“Despite prior coordination with Israeli authorities their clearly-marked vehicle was bombed,” Oxfam says.
It’s gotten to the point where the only advantage to sharing your coordinates with the IDF as an aid worker in Gaza is that it will allow the historical records to show that they knew exactly what they were doing when they used those coordinates to kill you.
Israeli forces found and killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar by accident while they were just randomly destroying parts of Gaza, and then they methodically targeted and killed four water engineers on purpose. These two facts alone tell you everything you need to know about what Israel is really doing in Gaza.
The answer to the question “How can Israeli soldiers carry out such monstrous acts?” is the same as the answer to the question “Why do IDF troops keep filming themselves dressing in the underwear of dead or displaced Palestinian women?” The answer is because of the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians in Israel.
Because Israel is a fundamentally unjust state established on fundamentally unjust principles, it is necessary for its citizenry to be indoctrinated from birth into a fundamentally unjust worldview. In order for it to make sense for there to be a society where one group is treated one way and another group is treated another way just because of their religion and ethnicity, Israelis must be raised to see Palestinians as less than human. As less than animals. As less than vermin. They need to be hated with ferocious intensity.
It’s evil, but it’s also the only way to make Israel work. Otherwise the idea of a “Jewish state” that was dropped on top of a pre-existing civilization of non-Jews makes no sense, and would not have the consent of the public. This fantasy that western liberals have of a fair and gentle Israel without apartheid abuses and endless violence is just that: a fantasy. It has never existed, it will never exist, and it cannot exist, because the idea is inherently self-contradictory.
Fantasizing about the idea of a fair and just Israel is like living in the American south during slavery and fantasizing about the possibility of slaves one day being treated kindly and fairly in a liberal utopia where cotton plantation owners are still able to reap immense profits because they don’t have to pay their workforce. It cannot happen, because it’s a contradiction in terms. The thing the plantation owners would be getting necessarily comes at the expense of someone else’s human rights.
Which is why slave owners all harbored dehumanizing beliefs about people of African descent, and taught those beliefs to their children. If you don’t believe that people with dark skin are fundamentally different from people with pale skin, then there’s no way to reconcile the fact that they’re receiving vastly different treatment in your society in a way that makes logical and moral sense. Phrenology and other pseudosciences were geared toward squaring these circles in people’s minds.
That’s all we’re looking at when we see the seething hatred that Israelis have toward Palestinians. That’s why we see Israeli soldiers playing with the toys of dead Palestinian children and dressing in the undergarments of dead Palestinian women in gleeful mockery. That’s why Israelis made TikTok videos making fun of Palestinians being slaughtered in Gaza. It’s why clicking “translate” on a social media post made in Hebrew is often like reading a page out of Mein Kampf. This is simply what it looks like when you construct a society around fundamentally unjust principles.
And what’s really creepy is that we see that same dehumanization here in the west. It’s to a lesser extent because our involvement in the crime is less intimate, but we see the dehumanization of Palestinians all around us in the way Palestinian deaths are treated very differently by the western political-media class than Israeli deaths. Palestinian deaths are a statistic, while Israeli deaths are personal. Palestinians die in numbers, while Israelis die with names. Palestinians die in a terrible humanitarian disaster of unspecified nature, while Israelis are butchered in a sadistic act of terrorism. Palestinians perish in Israel’s war of self-defense, while Israelis are killed by monsters who hate Jews.
And the reason for the dehumanization of Palestinians in the west is the same as the reason for the dehumanization of Palestinians in Palestine: because otherwise our society doesn’t make sense. If Palestinians are just as human as we are, then it doesn’t make sense for our governments to be backing mass atrocities we would never accept in our own neighborhoods. There needs to be something less than about them. Something unworthy.
The abuses of the western empire are constructed around this kind of dehumanization, because the empire is held together by mass military violence and abuse inflicted upon populations in the global south. Without all this war, militarism and imperialist extraction, the giant globe-spanning power structure that’s centralized around Washington cannot exist. So a highly sophisticated propaganda machine has been put together to explain why all this killing, abuse and exploitation is actually fine and normal, in the same way phrenology was used to justify slavery before abolition in the United States, and in the same way Zionist indoctrination is used in apartheid Israel.
A civilization that is premised upon injustice depends upon unjust worldviews. It’s true in Israel, and it’s true throughout the western empire. That’s why our information ecosystem looks the way it looks right now.
