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How Israelis, Islamists dehumanize each other
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Toronto Star
Posted: April 5th, 2009
http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/606064
Two Israeli newspapers published disturbing accounts this week about misconduct by Israeli soldiers during this country's January offensive in Gaza and one statement ... conveyed an over-riding state of mind, one that enabled at least some Israeli soldiers to carry out some thoroughly loathsome deeds while they were deployed in Gaza including, it seems, the cold-blooded murder of Palestinian civilians. "I don't know how to describe it," said the soldier in question, a squad leader who is clearly troubled by much of what he saw. "The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something much, much less important than the lives of our soldiers." Psychologists have at least a couple of terms for the tendency of humans to view their adversaries as springing from a lower order of being. Known either as pseudo-speciation or dehumanization, the phenomenon is as ancient as the Bible and as common nowadays as olive trees in the Holy Land. If there is one man in this country who has explored the dark side of Israel's heart, it is Yehuda Shaul, director of Breaking the Silence, an organization that collects and publishes accounts by Israeli soldiers about their sometimes brutal behaviour while on duty in the Palestinian territories. Shaul says ... "The soldiers say: `Everyone is an enemy. Everyone here is a legitimate target.' That was the notion."
Note: For a former Marine Corps general's analysis of the purposes served by the dehumanizaton of the "enemy" inculcated in soldiers by their officers, click here.
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