Palestinians Have Dehumanized Themselves

By Uri Kurlianchik

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

 

When I was a boy, Israel was a leftist country. We had huge peace rallies, the Oslo Accords were celebrated as if they were going to save the world, and we even had a subject in school called “peace” in honor of the treaty with Jordan. People who were skeptical of this all-consuming love fest were viewed as crazy racists and messianic fanatics. To even suggest that not all societies wanted peace was seen as vulgar and uncouth. Nice people cried for the innocent on both sides. We could forgive the Arabs for killing our children, went one of the clichés, but not for making us kill theirs.

 

But then this euphoria of peace was followed by decades of barbarism — and that eroded the pity reserves of a majority of the Israeli people.

 

This shift wasn’t the result of anti-Arab propaganda. The media was firmly left-leaning and went out of its way to defend the Arabs after each new atrocity that was difficult to believe was done by humans. But the rest of us watched the near-universal celebrations that followed in Arab towns and villages and asked, “Where is this peace partner we were promised? What kind of a society are we expected to live side by side with?”

 

In the decades since the lofty dreams of Oslo, we’ve seen Jews torn to pieces with bare hands because they accidentally strayed into Ramallah in 2000. We saw Jews massacred in discothèques as in the Dolphinarium attack of 2001, slaughtered while celebrating Passover at the Park Hotel in Netanya in 2002, and on buses, as in the Beersheba suicide bombings of 2004. We saw a murderer who smashed a baby’s head in 1979 becoming an international hero after his release in 2008. We saw little girls butchered in their beds in Itamar in 2011.

 

People were mutilated, castrated, crippled — not as collateral damage, but meticulously, with sadistic precision, by an enemy who preferred to go after defenseless civilians, and who seemed to revel in atrocity, as if atrocity was an end in and of itself.

 

And each time, the Jack the Rippers responsible for these horrors were celebrated as heroes not just by the Arab communities they came from but by their radical allies in the West. Few stood up and said, “Guys, there are laws even in war.” No, when it came to hurting us, it was always, “by any means necessary” and “you don’t get to choose how they resist.” International laws were there to prevent us from protecting ourselves, never to protect us. Time after time, year after year, decade after decade, the enemy produced images of horror that even the most progressive Israeli peacenik couldn’t spin into anything other than what it was: the portrait of a savage society.

 

The change didn’t occur at once. But as time went on, we discovered that pity is a resource, and it’s finite.

 

Some Israelis started arguing that perhaps the Palestinians weren’t going to be the most reliable peace partners after all. At first, these ventures outside the Overton window were shut down within polite society. Then polite society started shrugging because it ran out of arguments in the face of mounting horror. The Oslo Accords were followed by an unprecedented wave of terror. The outstretched hand was met with a knife. How do you respond to that?

 

Then October 7 came, the ultimate exhibition of atrocities, the ultimate barbarity, its vivid details recorded and spread so ubiquitously that there was no chance to miss it. Shocked and hurt, the Jews who still had pity in their hearts learned that few had pity for them — from the celebrations in Gaza, to poll after poll showing the operation was overwhelmingly supported by the broader Palestinian population, to the moral decrepitude of the international community.

 

“You made it up! You did it to yourself! It was only military targets!” and other forms of sadistic gaslighting were smugly hurled at a grieving nation. “Where are the 40 beheaded babies? Ha ha!” “Jewish babies were burnt alive? With or without baking powder? Har har!”

 

The message was simple: “No matter what happens to you, you deserve no pity. Your very existence is a crime. Everything done to you is justified. Even to civilians, even to babies.”

 

This was the final straw. This was the moment the last shred of compassion for the enemy evaporated for most Israelis and our hearts became hard; hearts of survival, hearts of war.

 

And now, pseudointellectual demagogues talk about “the dehumanization of the Palestinians” — and condemn Israelis for not feeling more sympathy for Gazans. But they ignore the fact that it took 40 years of hard work and butchery to numb Israeli society to the suffering of our enemies.

 

Every day brings another grizzly reminder that whenever we think we’ve reached the depths of our enemies’ evil, they descend another level. As if it weren’t bad enough that they kidnapped Ariel and Kfir Bibas (who were four years old and nine months old at the time they were taken) along with their mother, Shiri, we now learn, based on Israeli forensic analysis, that the boys were murdered in captivity with bare hands. And as if that weren’t bad enough, Hamas returned an anonymous corpse that they tried to pass off as Shiri’s body. Only after Israel’s furious response did Hamas return the actual body of Shiri Bibas; she, like her children, had been murdered in captivity.

 

Will Israelis’ pity for the Palestinians ever return, or have we finally transformed into a new kind of nation? I don’t know.

 

What I do know is that when you treat people with pitiless barbarity for decades, don’t expect them to be compassionate toward you forever. And when your society celebrates the murder of an infant, you have dehumanized yourselves.