Dehumanization is the classic means of de-legitimating the struggles of oppressed groups. First, the ruling power makes the movement personal, portraying political struggle as an attack on the individual members of the dominant group. Once the opposition movement’s political goals have been portrayed as a smokescreen hiding their real goal: to kill the individual members of the dominant group, the opposition can be denounced as subhuman killers. All the while, the violence that the dominant group rains daily down upon the oppressed people is ignored.

This pattern is repeated over and over again. The established powers declaim that the oppressed cannot be granted the freedom they demand because they are not really human beings who just want to live as other humans do, in peace, security, and for the sake of enjoying meaningful lives, but wild murderers who would use their freedom to rampage and destroy.

The oppressing power can always point to specific events to bolster their case. If oppression goes on long enough, some groups will be driven to violence. Their acts, and not the history of oppression, will be seized upon as evidence with which to convict the oppressed of crimes against humanity: the humanity of the oppressor.

But “humanity’ is not reserved for some specific groups of human beings. Human beings are social self-conscious centres of experience, activity, and enjoyment. Our capacities for receptive enjoyment of the world, thought, planning, creative activity of all sorts, and mutualistic, peaceful relationships with others and the world at large constitute the basis of everyone’s legitimate claim to life-security and the means of life-enjoyment. The other names by which we call ourselves: Israeli, Palestinian, Jew, Muslim, are valuable not as such, but only as concrete instantiations of the underlying humanity that links us all beneath constructed historical differences. Those differences are real and valuable, but they are not ultimately valuable, because they presuppose life. People change religions or become atheists, they move to different countries and they change political ideologies: they do not thereby cease to be human beings.

Human beings also fight. No group of human beings is constitutionally warlike or peaceful: violence is a function of socio-historical structures and forces, not the peculiar traits of one or another culture. De-humanization strategies draw attention away from the structure and point it at a one-sided, caricatured portrait of the purported essence of the culture to which the demonized individuals belong, the secret that explains “what they are really like.” But this strategy too is generic and not a tactic unique to any particular ruling group. Wherever a group in power needs to justify itself, it does so by de-humanizing the culture of the group to which it is opposed.

In a brilliant short essay “Who Thinks Abstractly?” Hegel exposed the way in which demonizing constructions depend upon adopting an ahistorical, or as he says, abstract point of view. His example will be familiar to us: the criminal. When a terrible crime has been committed the newspaper will trumpet the community’s outrage and portray the criminal as some beast without a life-story. They never ask: how did the human being come to be a criminal? Instead, they fixate on the deed without inquiring into the historical process by which a human being became the sort of person that could commit the ghastly crime.

When we encounter political crimes the same sort of ahistorical thinking tends to prevail. The media focuses on the atrocity and not the historical process– the reasons, as Hegel would say– that led up to it. Hard as it is for people to accept, the militants who commit atrocities are human beings. Only human beings can behave inhumanely. The terrorist who blows up a bus or shoots up a rave, and the pilot who bombs civilians and goes home at night to his family are not space aliens. They are human beings as much as the pacifist. When they were born there was no gene that programmed them for a life of violence. If they were lucky their mother held them tenderly in her arms and whispered all the hopes she harbored for them.

But not everyone is lucky. 50 000 pregnant Palestinian women are currently under bombardment by Israel. What will they whisper to their newborns if they survive the onslaught? But even under those circumstances none of those children are fated to become one thing rather than another. Human beings can change, if they recognize the causes of their conflicts, actually address them, exchange one-sided justifications in favour of mutual understanding, and understand differences as the concrete form that humanity takes.

A tall order which often seems impossible. But wars end and former enemies can reconcile.

The task of solving problems and forging different futures is delayed when opponents lock into cycles of ultra violence such as we are currently seeing in Gaza and Israel. The reality of political struggle once it takes a predominantly militarized form is that the lives of non-combatants become instrumentalized. Perverse as it is, in war death can be more important than life. The perverse logic of the moral economy of war is the reason why war should be avoided at all costs by liberation movements. Their goals are peace and life-security, and they should choose means consistent with those ends. Non-state terrorism and state-led terroristic bombing campaigns are political choices that movements and governments make. No strategy or tactic is a function of pure mechanical necessity. Other means than military force are always possible.

One would have to be a complete naif to believe that Hamas did not know exactly how brutal an Israeli response to as audacious an attack as that of October 7th would be. Indeed, they openly crowed about luring Israeli forces into a ground invasion. Therefore, they must hope for even more civilian casualties, because they believe that they can turn those images into propaganda vehicles while at the same time dealing Israel such high casualty levels as to tip the strategic balance in their favour.

Israel is obliging. The bombardment of Gaza is shocking to the sensibilities and sentiments of any human being paying attention, but is entirely predictable when judged within the strategic calculus of means by which conflict is pursued. Enjoying complete air superiority, there is no military reason for Israel to stop bombing. Civilian lives are just part of the cost that must be paid.

One can never say for certain what the outcome of war will be. However, from a strategic perspective Hamas may have seriously miscalculated. Trapped without means of re-supply, their fate lies in the hands of the morale of the Israeli army. If it remains as high as it is now in the face of mounting casualties, then Hamas is almost certainly facing its Tamil Tiger moment. In 2009 the Sri Lankan government decided that the time had come to end the threat from the Tigers once for all. They were destroyed as an effective fighting force, along with tens of thousands of civilians.

Gaza is not the first city to be absolutely flattened in an all out war. The world watched in 1999-2000 when Putin completely levelled Grozny during the 2nd Chechen War. Just last winter the world was treated to another Putin extravaganza, when his forces completely destroyed Bakhmut. Hamas has nowhere to go and cannot win by hiding in tunnels. If Israel remains committed to the task there is no doubt that they will obliterate all of Gaza.

And they will tell the world that they were justified and that the complete liquidation of Hamas was necessary. But they will not ask themselves who the human beings who made up Hamas were or what their mothers hoped for their lives to be when they were born. A relative handful of people will protest in solidarity, but they are thousands of miles from the conflict zone and powerless to stop the forces that have been unleashed. The protests will end and Palestinians will be left to their fate, even more impoverished and desperate than they had been before the war.

Hamas believes itself to be engaged in a heroic struggle to the death with an inhuman enemy. Israel is exacting genocidal revenge for the citizens it has lost. Locked in a death dance, neither can comprehend the other’s perspective and instead they are trying for the final victory.

There will not be one. If Hamas is destroyed, a new version will emerge. Militarily, Israel cannot be defeated, but, politically, morally, Israel does enormous damage to itself when its leaders openly declare genocidal aims and- what is worse– execute them. It is beyond the capacity of people outside Gaza to imagine what it would be like to know that water, food, medicine, fuel and power have been cut off, and that the power that could force Israel to turn them back on- the United States- is not only not doing so, but parking aircraft carriers off the coast to ensure that Hezbollah does not open a second front.

As sickening a human tragedy as has been ever been written unfolds before our eyes.

Tragedies are difficult to witness, but they also teach lessons. It is time for the politics of heroic self-assertion and sacrifice to end. Justice is not on any one group’s side. Justice– getting what one deserves– is a human right. No one deserves to be killed as a matter of right. Meditate on the absurdity of a human right to be killed.

National liberation is a human right and as such a life-value. But when the struggle is pursued using life-destruction as a means it contradicts itself and encourages the cycle of killing and revenge that must now work itself out to its undoubtedly bitter end.