Dehumanisation

Ref: ADS-24

Summary: on the 80^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz the world remembers and honours the six million murdered by the Nazis, a crime which was enabled by dehumanisation.

The American philosopher David Livingston Smith’s book Less Than Human is an exploration of how the process of dehumanisation undertaken by states such as Nazi Germany creates a landscape where cruelty and genocide prevail.

In Hitler’s Germany this entailed an official campaign to treat Jews as subhuman, as “vermin” in propaganda exercises designed to engage and incorporate ordinary citizens into the atrocities that culminated in the ultimate horror of the holocaust.

In a 2011 interview with NPR Smith noted “when people dehumanise others, they actually conceive of them as subhuman creatures,” and once that line is crossed aggression is “liberated” and the target of aggression is “excluded from the moral community.”

Addressing the Senate on 20 March 2024 Bernie Sanders noted in his speech the comments the then Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant had made shortly after the 7 October Hamas attack.

We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly . . . There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.

Sanders went on to say:

Well, he has kept his word. In many parts of Gaza today, there is no electricity or fuel. Hospitals have been destroyed, and water infrastructure has been made inoperable. 

Of course it is wrong to make a direct comparison between what the Nazis did to the Jews and what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people today. However the point that the philosopher, Smith, makes about dehumanisation is worthy of consideration.

Israel justifies the way in which it has chosen to prosecute its war by arguing that Hamas uses civilians as human shields and hospitals and school as “command centres.” In fighting Hamas Prime Minister Netanyahu said “I can tell you categorically there is no army in the world that acts in a more moral fashion than the army of Israel.” In the official Israeli version the IDF does all it can to avoid civilian casualties and regrets when those casualties occur. And when they do it is Hamas fighters, what Gallant called “human animals”, who are to blame.

Not everyone in Israel subscribes to the official version. Dr Guy Shalev is the Executive Director of Physicians for Human Rights. In the Second intifada (2000-2005) he was an officer in an elite IDF commando unit:

As a soldier I was a super-Zionist, full of ambition. I believed in the army wholeheartedly. I felt the same after my discharge. And in the reserves. In hindsight, it’s been hard for me to understand how few questions I had. I had no criticism of the army. I simply surrendered myself to the system.

He says that disillusionment came slowly and only over a number of years. Asked about conditions in what remains of Gaza’s bombed and shattered hospitals Dr Shalev spoke about a child:

I’ll tell you about Rafiq, a boy of 15 who came to Shifa Hospital [in Gaza City] with his sister. He was hospitalised and one leg was amputated. When the army invaded Shifa, they concentrated all the patients in one structure, expelled the escorts and part of the medical teams, and for two weeks focused on fighting Hamas in the hospital…. The patients begged for someone to look after Rafiq. They told [the soldiers]: Leave us, just help this boy. They told them: We’ll evacuate him. They took him and just locked him in some room. Only after the army left was he found there in the room. A boy alone. Dying. I don’t want to describe the condition of the wound. The infections and the maggots.

Sde Teiman is a detention centre in the Negev Desert that has held thousands of Palestinian prisoners both Hamas fighters and civilians since the beginning of the war. The Haaretz journalist Shay Fogelman conducted interviews with soldiers and medical professionals who had served at Sde Teiman. The details are deeply shocking and disturbing. Prisoners are shackled 24 hours a day, blindfolded, ordered not to speak and forced to sit without moving for hours on end.

Any infractions, even the most trivial, can result in severe beatings and in at least one case a brutal sexual assault.

A few brief excerpts from the lengthy interviews compiled by Haaretz:

Dr. L., a physician in a public hospital

Why shackle the legs of a person with a two-day-old stomach wound? The hands aren’t enough? …. The first shifts were very hard. But afterward it doesn’t create the same level of tension anymore. There’s nothing you can do. There’s the same stimulus, all the time. The brain gets used to it.

 T., 37, a reservist from the north

During the day they were not allowed to lie down; at night they’re not allowed to sit. Standing was not allowed at all without authorization. And they’re not allowed to talk. Most of the time they would sit with arms shackled, and blindfolded. Actually, not most – they’re like that all the time, day and night.

 And there was something else. Force 100 (IDF military unit) would take something like 10 people from each lockup. They came with lists and knew who the people were. They took those guys aside and really laid into them…. I think that each time teeth were broken, bones were broken. 

 A., student and reservist in the military police

I relied on the idea that the bigger system knows what it needs to do and why it needed me there. I trust the army. And everything I saw at Sde Teiman looked to me, all in all, very logical, under the circumstances.

What was so dramatic about that moment (hearing the story of a weeping prisoner)?

The detainee’s story, and the fact that he started to cry in the end. It was a very human and surprising display after all the preparation and the things they tell you there. They keep pumping it into your brain that you have to disconnect. That they’re not people. That they’re not human beings.

Who said things like that?

The guys, the company commander, the officers, everyone. You know, there was a female officer who gave us a briefing on the day we arrived. She said, ‘It will be hard for you. You’ll want to pity them, but it’s forbidden. Remember that they aren’t people. From your point of view, they are not human beings. The best thing is to remember who they are and what they did in October.’

 A., student and reservist, from Be’er Sheva

What most disturbed me was to see how easily and how quickly ordinary people can disconnect themselves and not see the reality right in front of their eyes, when they’re in the midst of a shocking human situation.

Y., a female member of a medical team

I wasn’t there to judge. That’s the reality I encountered. Once a day the duty person would come to the hospital to check that none of the handcuffs was too tight. That they weren’t slicing the flesh….I didn’t know a thing about my patients, even those there for a long time. We were given a prisoner number. When I returned to work as usual in my department, after a period at Sde Teiman, I was happy. What a joy to know my patients’ names.

No names for the detainees in Sde Teiman. Blindfolded so no eyes to look into. No talking so no words to listen to. Only a number. And the path to dehumanisation, to genocide becomes just that little bit easier to follow.