We're not considered legitimate sources even of our dead or our suffering. We are no longer considered legitimate sources of information. And the real problem with dehumanization - right? - the really sneaky thing that dehumanization does, perhaps the most damaging thing it does is it delegitimizes the dehumanized from being able to speak on their own experience. PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.ĪLYAN: And it was done so easily, you know? I don't - there was, like, no flinching in doing it. We saw it with Biden when he made that statement about the numbers of Palestinian dead. For me, when people who are blank start to tell their story, I immediately assume they're not telling the truth. And so when that happens, when you feel that closing off, that looking away, the not wanting to witness, I would say the first thing, perhaps even the most powerful thing, is just to notice that it's happening, to start to say that's so interesting. I feel immediately a flare of something defensive. You know, it's our responsibility to pay attention to, oh, when I hear a member of this community say something, when I hear them start to tell their story, I feel something in me close up. And it is our responsibility to start to investigate the narratives we've been told. But you also raise the point that if you only find shock and distress among certain brutalized bodies, then what does that say? If you could just speak more on that.ĪLYAN: We're all raised on different stories and different narratives about ourselves, about people in the world, about who is safe, who is not safe, who is worthy of protection, who is worthy of being humanized. So you also write about how you don't hesitate and you don't want anyone to hesitate to condemn the killing of innocent people, innocent children, innocent civilians, Jewish life, Palestinian life. They've seen the infants left behind - that many have seen it and have deemed it to be an acceptable cost.įADEL: Wow. And I think it feels like there is a new chapter now where it's more grim and it's more heart-wrenching in some ways, which is that I think a lot of us are having to accept the fact that many do see, you know, that it isn't so much a matter anymore of how can we get people to witness something, that many people have seen it and have - you know, they've seen the names written on limbs. We must get them to understand what is at stake if the dehumanization continues. HALA ALYAN: There was kind of what I think of as sort of the first phase emotionally, for myself at least and for a lot of people that I know, which was sort of this frenetic, like, oh, my God, like, people are not seeing things, right? We must get them to see. I called up Alyan to talk about what she wrote. ![]() Alyan, a Palestinian American novelist, poet and clinical psychologist, wrote in The New York Times how in this moment Palestinian people are being stripped of their humanity. ![]() Media coverage of the bloodshed and suffering in the besieged Gaza Strip was once again painting the lives of Palestinians in broad strokes, a faceless people somehow complicit in their own suffering. Hala Alyan recognized something familiar after Hamas attacked Israel and Israel began its punishing response in Gaza that's been going on for two months now.
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