Israelis aren't unique in their cruelty. Although I can think of only a few recent examples such as the Rohingya in Burma, or the Tutsis in Rwanda, looking at American history reveals centuries of similar horrors.
The 400 year genocide of indigenous Americans included regular massacres like Wounded Knee, bounties placed on Natives' scalps, driving them off their land, raping their women, forbidding them fishing and hunting, depriving them of drinking water, polluting their land, clear-cutting their forests.
American colonists' crimes started long before there was a United States. When Columbus "discovered" the West Indies in 1492, his men enslaved the native people and worked them to death mining gold.
When Europeans settled in North America, the Natives wouldn't be enslaved, so settlers drove them away. They brought in millions of Africans to do the work, brutalizing them in ways that go beyond anything we've seen in Palestine until recently.
Not just the leaders
It's not only colonial leaders who turn into monsters. Their people often do, too, probably because they marinate all their lives in propaganda that provokes fear and hate. Surveys show a large majority of Israelis cheer on the ob literation of Gaza and want to see more.
Similarly, older Americans might remember people shouting 'Nuke them' at Arab countries during the oil embargo of 1973, or saying 'Turn it into a parking lot' of any country who resisted US dominance, like Iran during the takeover of the US embassy in 1979.
How many innocents would be killed in turning a country of 80 million into a parking lot? It seems Americans don't care. Not everyone, of course, but many people living in a colonial culture adopt its contempt for the colonized.
How to become a monsterIf you want to become a monster, you can follow the American and Israeli script in five ways. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy argued that three factors create a monster mindset in Israelis: chosenness , victimhood, and dehumanization of the other.
1.Think of yourself as special. Levy points to surveys showing that most Israelis think of Jews as specially chosen by God. Other monsters have felt similarly. Hitler's Nazis considered Germans the "master race," better than anyone else. President Ronald Reagan called America "the shining city on the hill." 19th century leaders proclaimed America's "manifest destiny" to conquer.
2. Having established your superiority, dehumanize the inferior others. They don't suffer, think, or feel like you do. Killing or oppressing them is an unfortunate necessity, like the way we treat animals, and may even be for their own good.
Israeli leaders have regularly described Palestinians as "a cancer," "vermin," "dirty," "primitive" and called for them to be "annihilated," language that reminds journalist Chris McGeal, who covered the Rwandan genocide, of the terms used by Hutus to describe Tutsis.
You might call them hyenas, as my Medium critic did, or you might use the less evocative but equally dehumanizing term "terrorist." Hamas are never people; they are always terrorists.
"Terrorist" has become a label used to slander anyone who stands against the colonizer. In several American states, opposing the operations of factory farms is legally classed as terrorism. Yemenis are called terrorists for blocking Israel-bound ships, but Israelis are never called terrorists for bombing neighborhoods full of children.
Levy says, "If Palestinians are not human, then there is no question of human rights. If you scratch under the surface of every Israeli, you will find that almost no one treats the Palestinians as human." Dehumanization is crucial to becoming an effective monster.
3. But don't stop there. Demonize those you wish to put down. Attribute the worst of crimes and the most vile of motivations to the other. Call unarmed protestors potential killers and shoot them down, as Israel did in the 2018 Great March of Return in Gaza, or attribute unspeakable crimes to them, as they do to Hamas every day. These stories don't have to be true; they resonate with people primed all their lives to hate.
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