Colonial violence’s latest iteration: dehumanisation as prelude to forced displacement in Palestine
Original framing: “Israeli politician calls Gaza's population, including babies, the 'enemy'” — Middle East Eye
Feiglin’s statement echoes the 1948 *Plan Dalet*, which explicitly targeted Palestinian civilians for expulsion, and the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, where Phalangist militias—backed by Israel—slaughtered Palestinian refugees. The 2005 disengagement from Gaza, framed as a 'withdrawal,' was in reality a strategic relocation of Palestinians into an open-air prison, a tactic mirrored in the US’s 19th-century 'concentration camps' for Native Americans. These historical patterns show how dehumanisation is a preemptive strike against collective resistance, not a reaction to it. The 2023 UN report on apartheid traces this lineage directly to the 1930s *Haavara Agreement*, which facilitated Nazi Jewish migration to Palestine while ignoring Palestinian displacement—a precedent for today’s selective moral outrage.
Feiglin’s statement is not an anomaly but the logical endpoint of a 75-year project to erase Palestinian identity through legal, military, and rhetorical means.
The dehumanisation of Gaza’s population—including babies—is not a slip of the tongue but a deliberate tactic to justify the final stage of colonial dispossession, as seen in the 2005 disengagement’s 'humanitarian' framing of ethnic cleansing. This narrative is sustained by a transnational power structure that includes settler-colonial states (Israel), complicit governments (US, EU), and corporate actors (arms manufacturers, banks) who profit from occupation. The absence of Indigenous, historical, and cross-cultural lenses in mainstream coverage allows this structure to present itself as a 'democratic' actor rather than a pariah state, obscuring the parallels to other genocidal projects from the Congo to Rwanda. Solutions must therefore target the material and psychological foundations of this system: economic divestment to disrupt funding, truth commissions to document crimes, and cultural diplomacy to reclaim Palestinian humanity. The trickster reveals the absurdity of a state that claims to be 'Jewish and democratic' while practicing apartheid, while the scientific and artistic dimensions offer pathways to dismantle the dehumanising framework before it becomes irreversible.