On deep listening from within ecosystems of dehumanisation
Recognising cycles of oppression with the help of Paulo Freire (and each other)
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I am writing to you
because my voice is broken
It is hard to speak
But I hear you through the airwaves
-⎽__⎽-⎻⎺⎺⎻-⎽__⎽–⎻⎺⎺⎻-
I write this on 22nd August 2025, the day that the IPC (The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) formally declare famine in Gaza. This is the fifth time in the past 14 years that a famine has been determined by the IPC; the IPC previously stated that there was famine in areas of Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and 2020, and Sudan in 2024.
The eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is also in crisis, leaving an estimated 27.7 million Congolese (24 percent of the analysed population) facing high levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3 or above) between January and June 2025. This includes approximately 3.9 million in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) and over 23.8 million in crisis (IPC Phase 3).
These are horrors at a scale that is hard to grasp.
The systems that I benefit from are directly responsible for the extreme suffering of others.
Image: 1802 map of current day mainland “Australia” when it was still named New Holland, named by Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon aboard Duyfken.
Not long ago I sent a video of three anti-Zionist Israelis having a long conversation about how they managed to find their way out of Zionism and the massive psychological indoctrination they had been immersed in since birth. I sent it to a white, male Australian friend and flagged it: “Long but important talk by 3 anti-Zionist Israelis” to warn him that it was an unedited conversation that demanded some time, but which I still thought was worth watching. I mention that he is a white, Australian male only because I think it bears some relevance to what I am about to write.
My friend’s reply, after less than two minutes of watching the video, was honest, but sharp:
“Finding this difficult to watch…powerless minions of the Zionist machine trying to feel better about themselves. Yeah, that’s sad & important for them, but my sympathies are focused elsewhere. Give me a reason to watch more. I am so heartily sick of our media giving airtime to their bullshit.”
I was taken aback. On one hand I understood my friend’s knee-jerk reaction. We are witnessing genocide. Watching Palestinian voices and bodies are being starved and quashed every single day. Western media prioritises white voices over non-white, that is nothing new, but the dehumanisation of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims is off the scales.
Censorship and propaganda increase, but can’t hide the sadism. The brave journalists on the ground in Gaza are been murdered by the Israeli military, who are working directly with US and UK military. The UK government seems to have no other task right now than to assist Israel in genocide.
My friend and I had been exchanging links for quite some time. We have known each known each other for many years. He is someone I hold him in high esteem. I admit that my ego was wounded; I was hoping that he would at least consider there is some value in the video I had sent, just because I had sent it to him. But beyond that, it was something deeper that bothered me.
A few weeks before, I had the fortune to attend a zoom with a Palestinian elder (who shall remain unnamed) who was a contemporary of Rosa Parks and Martin Luthur King. He opened his talk gently, with a short summary of the history of colonisation of Palestine by the British and Zionists. He thanked us for paying attention to Gaza and other forms of injustice around the world.
He framed the genocide as the outcome of this a 100 yearlong conflict initiated by British imperialism and realised violently at the end of World War 2. The occupation, he said, is multifaceted; political, economic, social, religious, environmental, industrial, financial – and psychological. He described how as a younger man, the Vietnam war had raised his awareness of Imperialism, and it was this awareness that shed light on the geopolitics of the Middle East.
Then came his main thesis: he implored us not dehumanise Israelis.
This elder had suffered immense loss, more than most of us can ever imagine, and yet the main message he wanted to leave with us was to not become what we hate.
What has happened to Israel, he said, is a known psychological phenomenon that can happen to any one of us. Israelis, like many others before them, he said, have taken on the attributes of their oppressors. They have been manipulated to do so through the weaponisation of woundedness.
How can we hold onto our humanity in this moment? We are in the middle of the decline of empire. The most pressing issue of climate change has become a backdrop to the threads of violence that are appearing everywhere. This is because the main vehicle of control when moral authority cannot be feigned is violence. Masks are off and we are seeing empire turn in on itself.
Even in decline, the mechanisms of violence continue to try and maintain an artificial view of a unipolar separate human world. The news tries to push a view that is completely ahistorical and in denial of the fact that we are all living, biological beings in a multipolar, interconnected world. Interbeing, as zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh named it, is the true nature of human existence. This imperial, resource-greedy effort is destined to fail as it is unsustainable. It is a kind of cannibalism.
The Palestinian elder continued talking to us on zoom. We sat in silence, listening intently and absorbing the urgency of his message. As humanitarians, he said, we cannot stop this genocide. Many more lives will be lost. We know the figures are far beyond official figures. It is a tragedy for the Palestinian people, for the world, and for the Jewish people who have had the stain of genocide attached to their name by all types of Zionism. They will have to carry that stain forever, just as the Germans have had to carry the stain of Naziism with them forever.
“We see it everywhere,” he said. “Any human being can easily turn into exactly what they hate.”
It is the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ as it has come to be known. That’s a misogynist term that a Swedish criminologist, psychiatrist police consultant invented to shift responsibility from the police to a young woman who was trying to save her own life and the lives of the others.
Image from The Independent.
The phenomenon we are talking about is known as the Cycle of Oppression and was defined by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. It is this psychological phenomenon that has taken over Israeli society, where a large part of society has become everything that they hate, mimicking the play-book of Nazi oppressors in WW2 Germany.
The Cycle of Oppression can also be seen elsewhere in varying degrees. We see it in the compliance of the Palestinian Authority, and across history, from Vichy France to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, from anti-imperialist North Korea to Cuba and beyond. We see it in ordinary people who bow down to the billionaire press as they pendulum swing them between the manufactured outrage of anti-migrant and anti-trans hate.
ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩ ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩ ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩ
Everywhere we humans operate it seems, we risk becoming what we disdain. In every conversation and every interaction, we so easily fall into a persistent othering, sometimes triggered by untended woundedness, sometimes because of an inability to imagine the suffering of the “other”. These are the waters in which we were taught to swim.
Antagonism towards the truth of our own interconnected nature is embedded into our language, our beliefs and our modes of organising. In this sense, no one in this world is freer right now than Palestinians, who refuse to subjugate and dehumanise Israelis, even on the receiving end of genocide.
“Do not fetishise Israelis as uniquely evil,” the Palestinian elder said. “And do not fetishise Palestinians as “perfect” either.”
As Mohammed el Kurd, poet and author of Perfect Victims, says, you don’t have to be a wholesome, gentle grandfather, or studious youth, or grieving mother, or amputee, or innocent child to deserve to not be a victim of genocide.
There is nothing quite so deeply racist as that.
ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩ ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩ ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩ
A few weeks after sending the video, an Al Jazeera journalist, Anas al-Sharif, aged 28, was murdered along with three of his colleagues in a deliberate Israeli attack on a media tent outside the main gate of Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital. It was a direct and deliberate target on him and his team.
We watched on from our homes, totally stunned, broken-hearted, powerless to stop the horror.
Overwhelm is met with more overwhelm.
Grief with more grief.
Shock with more shock.
Al-Sharif and his team knew that Israel had the technology to kill them at any moment. He had received many warnings to stop and even been offered a safe passage to leave, several times, but he didn’t. He knew his time was limited; he had even had posted his own obituary; they all knew that the likelihood of being murdered was high as Israel was just about to launch a full-scale invasion of Gaza City.
We have all seen enough to know what invasion entails.
Al-Sharif wrote:
“I entrust you with its people, with its wronged and innocent children who never had the time to dream or live in safety and peace. Their pure bodies were crushed under thousands of tons of Israeli bombs and missiles, torn apart and scattered across the walls. I urge you not to let chains silence you, nor borders restrain you. Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland.”
The images are indelible. We are changed forever. Genocide is being burned into our psyches; men and boys stripped and tied, mass graves, children burned by white phosphorus, human beings bulldozed, buried alive, women giving birth in dark tents, no anaesthetic, children shot, in the genitals, in the head. The manic glee of Israeli soldiers, some barely old enough to drink alcohol in most parts of the world. Elderly and toddlers shot at in the streets, starving dogs eating corpses. I only rename some of it lest we forget that all those images are human beings. Entire futures crushed. It is a rupture in humanity that will echo on for generations. Accountability must come. This systemic horror cannot be forgotten. It will implode in on itself.
The airwaves between my friend and I lie remained silent.
Israel has drained all sympathy from anyone with any basic moral compass. There are no words left. As Daniel Maté said on one of his Instagram reels: we might be able to have compassion for Israeli Zionists in the future, but at this moment in time? It is probably not even an appropriate response.
The days drag on. Western media continues to give airtime to what “Israel says.” As Mohammed el-Kurd said on another video: Would we have asked Germans how they feel about performing genocide, during the Holocaust?
So yes, I understand my friend’s reaction. Israel has killed nearly 270 journalists and media workers since October 8th. The ones who barely get a mention are the 10,400 held in torture prisons without any due process, against International law. 400 of them are children under the age of 14, and that was at the last count this year in February 2025. The crews that were taken off the Madleen and Handala flotillas by the Israeli army described the filthy conditions Palestinian hostages endure. They described the screams of young boys held in isolation. The raw wounds and skin disease and amputations. No change of clothes, no basic amenities to wash. The insects and the rats- and worse.
Every media tech platform we have is actively suppressing reports of this hell on earth, especially from Palestinian voices. We can’t share links of videos of Palestinian children just existing. Facebook block links from Insta and insta from Whatsapp. Meta owns all three now.
Non-white people who talk about Palestine are demonetised on YouTube overnight whilst white anti-Zionists are not. Israel has the largest surveillance industry in the world and are tracking anti-Zionist conversations across the Net, logging every account it comes across that participates in any perceived criticism of Israel. Even my own tiny, private insta account has been locked down and shadow-banned.
Yet suddenly they release the grip and allow images of starving Palestinian kids to get through to westerners. “Famine” is framed as some kind of mysterious natural phenomenon, in Gaza, and in Congo and Sudan. There is barely any mention of the active siege that is causing the starvation – that food and medical supplies are just kilometres away. They are very obviously manufacturing consent for ethnic cleansing. And Congo and Sudan is also spoken about as a phenomenon unique to Africa – no mention of western complicity.
Meanwhile Domino’s Pizza delivers its pizzas to American vigilantes in Gaza who have been brought in to dole out contaminated “humanitarian aid”. They herd, trap and kill starving people in front of our eyes. Boston Consulting scrambles to deny culpabilioty, Western news feigns outrage, after two years of denying genocide. They are opening the gap for plausible deniability- when in fact the media is merely adapting to US and Israel’s final phase. The messaging is clear: leave or be slaughtered. But leave to where?
@}}>—– @}}>—– @}}>—–
Yes, I understand my friend. He went on to equate the young Israeli guys in the video as “reformed Nazis.”
“But they are not Nazis and never were!” I banged with my fingers on my keyboard, “Which you would know if you had listened to any of it!!”
I regret my knee-jerk reaction too.
I don’t want to fall away from my friend, as I have fallen away from those who support Israel.
I was disappointed, and reacted poorly.
Disappointment is a form of woundedness too. It is sticky.
I also felt as if he was shifting the goalposts and re-framing of the conversation. I was flooded with the exact same frustration I have when trying to engage with Zionists.
⎺⎺⎻-⎽__⎽–⎻⎺⎺⎻-(っ- ‸ – ς) -⎽__⎽-⎻⎺⎺⎻-⎽__⎽–⎻
We are falling away from each other.
We need to hold on.
I am sorry.
⎺⎺⎻-⎽__⎽–⎻⎺⎺⎻-(っ- ‸ – ς) -⎽__⎽-⎻⎺⎺⎻-⎽__⎽–⎻
Image: Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (19 September 1921 – 2 May 1997)
“The great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed
Is to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.”
– Paulo Freire
I listened in silence to the beautiful, reticent voices in a reading group that’s just started on the Emergent Wisdom Collective Discord. Just sharing the airwaves and long, silent pauses with people who care is a balm for me.
The group is reading Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed in English. Freire writes in detail about how oppression doesn’t only destroy the humanity of the oppressed, but it also traps the oppressor in systems of domination.
“Dehumanisation, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human.” (Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Chapter 1)
For Freire, liberation is always dual: “The great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed is to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.”
This is not to equate suffering at all, but to diagnose how fascistic systems dehumanise everyone it touches, and how this process of indoctrination starts from within, with dehumanisation of the oppressing group.
Let’s not dissect the anthropocentric nature of the word dehumanisation here: Freire is talking about a specifically human behaviour after all. There is probably no other natural phenomenon that can dehumanise humans quite like humans do. To learn to “liberate” the human oppressor from their own dehumanisation means bringing the very mechanisms of oppression to a halt. I would also argue that it’s the oppressor who is the one who has had their humanity stolen from them the most.
*. ⋆ ˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚ ੈ✩‧
Woundedness can easily become a mass psychosis if not tended to.
As human animals we are full of longing to:
*Come together in community and grieve together.
*Nurture connection
*Feel how we are interconnected as fallible human beings
*Be rooted as biological beings in this world
* Regularly touch the great shimmering interbeing that we are part of.
* Educate ourselves as to what is happening to the human species on this planet
* Identify inherited woundedness and behaviour patterns
* Be in service to others to find out way to the future.
* Reconciliate.
*. ⋆ ˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚ ੈ✩‧
Freire’s book was written in 1968, long before the existence of Internet, smartphones and everything that has followed.
“What on earth would he have thought of all this?” I thought, as I continued to listen.
Hal is everywhere, he might think.
Image: Hal from Kubrick’s Space Odyssey: HAL 9000 is a fictional artificial intelligence character and the main antagonist in the film 2001: Space Odyssey series.
We know that 1968 was a potent year filled with widespread mass demonstrations. My own image of that year is a mash up of my parent’s descriptions, family photos, films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bullet, or Planet of the Apes, and novels about the time such as Kristeva’s 1990’s novel, The Samurai or the Marguerite Duras’ novel The Lover.
A montage forms through multiple lenses: I see students and workers united in class consciousness against the forces of capitalist imperialism. I see young women demonstrating for equal rights. I see the civil rights movement. I imagine a new kind of “looking forward” – anti-war consciousness; liberated sexuality, love stories, the sense of possibility. An ominous feeling that technology holds a threat we cannot grasp. I imagine the hope that people may of had that solidarity can overturn a bombastic and cruel ruling class whose and colonialism that subjegates everyone in its path.
Nearly two decades had passed since the end of World War 2 and the economic boom was imposing increasing pressure from above. the novels and films from the time show the passion, sensuality and sheer possibility of revolutionary idealism.
1968 Paris, alive in my imagination.
Fast forward to 2024, and we also see mass demonstrations across of the world. But for most, the unifying cry is a mere “ceasefire”. Cease firing to stop the visible violence. Cease the visible killing of children. Cease the starvation and systemic killing of a population of already disabled people. It’s a pretty low bar. We come to the streets not full of revolutionary passion, but exhausted, divided and weak from shock and grief.
Another friend despairs: Are our people too comfortable here in the diaspora? What is going on?! Yet another tells me we are supposed to be grateful for any semblance of stability and safety we we can cling onto in our lives, because we are all one or two steps away from joblessness, homelessness or even imprisonment.
This is exactly the psychological cage we must not walk into willingly. Even under dire circumstances we must retainwhat we can of our own humanity. The cracks will start to show if only the pressure persists.
Image: Several men have been detained for wearing a “Plasticine Action” t-shirts in Scotland and England. August 2025.
Looking at today’s world through the Freirien lens we can clearly see the trap of dehumanisation Israeli citizens continue to set for themselves and the inevitability of its collapse. The mountain of atrocities continues to grow. The images and genocidal comments continue to be posted without censorship by the Tik Tok army of Israeli youth. This is militarisation dressed up as community and belonging -even distorting the whole notion of inclusivity.
The IDF (so-called Israel Defence Forces) even run a “special in uniform” programme, The Roim Rachok program, for US based Zionist parents to send their children with special needs, such as autism, Downs Syndrome and other disabilities, to serve in the IDF. The enrolment push is run through “Jewish” organisations and platforms primarily in English speaking western countries. The money they raise is significant.
Another program, “Seeing Afar,” which is jointly run by the IDF and the Ono Academic College, aims to harness the pattern recognition of autistic youths to decipher aerial and satellite visual-intelligence images.
“The secretive and sensitive Unit 9900, which specialises in visual intelligence and plays an essential role in the activities of the Israel Defence Forces, has received some 100 autistic volunteer soldiers so far,” reported JNS, back in 2018.
Trump himself said that Israeli government should not allow their army to share the horror online. He didn’t tell them to stop performing the atrocities – just to think about the fallout.
In an April 2024 interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump said: “They shouldn’t be releasing tapes like that. That’s why they’re losing the PR war … They’re releasing the most heinous, most horrible tapes of buildings falling down.”
And “They have to finish it fast … because … people imagine there’s a lot of people in those buildings, and they don’t like it.”
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No, we don’t “like” it.
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We are in pain. We call people names to relieve ourselves of our own complicity in the root cause: capitalism and the many forms of wounding capital that inflict physical violence on “the other”- not just Palestinians or Congolese, or Sudanese, and that terrible phrase “the global South” – but on ourselves. We are all vertically oppressed, shuffling towards psychological compliance.
We other fascism itself, blind to any notion of inter-connectedness – with the Palestinians we feel so sorry for – or with the mechanisms of ecocide and genocide that are propping us up.
The way we speak about each other is part of this territory.
While so-called progressive Israelis see the genocide as unfortunate but “necessary” – even now – we also shrug our shoulders and say, “what else can I do?”
The disconnection from our planetary truth is not unique to Israelis; it lies within all of us; in our economic models and livelihoods, our entertainment, in how we consume, travel, meet, learn, love, study, connect online: the violence is embedded in all of our current systems.
Video: Seun Kuti has advice: Free Europe! …from right wing extremism, from fascism, from racism, from imperialism. When you do this job…Gaza will be free, Congo will be free, Sudan will be free… Free Europe!
𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒 𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒
Greta connected the dots, and they shadow-banned her.
She got on a boat, and they imprisoned her.
The Israeli guys in the video asked the third Israeli who had left Israel:
How did you break away from Zionism?
“It was part of a broader understanding,” he replied.
𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒 𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒𓂃𓈒
So many things came up in my heart, while I listened to the crackling voices of the study group reaching me via Internet cables under the Atlantic Ocean.
I realised that I had still not spoken to my friend.
I remembered a phrase that I was told about many years ago in Germany: The Radfahrer-Prinzip, or the “bicycle kicking syndrome”, as it was told to me, is when a person or group feels it is pushed down from above, they find another group to subjugate, dehumanise and kick down on. Just like a cyclist on a long-distance racer, bent over and kicking down to get ahead. It describes all people who bend servilely to their oppressors, even admiring them and mimicking them, whilst kicking those beneath them.
Image: From the film Der Untertan, 1951.
Heinrich Mann, in his 1918 satire Der Untertan (The Loyal Subject), created a grotesque portrait of this phenomenon in his character Diederich Hessling, a man who worships the power above him and unleashes vile cruelty downwards.
Zionism is not unique, it is just peak capitalism, peak occupation, peak colonialism. It is a product of global economic ecosystems that extract, monetise, and kill, on repeat and have been doing so long before October 2023. Israel is used by the West to be a neo-liberal free zone, a moral and ethical loophole the West uses for its own means.
The sheer cost of occupation is justified many times over in monetary terms. The profits are immense. The cost to the planet and humanity immeasurable.
The iron dome enables Israel to bombs its neighbours without any retaliation to speak of, pushing everyone into compliance along with the rest of us, to monetise suffering and even monetise release from suffering with structured disassociation in the form of entertainment; Netflix, Spotify, you name it, drip feeds us with the same myopic world view. It is no coincidence that Daniel Ek takes his billions from underpaying artists to invest in AI military.
Meanwhile these systems also manufacturing plausible deniability; whatever shouldn’t be done by the West, can be done by the “rogue state” of Israel. It’s an old game and a well-oiled machine that’s been perfected over the last 500 years on other bodies. An ecosystem that extracts and kills with precision to prop up its own self-oppressive structures.
Just like Israelis, we too are bound upward in fear, militarism, and obedience, while trained to kick downwards in vertical servility and perform horizontal violence. To step outside of it, to refuse both bowing and kicking, is not only rare but dangerous.
What is the plan?
The plan isn’t exactly secret.
Israel and the West quite openly are creating “enclaves” and pushing to manufacture consent for genocide and ethnic cleansing, making life impossible for people to remain in their homes. These people are not being “evicted”- they are being tortured and ethically cleansed. We will see Gaza and the West Bank repeated across the region, pushing any survivors from the West Bank to Jordan, from North Israel to Lebanon and Syria, Egypt and beyond.
That was the situation a few weeks ago. Now the US has stopped all humanitarian medical evacuations of even the most pressing child cases. The masks are off now and they don’t even have two pretend. The leaders of the Western and Arab world are evidently just as corrupt, chosen for purpose along with the likes of Starmer, continuing to make deals in order to maintain their own positions of power and wealth.
What else can we do?
*Remember that this is an indigenous struggle and a global struggle for survival. Indigenous people all over the world support Palestinians.
*Amplify marginalised voices!
*Try and help support Palestinian people make an income through buying their products; olive oil, soap, crafts, etc.
*Donate to verified fundraisers.
*Educate yourself and raise awareness about Congo and Sudan that are connected struggles. Support activists.
*Create a study group; find positive ways to share your grief.
*Support Palestinian, Jewish and Israeli friends who are speaking out about Israel.
*Try to talk kindly to your friends and family who do support Israel, it is a long road out of Zionism.
*Support each other. There is a huge amount of spiritual trauma everywhere. It is immense.
*Find inspiration in those who do not practice “othering” despite the odds.
*Learn about BDS – all of it. Boycott and buy refurbished electronics (Swappie in Finland is good). Find ethical tech alternatives to Google, Microsoft, Amazon owned platforms.
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Breathe
Bear with me
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One of those rare Israelis who does not practice the “othering” of Palestinians is Professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan, sister of Miko Peled. Peled-Elhanan has documented how Zionism reproduces itself through Israeli school curricula. In Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education (2012), she analysed hundreds of textbooks and found that Palestinians are almost never depicted as ordinary human beings. They appear as refugees, terrorists, or primitive figures, but never as professionals, parents, or neighbours. Palestinian suffering, when acknowledged at all, is reframed as necessary for Israel’s survival. According to Peled-Elhanan, Palestinians simply do not exist as human beings in the Israeli psyche.
“The system of education teaches Israeli children, from kindergarten on, that Palestinians are not fully human and that the land is empty of them,” she says.
Does this kind of propaganda sound familiar? It should do. Our entire media treats us like children to be placated, moulded and rewarded. Bread and circuses. But we can free ourselves with minimal effort. Peled-Elhanan’s own daughter was killed in a suicide bombing, yet she insisted that the root cause of the violence was Israeli indoctrination and occupation. She exposed the colonisation of children’s minds; how they are taught to dehumanise. And this was her form of resistance. What insight, what compassion.
These are the teachers we need now. You have to be open to sitting with deep discomfort to break out. To take a step back, to check our privilege and look deep into how we are “othering”. To practice deep listening. Are you being ableist in your activism, for example? Are you behaving with integrity, as you push your way through? This is not an easy task, but it shows us where our practice is at – and any real change is going to demand the insight and compassion of a Bodhisattva.
References:
IPC (The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification https://www.ipcinfo.org/
Sound of Anarchy YouTube channel
RTE News: https://www.rte.ie/news/2025/0822/1529692-famine-explainer/
Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal, Mohammed el Kurd, Haymarket Books, February 11, 2025.
On the Stockholm Syndrome. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-23/is-stockholm-syndrome-a-myth/102738084
On surveillance: Zuboff, Shoshanna. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: Hatchett Books. https://www.hachettebookgroup.
IDF Special in Uniform programme: https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/our-soldiers/the-idfs-disability-inclusion-program/com/titles/shoshana-zuboff/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/9781610395694/?lens=publicaffairs.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (Continuum, 1970).
Autism recruitment in IDF. https://www.jns.org/the-idfs-unit-9900-seeing-their-service-come-to-fruition/
IDF programme, Special in Uniform: https://specialinuniform.com/and https://tinyurl.com/IDFrecruitmentad
Trump says Israel has to get war in Gaza over ‘fast’ and warns it is ‘losing the PR war’
https://apnews.com/article/trump-biden-israel-pr-hugh-hewitt-21faee332d95fec99652c112fbdcd35d
From economy of occupation to economy of genocide. https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ahrc5923-economy-occupation-economy-genocide-report-special-rapporteur
Der Untertan, Heinrich Mann, S. Fischer Verlag, 1918.
Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, Nurit Peled-Elhanan, I.B. Tauris, 2012.
“Israeli schoolbooks ‘racist against Arabs’, claims academic,” The Guardian, Aug 7, 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/07/israeli-school-racism-claim
Interview with Nurit Peled-Elhanan: https://groundviews.org/2013/04/01/colonizing-childhood-and-zionist-pedagogy-interview-with-prof-nurit-peled-elhanan/
https://bdsmovement.net