Are We Losing Our Humanity? Piecing together stories beyond the slogans and propaganada
Through the organization Standing Together, Ariel Bernstein memorializes her friend in Gaza, Kahlil Abu Yahia. They met over Zoom during an event called Solidarity of Nations where she spoke of her experience being a combatant in Gaza and Kahlil was a peace activist. “These days when someone dies, you have to declare what side of the wall they belong to before you’re granted permission to be sad,” she writes. Khalil had dreams of attending a university in England where he had been accepted. “When he spoke of freedom, his eyes lit up with a hypnotizing sparkle”. He was killed by an air strike in the south of Gaza on October 10th, 2023 in an area where he was supposed to be safe.
I’m not writing this piece to make an ‘All Lives Matter’ plea. I am not writing this piece because I have optimism for world peace or centrist views. I don’t have the grand longterm solutions for Palestine and Israel, but I do fear that we are losing both complexity and humanity in our politics and political movements. I fear that we fuel the war machine when we flatten and erase eachother’s stories. This piece shares some of the rare sources I have found this month, to counter the overwhelming dehumanization of Palestinians and Israelis swarming the internet and media and why I believe it is critical to speak of lives with nuance and detail as much as we possibly can.
Our first and primary identity, the core of who we are, is human. Writer Gregg Mosson wrote to me in an email this week, a simple haiku:
Whirled from pain to pause,
fear then love, the show of me
unfurls. Where’s the core?
I love the way true writers smudge the lines of two-dimensional boxes with characters that curve, bend, cross, and dot — the letters defy edges. Jewish writer, Naomi Wolfe, wrote in stunning detail in her piece Grief Enough for All, about trips to Israel where at first she witnessed her family’s warm interactions with Palestinians, which following violent events, led to subsequent visits where generations of children seemed to become more siloed. She noticed, in their art, abstract hopes for peace and fears of the “other side” made of murderous monsters, notions that seemed to be instilled by adults. She writes:
“I don’t have any answers. I have exactly no answers. But I can say that I understand the great love, the great longing, that paradoxically unites these deeply hostile enemy peoples…
The honeysuckle spilling over the walls of Jerusalem, generating clouds of sweetness.
The shadows from the olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane.
The white, white light, where you feel closer to God than you do anywhere else in the world. People go mad from it — from the divinity in the very air — with a madness that is called ‘Jerusalem Syndrome.’
The sacred Wailing Wall and sacred Dome of the Rock, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; the tightly bounded neighborhood where three great religions meet…”
This beautiful story of personal history was slammed in the blog comments as Islamaphobic, antisemitic, and crassly centrist. Comments contained all the usual slogans and propagandist statements and I was disappointed but not surprised that people from all walks of life wanted to fill her page with their exact slants and leave no room for any other.
I piece together threads of whole human beings, knowing that this effort to humanize will be weaponized by some who shelter in victimization and justification, and I remind myself that sometimes true stories, like medicine, sting wounds.
Whether we are learning of Palestinian prisoners, Israeli hostages, murdered children, missing people, and their connections to land, we are speaking of human beings who deserve the dignity of detail.
Adva Adar remembers her 85 year old grandma, Yaffa, who was taken by Hamas on October 7th, 2023. Her grandma loved to read, Adva recalls, “So we were like, ‘We’re going to get you a Kindle.’” What did her grandmother say? “‘ ‘No, I like the smell of the paper in books.’ ” I hold the intimacy of such detail like the hand of a precious elder.
It is not easy to find stories of those who are rendered voiceless. In an email, I received from Satya Yoga Coop, a community member, Anam Raheem writes: “I wish you knew my friend Ghada’s son Kareem… We had this game where we would pretend to send each other little zaps of magic. I would make a zzzz! sound each time we touched fingertips and Kareem would double over laughing, his smattering of baby teeth on full display… Kareem is somewhere in the south of Gaza…”
Droves of people gathered to mourn Canadian-Israeli old peace activist, eulogizing Vivian Silver, whose seventy four year life ended in the Hamas attack. Vivian was a cofounder of Women Wage Peace and a volunteer who provided transportation for sick Palestinians from Gaza to Israel for cancer treatment.
Top Palestinian school graduate of 2023, Shaimaa Akram Saddam’s dream was to enter the Islamic University of Gaza and to gain a degree in English-Arabic translation, but she was killed in an Israeli airstrike on her home, along with her pregnant mother.
At times, I have found myself losing all faith in humanity, but then I learn the stories of those whose strength shakes me from the privilege of my despair, stories like those of kidney specialist, physician Dr. Hammam Alloh, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike that hit his wife’s home on November 11th, 2023. He was committed to developing education programs for doctors and worked in hospitals to the very end, knowing that his patients who needed dialysis would die without water and electricity, that he may die in this genocide, but he still went to work through the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
If your racial identity surpasses your humanity, you’re primed to act out of racism. If your religious zeal surpasses your humanity, you will live with a “god-given” superiority complex, able to damn others’ into your worst imaginings. If your ethnic identity surpasses your humanity, cultural activities once expressions of joy and pride morph into notions of cultural purity. If your politics surpass your humanity, you will be able to justify systems of oppression. When we lose our humanity, identity becomes a means of control and domination, instead of a link to family, community, and diversity — we stand on the brink of further atrocities, and we all lose dimension.
Dehumanization is the language of oppression and this language is on the rise; when we are fully dehumanized, we are easily militarised or manipulated to give our consent to things we would not otherwise.
We desensitize a little more every time we speak atop each others’ grief, about the dead in numbers and not names. We dehumanize when we cast groups into innately ‘good’ ‘heroes’ and ‘bad’ ‘barbarians’ and erase eachother’s histories. We buy into dehumanization systems built to rank life’s “worth” in terms of ownership, money and assets. We distance ourselves further every time we speak of anyone as a statistic, without care for their stories.
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