Hala Ayan
The Guardian / August 19, 2024
As we are saturated with horror, it gets normalized – and Israel’s assault continues unfettered. A Palestinian American poet on dehumanization
Back in May, when the image of a decapitated child in Rafah started circulating, my friend texted: This is the image. This is the one. Now the world’s going to roar. For many of us, this has been the reality of the last months: waiting for the image that will shake complacency and complicity; waiting for the image so staggering it’ll be non-negotiable. An amputated toddler. A blown-apart body. A girl hanging from the side of a building. We are still waiting.
Dehumanization is a prerequisite of most forms of violence. Well before a bomb drops on a school where children are sheltering – because you ordered them there to shelter – you have to make that act acceptable. The more dead, starving, weeping, and shredded Palestinian bodies the public sees, the more the brain becomes psychically numbed to them. Palestinians disappear into “hordes”, “masses”, numbers so high it becomes impossible to imagine their nicknames or favorite songs. The body of a Palestinian is a negotiable thing – a child becomes a “minor”. The dead become “alleged”, numbers in unreliable mouths. This is an old trick on brown and Black bodies: write them out of the imagination, age them up, refer to them in the collective. So when they are shredded, burned, lynched, assaulted, when we see a Black man beg for air, when we see the heaps of limbs in Abu Ghraib, we are conditioned to accept their fate as inevitable.
The most common critique of critiquing Israel hinges on exceptionalism: the idea that the state is unfairly criticized, held to a different standard, uniquely singled out. This is a fascinating inversion of the narrative of exceptionalism Israel uses on itself: its claim to the land is exceptional. Its citizens have an exceptional right to water and resources and freedom. Even its political framing is exceptional. It somehow gets to be both an ethno-religious state and a democracy. It gets to claim both modernity and a God-ordained right to power.
The actions of the last 10 months show a state that clearly believes in its immunity and right to external protection. We have seen a relentlessness on Gaza that is multidimensional, both militarily and psychologically, showing a tactical understanding of what induces hopelessness, burnout and psychic numbing: incessant bombing, blocking of aid, continuously shuffling civilians around in countless evacuation orders, and, perhaps most insidiously, dehumanizing Palestinians through policy and narrative. Gaza is cited as the most dangerous place to be a child. Gaza has the highest number of pediatric amputees in history. Gaza is the deadliest place to be a journalist since the Committee to Protect Journalists began collecting data. In 10 months, in the gestational period of human life, Gaza has become one of the most uninhabitable places on this planet.
There is a saturation point of horror, where the collective psyche either recoils or normalizes, where the metric for horror begins to shift. What’s another dead child in the face of twenty thousand? If you’ve already manufactured consent for slaughtering one bloodline, two, three, then another 10 won’t matter. On 17 October, it was a matter of intense debate whether Israel had bombed al-Ahli hospital, with countless talking heads and representatives rushing prime-time news to speak of self-defense and moral armies. Less than a year later, Israel has now openly and unflinchingly bombed dozens of hospitals, UN schools and every single university in Gaza. The goalpost of acceptable has moved at breakneck speed.
For those of us watching – to say nothing of those on the ground – the pursuit of Israeli or American-led accountability seems increasingly futile. Meanwhile, there is no Palestinian response to Israeli aggression that is acceptable. The long, vibrant history of Palestinian non-violent resistance – nearly always met with Israeli violence – is delegitimized or ignored. Boycott movements are labeled as offensive. Campus protesters in the spring, mostly peaceful and student-led, were cast as dangerous, foolish, or both, and eventually met with the national guard.
For nearly a year, this country’s administration has flirted with talk of red lines. But a red line that isn’t a red line is, ultimately, permission. The American rhetoric can be summarized in a single phrase parroted into microphones across this country: right to self-defense, right to self-defense, right to self-defense. To ask whether this right is applied evenly is tantamount to blasphemy, probably because the underlying question is who is granted the right to a self, to a body, to a life. And this is the most unspeakable question of all.
Meanwhile, Palestinians – even outside Gaza – live within a system where families wake up and find themselves summarily evicted, where they can be held in detention without charges indefinitely, where to seek accountability you must plead with the very system that oversaw the injustice. In recent weeks alone, Israeli parliamentarians defended the right to sexually assault Palestinian prisoners, Israeli protesters rioted in front of the Sde Teiman detention camp to prevent the arrest of soldiers for allegedly raping Palestinian prisoners, Israeli forces destroyed a water facility in Gaza, and two assassination attempts were made on foreign soil. Israel investigates itself, we are told in American press briefings. Israel has its vetted process. Then, months or years later, Israel has exonerated itself.
We societally love the concept of bad apples because we want to believe in social order. It is much harder to read stories about a dog mauling a man to death as he whimpered please, enough, my dear, about another refugee camp massacre, about Palestinian prisoners being sexually assaulted with fire extinguishers and electrical probes, and face the possibility that this might be the natural progression of an ideology that has never been forced to reckon with its abuses. That it might be a system, unfettered, carried out to the logical conclusion of its fundamental tenets of who deserves what kind of life.
Joe Biden’s stance on Gaza is one that Kamala Harris is inheriting. Many are holding their breath to see what she will do with what she has inherited. Many aren’t bothering to. What Harris has the opportunity to do now is represent her administration’s constituents and heed the call for accountability. Because the truth is that any breaching of international law – targeting hospitals, journalists, engaging in collective punishment – amounts to a rupture that shouldn’t just alarm Palestinians, but every entity and individual seeking to live under some sort of world order.
Unfettered power rarely self-corrects – and relies upon the strategic use of silence. Audre Lorde wrote: “We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.” Therein is the seed of true accountability: to be committed to it in the face of enormous cost.
Israelis do not have some unique claim to safety, no matter what their parliament or any American president says. Nor do Americans. We must not believe for a second that relentless dehumanization is only the problem of the dehumanized. They pay the unimaginable cost, but it is a multidirectional phenomenon. What oppressive systems don’t realize is that to engage in dehumanization – in thought, in speech, in action, in policy – is a slow and isolating exercise in the siphoning of your own humanity.
So many of Gaza’s children have been buried. Or orphaned. Or been found clutching their dolls under rubble. Or died of heart attacks from terror. So when Netanyahu, a man with a looming potential arrest warrant for war crimes, receives a standing ovation from our Congress, that’s not just Netanyahu’s legacy. That’s ours. And the time to amend it is getting narrower and narrower.
Hala Ayan is a Palestinian American writer, poet, and clinical psychologist
