In his latest Substack essay, author Peter Beinart talks about Medhi Hasan’s recent interview with Dean Phillips, a member of Congress who ran for president on the Democratic side just this year.
Specifically, Beinart speaks about the question that Hasan put to Phillips regarding the military operation in Gaza this month in which 274 Palestinians were killed to extract four Israelis being kept captive.
Hasan, in his interview, flips the circumstances around and brings in a real-life example of conditions where Israelis have kept thousands of Palestinians in torture cells, where at least one person was “raped to death” via being sodomized with a heated metal rod.
Hasan asks Phillips whether it would be acceptable for a contingent of Palestinians to go into Israel and kill 274 Israelis in order to free four people from such a dungeon. Phillips, Beinart notes, cannot answer the question. (First, he denied that such a thing was going on, but Hasan whipped out the New York Times article that exposed the conditions. Then, realizing that this was no hypothetical, Phillips fails to respond.)
Beinart, in discussing this exchange, asks the following:
So, nobody says, well, what would you do if you were a Palestinian under those circumstances, right? Because there is a natural kind of tendency to think that Israel’s Jews are fully human, and therefore like us, and therefore we should ask how we would respond in their position, which is a very legitimate question, right. But if you believe that Jewish and Palestinian lives are equal, you should also be asking the other question, which is: how would you react as a Palestinian given those things, and ask people to imagine how Americans would react were we in the situation the Palestinians are in? And yet, that doesn’t happen.
And I want to know, what is “just like us”? Because that phrase is jam-packed.
That is to say, who is “just like us”? Who is “us”? And what does it mean to be just alike?
I grew up in a very slim but extraordinary window. I attended Head Start preschool during the bright spot between one of the worst presidential eras known (the Nixon years) and the unmoored Reagan years, which were yet un-glimpsed. I was not politically aware at this time, but the Carter years were fine years for families like mine, literally coming up. The social climate was changing, and even primary schoolteachers were instilling a new sense of egalitarianism. Real values are taught to kids around kindergarten age, and during that brief window my peers and I were taught that everyone is equal, everyone is just the same.
I have a feeling, though, that that’s not how Beinart meant his statement.
And I don’t say that to malign Beinart. Not at all. Indeed, I appreciate his opening up of the conversation. I just think that, even after all of the time that he has spent in the public eye, even Beinart may have some blind spots that he has yet to consider.
Who is his audience? To whom does Beinart address his question? He says very matter-of-factly that when we think of Israeli Jews, we think of people like us.
When I think of Israeli Jews, I certainly do think of them as like me, insofar as that means “just people.” They are just people, like I am just a person. I am a full person, but I am merely a person. And that’s how we are all equal.
That’s not contained in Beinart’s very casual assertion. He said that we see them as “fully human.” Now, that brings in instances where there was a lack of affording full humanness. That brings in a sense of dehumanization.
Well, if you look at the dehumanization literature, you will see that when researchers poll average people to ask them, “How do you see Group Y?” respondents are given a spectrum upon which to rate Group Y. This scale is the human evolution scale with which so many of us are familiar.
People are asked to rate where their own group lies on this scale, then are asked to rate other groups. This is a measure of how less human those other groups figure in the respondents’ imaginations. That discrepancy is a marker of “lesser than.”
Beinart’s statement implies that those in his audience
sees themselves as fully human.
sees Israeli Jews as like themselves, and thus fully human.
I daresay that Beinart assumes that his audience is white, Jewish, or some combination — possibly even European. While his statement does not preclude people beyond that narrow band, there is something packed in the phrase “like us” that rather demarcates the audience.
What do I mean? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say “fully human” to some people will mean “top of the food chain.” I mean, if you look at that evolutionary chart, you’ll see that the fully evolved human is an apex creature. He (the figure is male) is the furtherance of nature, the best that nature has bestowed. Thus, the fully human can subordinate all of the other creatures of the world, including those not seen as fully human.
Beinart is a humanist, from what I can tell, so I am sure he does not believe such things himself. But I pose this because it’s important to think about what it means to be an apex social creature. The full humans can subordinate, subjugate, exploit the lesser humans. Because there’s a scale. Whether or not we — we! — can point to where we fall on it, we have this sense in our heads as to whether other people measure up.
Again, to me, we are all merely people. But to the person who sees themselves as apex, as pinnacle, as the best specimen around, that implies hierarchy.
So when Beinart says that Americans are inclined to see Israeli Jews as just alike, he’s talking about social hierarchy. And that’s rather explicit, because Medhi Hasan’s ultimate question is whether Palestinian lives are as valuable as Israeli lives.
What do people “at the top” get to do? They get to oppress. They get to boss everybody else around. They get to be in a certain echelon (what we today call ‘class’). They get to, as Marxists would say, wring profit from someone else’s surplus labor. That’s their position. That’s their prerogative.
So when the average American sees eye-to-eye with this imagined Jewish Israeli, they are seeing each other from the perspective of those who run the joint. That’s how they know they’re equal!
It’s a very offhand statement by Beinart, which is why it snagged my attention. There’s a lot compressed in a tiny, little space.
It is nearly inconceivable, and Beinart notes this, for Americans to place themselves in the imaginary shoes of the hypothetical Palestinian. But he doesn’t answer why. It’s because in the average American’s mental sketch, they see Palestinians as lesser than. It’s not an eye-to-eye relationship. It’s not equal; it’s not level.
So the exchange takes more effort. We literally have a failure of imagination.
When people say that the West is comfortable with the death toll in Gaza because of racism, this inability for Westerners to see certain others as they see themselves is the crux of the matter. But it’s hard to break “racism” down. People hear the word and they automatically think, “That doesn’t apply to me,” and then they stop listening. But give those same people a scale of humanoids graduating up an evolutionary scale, and suddenly the idea is rendered graphically for them — as though pictures open up a deeper, more primal place.
Palestinians don’t rank as “just like us” is the takeaway here. Because, again, who is Beinart’s audience? He’s talking to people who would place Palestinians further down the scale. He’s talking to people who see themselves as having the right — if they lived in conquistador times — to go and claim a place of their own. They’re the pioneers, the “rugged individuals” in American parlance. We accord that narrative thread to Israelis. We don’t accord it to Palestinians, because they’re not “fully human”. They haven’t reached that apex where they have the right to exploit others and exploit the land.
That’s the underlying narrative of the entire Israeli offensive, from start to finish.
Medhi Hasan’s interview of Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN), on Zeteo:
Maybe it's because of what I read and see on social media, but I feel like the Palestinians are just like us and Zionist Israelis are not.
I think Beinert is simply stating out loud a sentiment that has been obvious to anyone who is supportive of the Palestinian cause, namely that they are considered unsympathetic because they are non- white and non-Western. The fact of the matter is that white Europeans (preferably some flavor of Christian) are considered the default version of humanity. The extent to which someone is considered human depends on how much they fit or don’t fit this model. As much as the future of the Zionist project remains uncertain, one of its primary goals - that of making white European Ashkenazi Jews accepted as white Westerners in their own nation state - has been wildly successful. Israel is accepted as part of the West and enjoys all the privileges that entails, namely the ability to abuse, kill, and exploit non-whites/non-Westerners with no consequences. To paraphrase Kos and other Western commentators, it’s not a tragedy when Palestinian children are slaughtered en masse, because no actual people were harmed.