Manufacturing Dehumanization: The Genocidal Logic of ‘Peace Through Strength’
By Professor Tahrir Hamdi, Arab Open University, Jordan
Co-founder of ActforPal
On Wednesday, October 29, ActforPal held a hybrid webinar with Hiroshima City University confronting nuclear futures at Hiroshima, at Nagasaki, in Palestine, and beyond. The following is an extract from Prof. Hamdi’s contribution to the roundtable discussion, the entirety of which will be included in issue 5.2 of Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies in summer 2026. In the meantime, watch the full webinar on YouTube.
Within the historical context of occupied Palestine, complete dehumanization of the indigenous Palestinian population has always been the case, even before the establishment of Israel in 1948. Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, reported to Arthur Ruppin, head of the Jewish Agency’s colonization department, about Palestinians: “The British told us that there are some hundred thousand negroes [kushim] and for those there is no value.” Netanyahu has pitched a ‘battle of good versus evil’ argument to American audiences in attempting to justify maintaining Western colonial planetary hegemony through the mass extermination of whole civilian populations by armed assault and imposed starvation. The vision of ‘peace through strength’ means the right to commit genocide by highly destructive airpower with the capacity to annihilate people and buildings. But is this creating peace or pacifying? The destructive powers used against Gaza exceed those of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. According to University of Bradford Emeritus Professor Paul Rogers:
[T]he total tonnage of weapons dropped, mainly bombs but missiles and tens of thousands of artillery shells, … [is] a total of something like 70,000 tonnes of explosives. Back in the Cold War days, we used to say a kilotonne is equivalent to a thousand tonnes of TNT. We are now using explosives that are much more powerful than TNT. But if we do use that figure – 70 kilotonnes of weapons dropped across Gaza – Hiroshima was about 12 kilotonnes, so we are talking about the equivalent of six Hiroshimas … But because these bombs drop individually, they are spread much more, so you get an extraordinary level of devastation. It’s certainly more than Dresden, certainly more than the other 2,000 bomber raids in the Second World War.
The Western hegemonic ‘peace through strength’ mentality of the colonial, racist so-called ‘free world’—led by the United States with the settler colony of Israel its most prominent example—has given itself the moral right to deploy people-erasing bombs, tools of mass human destruction, against the Other. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of the dehumanized Palestinians, whose killing by the hundreds of thousands is still being debated on Western television in terms of the “proportionality” of the “Israeli response.” Perhaps as an academic specialized in language, discourse analysis and literary and cultural studies, I tend to focus on the importance of how words and images are used in the media to manufacture consent, as described by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988).
One striking example is the term ‘hostage’, used to describe Israelis taken by the Palestinian resistance on October 7, 2023. These ‘hostages’ include Israeli soldiers who had killed Palestinians. Palestinians, on the other hand, are ‘prisoners’, already guilty by mere naming. Such ‘prisoners’ include a 14-year-old boy who threw a stone at an Israeli tank and Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, paediatrician, neonatologist, and Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza, who was arrested in December 2024 and remains detained without charge in Ofer Prison. Western media and some Arab media outlets deploy these terms studiously and obediently, while American and European legacy media outlets focus their attention on the pictures and names of the humanized Israeli ‘hostages’. Meanwhile, the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians genocided by the Israeli killing machine remain nameless, unidentified corpses, already shredded into pieces. Our minds are being trained to accept this ‘fact’—that some are less than human and therefore do not deserve to be recognized or mourned. Our consent is being manufactured to the point of total numbification of the human psyche.
Populations in the Global South have long been treated as dispensable by the Western colonial hegemonic order, a supposedly democratic realm in which ‘free humanity’ reserves the right to exterminate and annihilate at will those deemed less than human. However, people in this so-called ‘free world’ have been awakened from their slumber (as a result of the Gaza genocide perhaps) to discover that the democracy they were numbed into believing in is neo-colonial, hegemonic, and genocidal. In the spirit of ‘saving’ only the humanity that is deemed to deserve it, American congressmen Randy Fine and Tim Walberg and Senator Lindsey Graham, as well as Israeli Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu have called for the nuking of Gaza. According to Professor Adam Miyashiro, “[t]he frequency and flippancy with which politicians and pundits have entertained—and at times encouraged—the nuclear destruction of Gaza has struck a nerve in Japan, where anti-war and pro-Palestine sentiment has surged.”
The question remains: How can we confront and counter this Western hegemonic racist mindset? How can we, as human beings, accept the notion of ‘saving’ a supposedly superior civilization at the cost of annihilating another? How can we glorify the existence of weapons capable of eradicating entire populations in an instant? How can we justify the irrationality of permitting some countries or entities to possess nuclear weapons while denying others the same right? Racialized thinking must be exposed, unlearned, and unequivocally rejected. People across the globe must rise up, boycott the Zionist entity and protest this colonial, genocidal agenda. The Zionist state, which can only persist through the ongoing genocide and expulsion of the indigenous people of historic Palestine, must be dismantled. Israel is not just a racist, apartheid state; it is a genocidal Zionist settler-colonial project that must be brought to an end.
Miyashiro wants remembering Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s victims to lead to resisting genocidal and racist ways of thinking: “remembrance without resistance is hollow. To truly honour the victims of Hiroshima is to confront the political systems that treat some lives as disposable … to reject the dehumanisation and racial hierarchies that sustain violent military occupations —from the islands of the Pacific to Palestine.” The peoples of the world must remember and resist. The protest chant that has echoed across continents must continue to spread and grow like wildfire: “In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians.”
https://youtu.be/21MtvbN0Ztw?si=7JsE5LpbOuOugSs2