Afreen Zehra and Snigdha Singh
The Electronic Intifada / January 21, 2025
News of tragic casualties in Gaza became disturbingly routine during the genocide. Yet these losses, no matter how heart-wrenching, were reduced to a mere statistic – part of the more than 47,000 Palestinians killed by Israel since 7 October 2023.
This jarring realization raises an urgent question: How have we, as fellow humans, allowed such massive loss of life to occur? Didn’t we say “never again?”
At the core of this tragedy lies a simple but devastating concept: dehumanization. It’s the process by which individuals or groups are stripped of their human qualities, denied their emotions and dispossessed of their very humanity.
This insidious process enables atrocities like the genocidal assault on Gaza and the persistent oppression of Palestinians.
Thus, understanding the ongoing violence requires a deep examination of the mechanics of dehumanization. This is crucial, not only for ending atrocities but also to prevent any in the future.
Dehumanization is a complex psychological process that includes cognitive, emotional and behavioural aspects.
Cognitively, dehumanization requires individuals to strip others of their “human” qualities, often manifesting as viewing them as less intelligent, cultured or morally developed. This is evident in the portrayals of Palestinians as inherently immoral, violent or incapable of self-governance.
For instance, Israeli politicians have framed Palestinian society as one that “sanctifies death” or have referred to Palestinians as “children of darkness”, terrorists, rapists and “Khamas”.This mirrors oppressive language used by Nazis against Jews and by Hutu extremists against the Tutsi tribe and reinforces the perception that these people are less than human.
The emotional aspect of dehumanization involves a lack of empathy and feelings of disgust towards the targeted group. A stark example of this is found in a cartoon published by Libération, a prominent French newspaper, in March 2024.
The cartoon, which depicts Palestinians in Gaza during Ramadan as grotesque, subhuman caricatures, garnered an astonishing 7 million views on X (formerly Twitter). Under the guise of satire, these portrayals subtly enable viewers to emotionally distance themselves from genuine human suffering.
This detachment, in turn, facilitates the dismissal or justification of violence.
Research in social neuroscience has shown how dehumanized groups evoke reduced activation in brain regions that are associated with empathy and social cognition. This correlates to a decreased tendency to understand the emotional experience of the dehumanized individuals, further exacerbating the emotional distance.
The consequence of this is an impenetrable inability to empathize with suffering, something that we are witnessing in the widespread indifference to Palestinian pain around the world.
The behavioural consequences of dehumanization are perhaps the most alarming.
Albert Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement elucidates how individuals can selectively disengage their moral self-sanctions from inhumane conduct, which enables them to commit cruel acts. In the current context, this is manifested in several ways, including inaccurate attribution of blame, advantageous comparisons and moral justifications.
For instance, Israel has termed civilian homes in Gaza as “power targets” and civilian deaths as “collateral damage”. Everything is justified as necessary for security or self-defense regardless of the human cost.
Further, there is a displacement and diffusion of responsibilities, and people are less likely to demand justice or punishment when dehumanized groups are harmed.
A subtler form of dehumanization is infra-humanization, which involves denying the dehumanized group the capacity for complex emotions and motivations, instead assigning to them emotions that are felt by animals. This manifests in several ways, including minimizing and delegitimizing Palestinians’ grief and suffering.
Another instance of this is the stark contrasting Western perception of Palestinian and Ukrainian resistance. While Ukrainians are praised for their bravery, Palestinian resistance is labelled terrorism.
This discrepancy reveals an underlying assumption that Palestinians are less capable of noble or complex motivations in their struggle. Additionally, sympathy is only extended to Palestinians when they are passive, polite victims who want “peace”, not when they resist their oppression, denying them the full range of emotions and responses to injustice.
Another instance of infra-humanization is the well-documented gender bias in Western media narratives, where Palestinian men are seen as incapable of victimhood. This portrayal draws from long-standing Orientalist tropes that characterize these men as inherently aggressive individuals prone to terrorist acts.
It also very conveniently ignores the complex realities of life under occupation and the multifaceted roles that Palestinian men play in their families and communities. By framing them as inherently dangerous, these narratives dehumanize Palestinian men and justify violence against them.
Media perpetuate dehumanization of Palestinians
The media play a crucial role in perpetuating the dehumanization of Palestinians, as they often employ subtle yet powerful techniques to skew public perception.
Simply using the passive voice when reporting Palestinian casualties (“Palestinians died” rather than “Israel killed Palestinians”) diminishes the violence happening to Palestinians and paints the events in a non-agentic light.
But media outlets have been far more complicit in spreading Israeli propaganda. For example, stories with false, questionable or unsubstantiated evidence like that of the systematic use of sexual violence by Hamas soldiers or 40 beheaded babies were published and circulated by many outlets, reinforcing negative stereotypes and serving to justify violence against Palestinians.
This is further seen through the reluctance of Western media to label the situation in Gaza as genocide despite the high civilian death toll, revealing a deep-seated bias. This hesitancy suggests that Palestinian lives are worth less than others in similar conflicts.
Why we need to be highly critical of media using these narratives is because, even if people don’t fully believe these harmful narratives, their pervasiveness increases the perceived risks of disagreeing with these views, effectively silencing any opposition. The normalization of these perspectives creates a societal environment where dehumanizing attitudes become acceptable.
Digital echo chambers and social media algorithms often amplify these issues, reinforcing and exasperating dehumanizing attitudes and biases, leading to what’s known as the “spiral of silence”. This has also led to desensitization to Palestinian suffering.
Research shows that as the number of victims in a crisis increases, people’s empathy and willingness to help actually decreases, a phenomenon termed “psychic numbing.” This can lead to a reduced willingness to intervene in humanitarian crises.
Psychological impact of dehumanization
Dehumanization is important to address not only because it kills people, but also because its psychological damage ripples through communities and across generations, creating deep wounds that affect how people live, relate to others, and see themselves.
In Palestinians, dehumanization has led to severe trauma, with more than 50 percent of children in Gaza meeting the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder long before Israel began its genocidal war in October 2023.
There are also effects of subtler forms of discrimination manifested as internalized feelings of worthlessness, and a pervasive sense of threat, that impact cognitive and emotional development. The trauma is not limited to those directly experiencing violence, but also vicarious exposure to violence, and it is passed down through generations.
Moreover, the constant dehumanizing treatment has led to collective exposure to trauma and violence, which affects Palestinians’ sense of coherence and social fabric. This collective trauma also manifests in various ways, from heightened aggression to learned helplessness, further complicating efforts at peacebuilding and reconciliation.
“I am because we are,” or the African concept of ubuntu is a valuable lens for understanding the interpersonal nature of dehumanization. Dehumanization reduces the humanity of both victims and perpetrators, which becomes highly relevant in understanding the current context.
Dehumanization leads to distorted self-perceptions among both victims, who might internalize negative perceptions, and the perpetrators, who reported cognitive dissonance, moral injury, and PTSD. Dehumanizing Palestinians has led to a “siege mentality” for Israeli society which can further reinforce dehumanizing attitudes as a defensive mechanism, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of fear and aggression.
The dehumanization of Palestinians is one of the most pressing issues of our time. Allowing this catastrophe is a moral injury for all of us, but it can also be a catalyst for change.
Education that fosters critical thinking and empathy, media literacy that challenges harmful narratives, and initiatives that amplify Palestinian voices, are all avenues we can work towards for re-humanization. While often complicit and active in perpetuating injustice, popular movements have the potential to pressure their governments to hold Israel accountable and bolster aid efforts for Palestine.
This task remains urgent even if a ceasefire has now come into effect in Gaza.
This is also not merely an academic exercise or distant geopolitical issue but an imperative that touches the core of our humanity. As the poet Mahmoud Darwish states, “We have on this earth what makes life worth living.”
By committing ourselves to re-humanization, and by making the world see and value Palestinian lives, we can honour this truth. Although the path will be challenging and require us to confront painful histories, challenge systemic powers and take difficult actions, we will move closer to a world where human dignity, justice, and peace are not distant dreams.
Only then can we truly claim to have learned from history.
Afreen Zehra is a psychologist from Kashmir
Snigdha Singh is a psychology student at the University of Delhi
