The greatest obstacle to peace is dehumanisation: Ittay Flescher’s new book

Of all the factors that make peace impossible, perhaps the greatest is dehumanisation. This process of depriving individuals or groups of their human qualities is something I see all around me, and it breaks my heart.

Dehumanisation often arises from psychological processes categorising others into “us” versus “them” groups. When individuals or groups are perceived as different or threatening, it becomes easier for people to justify collective violence against them. Dehumanisation can occur when individuals fail to empathise with others or recognise their inherent worth and dignity.

Given that Arabs make up 21% of the population in Israel, there aren’t any Jewish Israelis who don’t know or interact regularly with Arab and Palestinian citizens of the country. Most of these interactions happen in workplaces, shopping centres and hospitals. While there are always underlying tensions, these relations are usually cordial and respectful on both sides. Yet the relationship with Palestinians in Gaza is something else.

Since October 7, the indifference I have observed among so many of my Jewish-Israeli acquaintances to Palestinian civilians suffering in Gaza is something that doesn’t surprise me but leaves me saddened.

While I understand that it comes from a place of rage after the horrendous Hamas attack, the fact that it has lasted for so long and is so immune to the many harrowing personal stories of loss and grief in Gaza is hard to fathom. It manifests in several ways, from disregard and sometimes even complete denial of the humanitarian situation in Gaza, to justifications for the destruction of every home and life in Gaza.

In one particularly extreme case, a 13-year-old Bedouin girl at a secular state school with predominantly Jewish students in Be’er Sheva was suspended for three days after she said in a class discussion approaching the one-year anniversary of October 7 that “there are hungry children in Gaza, there are children without a home”.

After she was suspended “to protect her from harassment”, videos of her classmates went viral with them chanting, “Am Yisrael Chai” (the nation of Israel lives) and “May your village burn”.

When I raise this issue of dehumanisation in conversation with friends who express these views, the most common comments I hear in response are:

•  Why should I care about them when they don’t care about me and celebrate my people’s murder and kidnapping with sweets and merriment?

•  They are all radical Muslims, the same as ISIS. They hold an ideology that must be afforded no quarter and must be destroyed. You don’t negotiate with terrorists. This is an existential war we must win at all costs. I won’t tolerate any disrespect towards our brave soldiers.

•  They hate us because we are Jewish. Anti-Semites want to see us all dead.

•  Let me explain to you, Ittay, we Israelis want peace and have offered solutions to end the conflict many times to the Palestinians, which they have rejected. We do this because we value life. They just want death and to take all our land. The Arabs would rather kill us than live.

When I share that I work with many Palestinians in interfaith dialogue and know many people who just want to live alongside us in peace and worry about normal things like paying taxes and getting a mortgage, the usual response I hear is, “you live in a bubble and because you didn’t grow up here, you don’t understand what Arabs want like I do”.

Perhaps some of the people who hold these views are reading my book. If so, I hope this chapter can open their hearts to a different possibility.

The 3000 Hamas men who crossed into Israel on October 7 clearly didn’t see as humans the Israeli men, women and children they killed in their homes, at the Nova rave and on army bases.

No matter whether these people had a weapon or not, whether they were asleep or awake, at a dance party or just having breakfast with their family in their homes, all were murdered, many at point-blank range. The UN Office on Sexual Violence in Conflict also found reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred on October 7 and that captives in Gaza have been subjected to sexual violence too.

Soon after the horrific attack, some Palestinians and their supporters justified and rationalised this violence by reducing all Israelis, and in some extreme cases, all Jews, to proxies of Israeli oppression. Even child hostages received no sympathy, with images of their faces being torn down in many Western capitals.

Their supporters on college campuses across the globe chanted slogans such as:

Ya Qasam [Hamas’s armed wing] make us proud, burn Tel Aviv to the ground.

There is only one solution: intifada revolution.

Go back to Poland, go back to Europe.

There is no safe place! Death to the Zionist state!

When I try to suggest to people who express these views that Jews do feel a deep religious, historical connection to the land and that there are many – myself included – who oppose the violence of the Occupation and believe that the realisation of the Zionist dream need not come at the expense of a free Palestine, I am often told that I represent no one, or that my kind words mean nothing when the government that represents me does horrific things to Palestinians.

Selective confirmation bias

Selective confirmation bias is a tendency to process information by interpreting reality in a manner that supports what one already believes while rejecting evidence that supports a different conclusion. Many would say it’s something I suffer from in my belief that peace is possible, yet I also see it as a blindness that plagues the majority of Palestinians and Israelis.

As a result of dehumanisation, the vast majority of us believe that the “other side” not only doesn’t want peace but largely wants our side dead. We tend to think that the “other side” are all liars unless they are proposing views that reflect our deepest fears and stereotypes of them.

Consuming immense amounts of polarising information on social media causes many to suffer from a fundamental attribution error: we assume that our radicals are exceptional, while the other side’s radicals are definitive. On the flip side, in the cases where Palestinian and Israeli civilians or leaders express calls for peace or empathy, they are branded as liars or traitors who are not speaking the truth about their national project. Therefore, a key element for change is adopting a new way of thinking.

Suspension of disbelief as a tool for peace-making

Suspension of disbelief happens when we temporarily allow ourselves to believe something that isn’t true, usually to enjoy a work of fiction or a fantasy film. Yet this thinking technique is also an essential tool for social-change movements. Take, for example, the case of women’s rights.

In the 1910s, the National Association Opposed to Women’s Suffrage published a pamphlet arguing against women’s right to vote in the United States. Some of their points included that “90% of women either do not want it or do not care”, that ‘it means competition between women and men instead of cooperation’, and that “80% of women eligible to vote are married and can only double or annul their husband’s votes”. They also argued that “it can provide no benefit commensurate with the additional expense involved” and warned that it was “unwise to risk the good we already have for the potential evil that may occur”.

While many American men and women once believed these arguments, the suffragettes refused to give up. They defied the sceptics who said their movement had no chance of success.

While the struggle for gender equality is far from complete today, not only can women vote in almost every country on Earth, but 59 countries have had female heads of state.

This exemplifies what happens when “suspension of disbelief” animates a social movement determined to counter all who say such a social change is impossible.

Beliefs and actions we need for peace

Since October 7, many people have shared versions of a particular meme on social media: “It’s okay to be heartbroken for more than one group of people at the same time.” I didn’t ever post it because it felt too simplistic and obvious a statement to share. Yet the more time I spend thinking and reflecting as I write this book, the more I realise it’s not a belief that can be taken for granted.

Most Israelis believe that if they took down walls, checkpoints and other security measures against Palestinians, they would be slaughtered in an instant. Most Palestinians believe that if their resistance organisations stopped fighting for freedom, Israel would permanently annex all of their land and never support their right to statehood, seeing this capitulation as Israel’s long-awaited moment of victory.

As hard as it may be, these are two deeply entrenched beliefs we Israelis and Palestinians hold that need to be suspended for there to ever be peace. For good reason, these two beliefs have become even stronger since the horrors of October 7 and the destruction of almost every home and countless lives in Gaza.

Yet, for us to share this land, we both must believe that when the day comes that we choose to stop inflicting violence, the other will respond by ending their campaigns of violence against us. Nurturing and spreading this belief was the key to ending the troubles in Northern Ireland, and it is a belief we will also need to adopt here.

For Jewish Israelis, this could mean returning to the approach of Rabbi Hillel from the Talmud, who taught: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour”. For Palestinian Muslims and Christians, this could involve re-embracing the Hadith of the prophet Muhammad: “None of you truly believes until you wish for others what you wish for yourself” or the words of Jesus: “In everything, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

It will mean encouraging both traditional and social media companies to abandon polarising reporting and algorithms that spread hate, and replacing it with peace journalism that is both self-critical and capable of building hope for an alternative future.

It will mean having more women in leadership positions who can bring a wider array of perspectives and creative solutions for conflict to the negotiating table, leading to structural changes that provide security for all.

To stop the violence, we need to believe that there are partners for peace on the other side, by embracing shared learning opportunities and building more social, religious and political institutions based on the principles of justice and equality. Without increasing lived experiences of coexistence, we will always go back to the memories of fear and hatred that have plagued this land for so many years.

One of the best ways to dispel the belief that compromise is a weakness is to take responsibility for the injustices caused in the name of our national struggles. To hold those who commit war crimes accountable in our own courts of Palestine and Israel before the ICC needs to intervene. To believe that our conflict has solutions and that compromise is an act of strength and courage for the wellbeing of future generations. It must also involve acknowledging the massive power imbalance between Israel and Palestine.

To grow these realisations, thousands of grassroots conversations need to be held that move us from sympathy to empathy based on the belief that the purpose of dialogue is not to win, but rather to understand and take responsibility to improve one another’s reality.

This entails trusting that the enduring security derived from agreements, such as those between Israel, Jordan and Egypt, far surpasses the temporary safety that might be achieved through military actions. It involves recognising each other’s humanity, and understanding that the love Palestinian and Israeli parents hold for our children.

Challenging dehumanisation and suspending disbelief is the same, as is the profound grief we experience when they are taken from us. It means embracing the notion that injustice anywhere poses a threat to justice everywhere and that security of one side requires security for the other.

It means Palestinians believing that Jews in Israel are not colonisers and that they have a deep historical connection to this land, and that their security fears are real and not just made up in response to the Holocaust. It means Jews believing that Palestinians are a real nation with deep roots in this land between the river and the sea with the undeniable right to self-determination and freedom in their only homeland.

It means acknowledging that not only is neither nation going to leave but that the existence of the other on the same land is desirable in building more liberal and tolerant nations that learn and grow through their shared experiences together.

While I may not have the means to convince the majority of people of these truths today, I firmly believe that if we set our sights on making these beliefs mainstream within the next ten years, it will be the most effective way to prevent the next war and eventually share this land with peace and dignity for all.

The Holy and the Broken, by Ittay Flescher (HarperCollins, $36.99) is out now

BOOK LAUNCH DATES
Ittay Flescher will visit Australia in February for a series of launch events in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne
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