ABD-ELHAMEED: Palestinian men deserve dignity, not dehumanization
A UN News report, published in late October 2023, mentions that women and children accounted for more than 62 percent of the deaths in the Gaza region since Oct. 7, 2023.
Several weeks ago, PBS released an article updating the death toll in Gaza, saying that around "two-thirds of those killed were women and children."
More recently, NPR published that "women and children make up 58 percent" of "casualties recorded in hospitals."
What is happening in Gaza is no doubt considered a feminist issue and a slaughter against children, but men should not be lost in the numbers. There has also been mass violence against fathers, brothers, sons, uncles and men of all ages and positions in the workforce.
Currently, Palestinian men are routinely dehumanized by Western powers as they are at the epicenter of a modern-day colonial and imperialist project.
This dehumanization of Palestinian men is reinforced at unprecedented levels due to the self-proclaimed democratic and civilized nature of the U.S. and Israel's governments and societies.
To justify its goals, which South Africa has likened to genocide under the Genocide Convention, it is essential that the perpetrators dehumanize their targeted people as much as possible, which are the Palestinian people.
Every second that is spent intentionally dehumanizing Palestinian men should be one spent breaking that chain of dehumanization.
Palestinian men residing in Palestine are the ones tirelessly pulling bodies out of the rubble, documenting the atrocities against their people and trying to bring joy to traumatized children.
The gentle face of Khaled Nabhan circulated around the world, who held his martyred granddaughter and called her "the soul of my soul."
Ahmad al-Ghuferi had 103 relatives killed in an airstrike on their home in Gaza City. He speaks of his family members in the present, saying, "My daughters are little birds to me ... Who will call me dad?"
One man helped rescue a girl from under the rubble of her home. When she asked the man if he would take her to the cemetery, he responded, "What cemetery? Look at you, you are alive and beautiful like the moon."
Zaki Shaheen Khader is a 73-year-old retired nurse who now treats forcibly displaced Palestinians in Gaza. Mahmoud Shammala, a surgeon at Al Nasser Hospital, says the worst part of his day is having to tell families that their children have died.
What about the boys who are growing up to be men? In one video, two Palestinian boys teach a little girl how to pray to God to end the war.
Meanwhile, Palestinian boys and men everywhere else are supposed to prove their humanity and right to existence.
The West's targeting and dehumanization of the men of any non-Western society promotes an idea that the "violence" and "toxicity" of these men disrupt the fabric of that society. This view then paves the way for the victimization of women and children.
Sa'ed Atshan, an associate professor and the chair of the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College, sums up this point perfectly: "The elision of Palestinian men's humanity becomes a deliberate choice in service of violence against all Palestinians — whether they are armed or unarmed and man, woman or child."
Secondly, Palestinian men pose a kind of spiritual strength and eloquence that I believe the West simply does not know how to handle besides furthering the dehumanization agenda.
A horrifyingly racist interview between British TV presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer and the Secretary-General and co-founder of the Palestinian National Initiative and physician Mustafa Barghouti is a stellar example of these tropes in action.
Throughout the interview, Hartley-Brewer became increasingly impatient with Barghouti as he tried to explain that the suffering of his people is a reality in the present.
Besides the repeated interruption of Barghouti, her words only reinforced her behavior.
Hartley-Brewer impatiently said, "Please don't say that again, we don't have time for it," when referring to Barghouti contextualizing the attacks from Oct. 7, 2023.
After shouting at him seconds later, she said, "Maybe you're not used to women talking, I don't know. But I'd like to finish the sentence, sir."
That specific sentence from Hartley-Brewer reinforced her disrespectful attitude from the beginning as she made a claim that contained racist and Orientalist stereotypes of Arab men and women.
Hartley-Brewer simultaneously spewed comments at Barghouti that are undoubtedly sexist toward Palestinian and Arab men while claiming the lack of rights that Palestinian and Arab women have. Despite Hartley-Brewer's behavior, Barghouti remained level-headed and respectful.
Barghouti's calmness throughout the interview opposes the Western tropes of Arabs and Middle Easterners as angry and barbaric, making his behavior a threat to settler colonialism and to all of Western supremacy.
This kind of abhorrent racist and Western-supremacist rhetoric is not limited to traditional journalistic formats but also exists in spaces where symbolism meets media: political cartoons.
In November 2023, The Washington Post published a political cartoon depicting Palestinians that was entrenched in every racist and Western-supremacist trope used to vilify them.
The cartoon titled "Human Shields" depicts a seemingly angry and distinctly Arab man with four children and one woman strapped to his body with the Palestinian flag standing adjacent and a framed portrait of the Dome of the Rock in Al-Aqsa mosque in the background, one of the holiest sites in Islam.
The woman in the cartoon is representative of a docile Muslim and Arab woman as she wears the hijab and is dressed in all black, a color that has been notoriously used time and time again to symbolize the "violence" and "backwardness" of an entire people.
This cartoon essentially blames Palestinian men for the mass killing of their people and depicts that women and children are victims of their "inherent" violence.
There is no "inherent" violence of Palestinians.
Palestinian boys and men are human and deserve to be dignified.
Naaima Abd-Elhameed is a senior in the School of Arts and Sciences majoring in journalism and media studies and minoring in Arabic and international and global studies. Her column, "Something to Think About," runs on alternate Tuesdays.
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