes one a human?” is a question I have been asking myself since October 7, 2023. Biology claims that the key defining feature that makes one human is bipedalism– the ability to walk on two legs. Psychology states that there are certain qualities that one should possess to become a human being, like consciousness, empathy, creativity, resilience, and the pursuit of meaning. However, for the past year, it has become evident that these conditions do not qualify a body living in Lebanon or Palestine to be treated as a human being.

So, does one need different conditions to be recognized as a human during periods of armed conflict if they come from and live in our region? I argue that the answer is yes.

Photo courtesy of Toufic Rmeiti

Defining dehumanization

Dehumanization, especially during times of war, refers to the portrayal of a person or a people in a way that obscures their humanity and reduces them to a label or a number. Language becomes a weapon that alters the way in which the world perceives a “conflict.”

Since October 7 of last year, we have witnessed the complete dehumanization of the Palestinian and Lebanese people in international media and government (mainly Western) rhetoric. Perpetrators of this phenomenon reduce our lives to impersonal, abstract terms and depict our region as a distant land posing an existential threat to the ethnostate of Israel. By doing so, these media outlets and government officials strip us of our individuality and humanity to justify crimes against “humanity” committed against us.

Other peoples, particularly in the Global South, have undoubtedly been dehumanized for ages. However, this piece will focus on Palestine and Lebanon, given the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the indiscriminate war against Lebanon, both perpetrated by Israel, and given that I, by design of being a Lebanese citizen, fall into this category. I also recognize that our people have faced dehumanization for decades, but that is a larger discussion that does not fit in this small piece.

How Western media erases our humanity

In our interconnected world, media outlets and platforms have emerged as leaders in the dehumanization process through the way they represent –or willingly ignore – our people, and through the way they depict the war on both countries, either through language or imagery.

First –and I must have missed the memo, there has been a steep increase in the use of the passive voice when speaking about Israeli crimes in Lebanon and Palestine, as opposed to using the active voice to describe even the slightest inconvenience to Israelis.

For example, the BBC reported on one of Israel’s airstrikes in the southern suburbs of Beirut with the headline “Explosion heard in Beirut,” failing to mention the perpetrator, the nature of the explosion, or the devastating impact it had on the city. Meanwhile, the same outlet reported Iran’s missile salvo launched toward Tel Aviv by stating, “Israel’s military says missiles launched from Iran towards Israel “a short while ago” as sirens heard across the country.” This reporting exposes the perpetrator, clearly defines the kind of attack, and specifies the initial effects it had. Using the passive voice, these platforms portray our plight as abstract occurrences rather than deliberate crimes, creating a detachment from the terror and distance between the audience and the victims who do not exist in this terminology.

It is beyond infuriating that much of the reporting on Palestinian suffering adopts the passive voice. It is a deliberate plot to create emotional distance and make their reality feel abstract, while also failing to hold Israel accountable https://t.co/VSjhyNWmCP
— Mike Bankole 🍉 (@DrMikeBankole) October 23, 2024

Post by Mike Bankole on X

Second, in the rare cases that these outlets do mention the perpetrator, Israel (not out of goodwill but because the headline would not make structural sense without it), they resort to euphemisms and synonyms to obscure the moral and legal ramifications of Israel’s crimes.

While monitoring Western media this year, I learned countless ways of circumventing the use of the word “invasion”. This becomes clear through examples that compare Israel’s ground invasion of Rafah in Gaza and South Lebanon with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While The New York Times and CNN called Russia’s offensive in Ukraine in 2022 a “full-scale invasion”, they called Israel’s invasion of Rafah and South Lebanon “sending troops in” and a “ground operation”. What these outlets refer to as a “ground operation” includes the invasion, cleansing, destruction, and potential occupation of the areas of the “operation.” Dehumanization here is formulated through language manipulation that makes the audience accept international law violations, by framing these actions in a way that makes them both innocent and justified.

Third, Western media outlets have resorted to fostering heinous selective sympathy by only shedding light on Israeli victims (often members of the Israeli Occupation Forces), creating a hierarchy of suffering where Lebanese and Palestinian lives are worth less than others. Right after the events of October 7, 2023, Western media outlets rushed to humanize the victims by telling the full story of each and what they “fought for” during their lifetime, depicting settlers as pioneers of peace who devoted their lives for good. A website called October 7 was set up with eyewitness stories to create a resource to recount the (victims’) stories from that day. After that, an $18 book was launched, which serves as a collection of “survivor stories.” All this was done to show a largely Western audience that the victims were people of the same race, culture, or even nationality as theirs, which is likely to trigger empathy toward them and outrage toward those allegedly responsible for their deaths.

Meanwhile, these outlets not only view our people as numbers that take up a small corner of the screen, but they even try to invalidate our dead: This is notably apparent in their description of Gaza’s Health Ministry as “Hamas-run”, which insinuates that the ministry cannot be relied on and the numbers are unconfirmed and likely convoluted. Even in a mere number, our deaths are trivialized and ignored, for these numbers are never accompanied by their righteous stories.

CNN published a piece today about Israeli soldiers returning from Gaza. One bulldozer driver testifies that they drove over Palestinians, dead and alive, "in the hundreds". This is genocidal and just breathtakingly evil. pic.twitter.com/5XxXCoKv2r
— Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) October 21, 2024

Post by Jason Hickel on X

Taking dehumanization a step further, Caroline Glick, who hosts a self-titled podcast, engaged in the complete dehistoricization of Lebanon, claiming the country does not exist and that we (the Lebanese people) are only pretending to live there. It is important here to mention that this woman, who sees herself as able to deny the existence of our country, holds Israeli citizenship.

State-sanctioned dehumanization

During the Holocaust, the Nazi regime used dehumanizing propaganda to justify the genocide of the Jewish people by stripping them of their humanity. Similarly, by adopting the same rhetoric, the leading actor in the dehumanization of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Arab people today is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He has paved a path that his fellow ministers and Western allies have gladly taken to legitimize Israel’s war crimes. Netanyahu’s actions follow the footsteps of successive Israeli governments, who have never viewed Palestinians as human beings.

In October of last year, Netanyahu framed the wars against both Gaza and Lebanon as a clash between civilization and barbarism. He has repeated this dehumanizing comparison several times, like in the US Senate in July, which was met with a standing ovation, and more recently in a speech on October 6. The “barbarism” which he speaks of refers to children, women, and men in Palestine and Lebanon who dare oppose Israel.

The strategic use of the term implies that we are a problem that needs to be eliminated– a threat to Israel’s “civilization”. Western audiences– many of whom already view our people as barbarians incapable of adapting to modern life due to decades of Orientalism– who listen to these speeches (always given in English), absorb this language that makes it more acceptable for us, the dehumanized people, to receive the worst forms of treatment. More dehumanizing language used by Netanyahu includes calling Gaza a “city of evil,” framing the genocide against Palestinians as a “struggle between the children of light and children of darkness,” and constant Holocaust revisionism.

The Israeli Prime Minister not only portrays us as military adversaries that must be defeated, but also as spiritual and religious threats. In this case, Israelis are the righteous defenders of the holy order who have a necessary religious obligation to eliminate us.

This is clearest in his now-famous speech, where he contextualized the genocide of the Palestinians in the framework of the battle against the Amalek, the enemy nation of Israelites who God asked King Saul to exterminate. This speech was one of the pieces of evidence presented as part of South Africa’s genocide ICJ case against Israel. The language resonated heavily with the Jewish Israeli society that quickly adopted this narrative and came to see their government’s massacres in Palestine and Lebanon as acts of salvation and anyone who opposed them as a traitor to religion. This alone makes Israeli society just as complicit in its government’s war crimes.

Netanyahu does not act alone, of course, his vile language only the tip of the iceberg. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has taken it upon himself to distance the international public from the massacres against civilians by claiming that his army is fighting “human animals,” to excuse the complete siege of Gaza.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly." pic.twitter.com/KHs5qo1K7c
— PALESTINE ONLINE 🇵🇸 (@OnlinePalEng) October 9, 2023

Post by Palestine Online on X

Further, former Minister of Defense Avigdor Liberman claimed there are “no innocents in Gaza.” Among countless racist and dehumanizing remarks, Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, notably asserted: “My right, my wife’s, my children’s, to roam the roads of Judea and Samaria are more important than the right of movement of the Arabs.” The Israeli Occupation Forces call massive human casualties “collateral damage” to justify massacring civilians to kill Hamas militants.

All these statements feed into genocidal incitement. I also believe that they transcend dehumanization to a level that has yet to be defined. Animals (as Gallant has called us) are typically cared for and respected. We are seen as inanimate objects—stones at most, that fall as rubble does when a house is demolished.

The dehumanizing language used by Israeli officials has set a precedent for its allied governments to adopt similar rhetoric. The ripple effect has given credibility to Israel’s narrative of fighting the forces of evil (who happen to constitute the entire populations of Gaza and Lebanon), stripping the government’s support of any shame.

Take Israel’s leading political, military, and economic ally, the United States of America, for example. Since October 2023, US President Joe Biden has been questioning the death toll in Gaza by saying he has “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using”. He has also framed the genocide in Gaza and the war against Lebanon as fueled by “ancient hatred” that Arabs of the region have against Jewish people (with that, shifting the responsibility of perpetrating a genocide to the population undergoing the genocide). The White House has shown full support for Israel by frequently denying conducting a formal assessment of Israel’s war crimes. After Israel dropped 2000 pounds of American bombs on the southern suburbs of Beirut to kill former Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, both Joe Biden and his Vice President Kamala Harris released statements celebrating the attacks, not once mentioning how everyone inside the six flattened buildings was vaporized, with no trace of their corpses in sight.

Dehumanization has thus become a tool used by the US government and its European allies to continue providing Israel with billions of dollars in military aid to “defend itself against terrorists.” This has obscured any path toward holding Israel accountable for its war crimes since the US and its allies will always provide any needed diplomatic cover for Israel to continue its massacres against us –the “human animals”, the inanimate objects, the statistics.

What makes one human?

Since October 7, 2023, we have been called collateral damage, human animals, children of darkness, barbarians, stateless, nameless, and ancient haters of the Jewish people. These terms represent a minuscule batch in a larger collection of dehumanizing terms that have been used against us since our colonization by Western empires (I recommend reading the works of Edward Said for a deeper exploration of this).

What we have not been given the luxury of being, however, is innocent humans. So, what makes one living in Lebanon or Palestine a human being? There are two answers, both equally horrifying.

The first horrifying answer is that, to transcend to the level of a human being, one must unequivocally support an expansionist, settler-colonial ethnostate and seek peace with its society of Zionist extremists.

The even more horrifying answer is that we will never be human beings in the eyes of Western leaders, Western media, and a large portion of Western society.

Therefore, being human is not natural. It is not passed on genetically. People of certain nationalities are not born with it. While our people, including our policymakers, view Western citizens as equal human beings and sympathize with their suffering, we are not afforded the same in return. These actors dehumanize us as a result of a military-industrial-media complex that Israel and its allies have spent decades building. This complex is based on a simple equation: if our suffering is not acknowledged, the world is not forced to act.

I do not believe in challenging this insidious phenomenon, nor going out of my way to prove my humanity to the Western Man. I will never force anyone to acknowledge my dreams, goals, feelings, emotions, and basic rights. I will also never reciprocate this dehumanization because it is not how our people view the world (and because it will only increase the number of airstrikes destroying my village).

Breaking this cycle of dehumanization requires a radical rethinking of global power structures, and that is something out of my current capacity as an internally displaced individual. What I can do is encourage my Lebanese and Palestinian counterparts to refrain from asking for help from those who will never view us as human beings.

Jad Dilati

Jad serves as the MENA Program Coordinator at Minority Rights Group where his work focuses on advocating for the rights of ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities in the MENA region and implementing projects that build the capacity of civil society organizations working toward securing their rights. He has previously worked as a researcher on freedom of expression and press in the levant. Jad holds a master’s degree in Conflict, Governance, and International Development from the University of East Anglia and a bachelor’s degree in Political Studies from the American University of Beirut.