Back in May, when the image of a decapitated child in Rafah started circulating, my friend texted: This is the image. This is the one. Now the world’s going to roar. For many of us, this has been the reality of the last months: waiting for the image that will shake complacency and complicity; waiting for the image so staggering it’ll be non-negotiable. An amputated toddler. A blown-apart body. A girl hanging from the side of a building. We are still waiting.
Dehumanization is a prerequisite of most forms of violence. Well before a bomb drops on a school where children are sheltering – because you ordered them there to shelter – you have to make that act acceptable. The more dead, starving, weeping, and shredded Palestinian bodies the public sees, the more the brain becomes psychically numbed to them. Palestinians disappear into “hordes”, “masses”, numbers so high it becomes impossible to imagine their nicknames or favorite songs.
The body of a Palestinian is a negotiable thing – a child becomes a “minor”. The dead become “alleged”, numbers in unreliable mouths. This is an old trick on brown and Black bodies: write them out of the imagination, age them up, refer to them in the collective. So when they are shredded, burned, lynched, assaulted, when we see a Black man beg for air, when we see the heaps of limbs in Abu Ghraib, we are conditioned to accept their fate as inevitable.
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