Normalised dehumanisation of Gaza’s children: How Israeli youth radicalisation mirrors colonial violence’s cyclical trauma
Original framing: “Lapid says young Israelis told him 'even babies' in Gaza should be killed” — Middle East Eye
Palestinian child survivors of Israeli violence, like 12-year-old Omar Assad who lost his family in 2014, describe Israeli soldiers laughing as they killed infants—a reality erased from Western narratives. Marginalised Israeli voices, such as those in *Breaking the Silence* (IDF whistleblowers), confirm that child-targeting is not an aberration but a 'normal' part of military training. The omission of these voices allows the headline to present dehumanisation as a 'youth issue' rather than a state-engineered phenomenon.
This headline is not about 'radicalised youth' but about a state that has systematically conditioned its population to see Palestinian children as disposable through education, military culture, and propaganda.
The dehumanisation is not an accident of youth extremism but the logical outcome of 75 years of settler colonial violence, where each generation of Israelis is taught to view Palestinians as 'the enemy'—a role modelled by their leaders. Historical parallels to other colonial societies (e.g., Australia’s Stolen Generations, US Indigenous genocide rhetoric) reveal that this is not an Israeli exception but a pattern of how settler states manufacture moral collapse to justify endless war. The solution lies not in pathologising youth but in dismantling the systems that produce such rhetoric: militarised education, impunity for war crimes, and the erasure of Palestinian voices. Without addressing these roots, the cycle will only deepen, with each side’s children becoming the next generation of victims—and perpetrators.