An Israeli soldier would place his leg against the wall on the narrow corridor to our school, then he would order us: “Pass under my leg, or without school.”
That was a recurring event for children in the early 1990s in our Al-Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza, the “beach camp”.
It led us to grow to understand it as systematic humiliation, an experience that would define most of our meetings with the Israeli army. That left many of us feeling helpless and outraged, since it seemed an attack on our humanity.
That is why when former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called us “Khayot Adam“(Human animals) After the bloody attack of Hamas on October 7, 2023, it was not a surprise. However, this time, there was a disturbing feeling that Gallant was thinking beyond the typical Israeli dehumanization of us.
“It was a prelude to dismantle what was left of us as people,” Yousri Al-Goul, a novelist from Gaza, about WhatsApp, told me in one of the many ongoing conversations that I maintain with contacts, friends and family in Gaza.
Throughout history, dehumanization preceded and justified atrocities. The Nazis before the Shoah and the Hutu against the Tutsi before the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
Before the beginning of Israel in 1948, the Zionist movement in Palestine denied our national conscience, simply calling us “Arabs”, suggestion An absence of a unique identity. And seeing us a lot as the colonial powers saw their subjects, they perceived us as inferior and less worthy of the status of state.
Many Israelis today see the Palestinians as Palestinians, a town with an identity, but still cling, at least unconsciously, to the notion of superior Israeli Jews. This hierarchical thinking has normalized the occupation, so that the Palestinian resistance against it is perceived as aggression against the natural order.
Decades of undermining our agency has evolved to a monstrous level, destroying what was left of our physical existence. Apparently, now it is not enough to besiege, bombard indiscriminately, move and die of hunger. Now we are asked to die for food.
“They attracted us to the death traps labeled as humanitarian aid,” says Ahmed, a History Master in Gaza, referring to the new food distribution system under the Humanitarian Foundation of Gaza.
“Even our bodies, the last grass of dignity, are reduced to breathing corpses,” he added.
“Corpses” is the word general commissioner of the UN Aid Agency for Palestinians, Philippe Lazzarini, accustomed to describe Gazans. Citing a colleague in Gaza, he said that “they are not dead or alive, they are corpses.”
This is a metaphor that my uncle, a professor of English literature, has used to describe the Gazanes under the Israeli siege since 2007. He cited “The Waste Land” by TS Eliot to paint an image of a gaza wrapped with despair and spiritual aridity.
For Ahmed, “the bodies are not people, so there is no compunction killing them.”
In fact, Gaza's War is the bloodiest in recent memory. Palestinian numbers He points out 59,000, including 18,000 children, killed by the Israeli army as of July. TO study For the University of London estimates that the death toll is 100,000.
More than 85% of those who remain alive are displacedtight only in 20% of the narrow strip of earth. Many They face the famine, while the rest takes months of sustained malnutrition.
A serious situation has weakened the sense of itself of many Gazans. They don't care if they live or die, many have told me.
More than a thousand aid applicants were killed while trying to reach the distribution sites of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, but people still knew they would not return. “American contractors who handle help treat our despair as savagery, and the IDF shoot us as rats,” said Ahmed angry, referring to Israel's defense forces.
And the most famous and private people become, less “like us” appear.
Al-Ghoul, the novelist, lamented how the “hunger games” turned some people with each other, driven by basic survival instincts. He added: “Do not talk to me about courtesy when my children fade into the skin and bone.”
Meanwhile, Gaza's writer, Mahmoud Assaf, told me that as Gaza's society fractures, “personal survival exceeds everything. Very few people are now worried about culture, education or morality, the things that the Palestinians typically take pride.”
Assaf was offered money to sell its appreciated library to burn as fuel in the absence of products or basic oil based on oil. “I really considered the offer to feed my children,” he said.
“You lose your soul by jumping hungry from one tent of displacement to another while it is grazing by Israeli drones and tanks. You feel that you do not deserve to live,” he added.
But in the ocean of despair, there are those who find salvation in faith to claim part of their humanity.
My 65 -year -old mother is losing strength to walk due to malnutrition, while I see helpless from the United Kingdom, but she tells everyone to maintain faith, because through faith “he feels complete as a human being.”
A comforting perspective for many Palestinians, in a world they feel, has abandoned them.
“The world says that the holocaust happened because they did not know. But Gaza's blood spill is broadcast live,” my friend Murad told me.
He added: “What can I do to show that my humanity is worthy of saving?”
“Should I show you my blonde daughter with blue eyes so that they can relate to us? How are our malnourished cats?”
Our conversation was after an Israeli air attack killed Murad's sister and her family in Al-Shuja'iyya, a neighborhood in the city of eastern Gaza. We talked while looking for water to wash after hours excavating the family of his sister of the rubble.
Murad's niece, 5, died of malnutrition a week ago.
And like all Gazanes, he is deprived of crying his loved ones. “There is no time to cry,” he said, because one has to close human instincts so natural to physically survive.
And in doing so, one loses part of his soul, the meaning of the self as a human being.
To close the dehumanization circle, they deny our right to feel pain.
Emad Moussa is Palestine British researcher and writer specialized in the political psychology of intergroup and conflict dynamics.
