The perpetrators are still human

Iwas 6 in 1956, when we moved from our inner-city Bronx apartment to Bergen County, N.J. My secular-Jewish family never attended synagogue in the Bronx, though my parents agreed with my choice to attend Sunday school in Jersey. Sunday school didn’t begin well. Our teacher announced that all the Jews in the world would return to Israel, to live on kibbutzim and work the land. Wait, what? Communal living? Work the land? I didn’t even like going to the local park in the Bronx. Living in Israel was unthinkable.

I came home in tears. My parents reassured me that we weren’t moving anywhere. They explained Zionism by saying that some Jews might move to Israel, but that was their choice. They spoke to the rabbi about the teacher, after which all Sunday-school Zionist talk ceased.

Later on, I learned about the Israeli “Law of Return,” passed in 1950, which meant that all Jews could “return” to Israel with full citizenship granted. But could return doesn’t necessarily mean should return — or will return.

I also began to understand the complexities of the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948. On the one hand, the German Jewish woman across the street from us had a tattoo number on her arm from Auschwitz. And the German Jewish woman next door had been taken in by French nuns as a teenager, who hid her from the Nazis. I had nightmares about concentration camps. But on the other hand, the Palestinian people were dislocated from their homeland. The elusive two-state solution was the only one that seemed sensical.

There are various forms of Zionism, on which I’m no expert. But like many of my Jewish friends and family, I’m as appalled by Israel’s extensive killing of Gaza’s Palestinian civilians with bombs as I am by Hamas’ terrorist killing of Israelis on Oct. 7.

I certainly agree with the Biden administration that Israel has a right to defend itself. The thorny question is, what constitutes self-defense? According to the Britannica. com entry on “Law of War,” there is a “very fine line dividing anticipatory self-defense ... from reprisal, the prime object of which is to punish an alleged wrongdoing.”

Despite the gut-wrenching documentation of the brutal Hamas attack, I applaud the “hundreds of Jewish organization staffers” who called for the White House to back the Gaza ceasefire. I’m more than dispirited by the U.S. veto of the UN Security Council resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, and by President Biden’s failure (so far) to put conditions on arms sent to Israel.

I keep up with news from Gaza. I took special note of a comment made by an Israeli relative of mine long living in the U.S. who insisted that most (if not all) Palestinians want to eradicate all Jews. Even if true, which I doubt, I believe that considering our enemies to be nonhuman monsters, as I’ve heard more than a few Jews (and non-Jews) call members of Hamas, to be both morally wrong and categorically incorrect.

In his 2021 book, “Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization,” philosopher of race and dehumanization David Livingstone Smith explains how dehumanizing others as less-than-human monsters helps us override our inhibitions against killing members of our own kind. This inhibition derives from our “ultrasociality,” which mandates that “we avoid lethal aggression against members of our communities.”

Nonetheless, throughout human history we have demonized out-group peoples as monsters, to morally justify their oppression, torture and murder. This sociopsychological political move, which has often been deployed by demagogues in advancing self-serving racist violence and oppression, is possible precisely because humans have the capacity to think of other humans literally as subhuman monsters or beasts — whether to justify the ovens of Auschwitz or the brutality of American slavery.

Are we licensed to consider these perpetrators nonhuman monsters? Do they constitute a nonhuman species that is a lesser kind than the rest of us? Should “making monsters” in this sense be a two-way street which helps even the score? If so, can this serve social justice?

As monstrous as the acts of Hamas, Nazis, Southern slave owners, and countless others have been, those who perpetrated them are not nonhuman monsters. They are fully human in our shared human capacity for dehumanizing others, for various immoral if not illegal purposes. Holding the belief that such nonhuman monsters exist does not serve social justice; it only advances future instances of dehumanization.

Unless and until we acknowledge our all-too-human capacity for dehumanization and find ways to combat it, the murder and oppression that follows in its wake will persist — in America and beyond.