How can you look at the horrors in Palestine and feel nothing?
There is a particular kind of horror that does not announce itself with violence. It arrives quietly, dressed in the ordinary language of duty, loyalty and order.
It is the horror of watching someone look at evidence of a massacre, filmed by the perpetrator’s own hand, and feel nothing.
No guilt. No revulsion. Not even discomfort. Just a blank, uncomprehending stare, as though the suffering belongs to a category of existence they have long since stopped recognising as real.
This is what confronted those present at the capture a few weeks ago of Amjad Youssef, the Syrian perpetrator who filmed himself participating in the Tadamon massacre in April 2013, when 41 civilians were thrown into a pit, fired upon at close range, and then had their bodies burned.
When authorities showed the footage to his family members - his own filmed testimony of slaughter - they did not recoil. They pleaded. They insisted he had simply been doing his job, carrying out his duties, following orders.
The more investigators pressed them on the sheer savagery of what the footage documented, the more they retreated into the same impenetrable wall of incomprehension. They were not lying. They were not performing. They genuinely could not locate within themselves the emotional architecture needed to process what they were seeing as a crime against human beings.
That is not callousness in the conventional sense. It is something far more disturbing. It is what happens when dehumanisation is so total, so long-practised, so woven into the fabric of ordinary life, that the suffering of a designated “other” no longer registers as suffering at all.
The victims of Tadamon had, in the minds of those who killed them and those who loved the killers, already been removed from the moral ledger of humanity. And so the footage was not evidence of a crime; it was simply footage.
Systemic conditioning
We would be dangerously mistaken to treat this as an aberration unique to one family in one conflict. The psychological phenomenon on display, what we might call empathetic apathy, is not a product of individual pathology. It is a product of sustained, systemic conditioning.
When a society is taught, over years and decades, that a particular group of people is less than human, less worthy, less real, the emotional circuits that would ordinarily fire in response to their pain are gradually rewired. Eventually, they stop firing altogether.
This grim reality was brought into sharp and sober focus at a recent webinar hosted by the Global Alliance for Palestine. Speakers examined the Israeli Knesset’s passing in late March of what has been termed the “Death Penalty for Terrorists Law”, a piece of legislation that mandates death by hanging as the default punishment for those convicted of killing Israelis, administered through military courts that almost exclusively try Palestinians and carry a conviction rate of around 99 percent.
It reflects what any society risks becoming when it decides, for long enough, that some lives simply do not count
The law, as one speaker at the webinar meticulously laid out, does not even pretend to be universal: any Israeli citizen charged with an unlawful killing in the occupied West Bank is tried in a civilian court, where the conviction rate for crimes committed against Palestinians runs at approximately three percent.
That is not a justice system. It is a taxonomy of human worth, encoded in law.
Perhaps most chilling was the speaker’s account of the sexual abuse to which Palestinian prisoners are routinely subjected - violations that are not hidden, denied or prosecuted, but rather absorbed into the daily background noise of a society that has decided, collectively, that these particular victims do not merit the full range of its moral concern.
Human rights organisations have documented arbitrary arrests, torture, denial of Red Cross access and sexual violence as features of Israel’s prison system - and yet these facts remain, to vast swathes of Israeli society, unremarkable.
Nowhere is this more visibly and disturbingly illustrated than in the broader Israeli public’s relationship with Palestinian suffering. The sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners - documented, reported, acknowledged - has been met in many quarters not with outrage, but with indifference, even approval.
Capacity eroded
Earlier this month, claims alleging that Israel trained dogs to sexually assault Palestinians emerged, with the Israel Prison Service denying the accusations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Saar have ordered a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times over its reporting.
The response of the state was not to investigate, but to litigate against those who covered this issue. Palestinian children have been shot by snipers, buried under rubble, killed in their sleep - and the response from large segments of Israeli civilian and political society has been to reach, reflexively, for the language of security, of necessity, of regrettable but unavoidable collateral consequences.
This is not merely a political disagreement. It’s empathetic apathy in real time: a society where decades of occupation, of casting Palestinians as existential threats rather than human beings, have eroded the basic neurological and moral capacity to recognise Palestinian pain as pain.
As one Israeli rights analyst put it, the death penalty law is not the exception as much as it is the rule: “part of the system and what makes up daily life for people here”, shaping how people see reality, not as an extraordinary incident but as an extreme example of what most people in Israel accept as normal.
When Israeli protesters took to the streets in their hundreds of thousands to defend judicial independence, they demonstrated that the capacity for civic outrage is intact. It simply does not extend to those who have been sufficiently dehumanised.
The emotions are not absent. They are selective. And selective empathy, deployed consistently along ethnic and racial lines, is not empathy at all. It is its abolition.
This is the trajectory of dehumanisation. It does not begin with massacres. It begins with language: with “animals”, “human shields”, “demographic threats”. It continues with policies that make the suffering of the other invisible or permissible. And it ends with people watching footage of atrocities and feeling, in all sincerity, that they are watching nothing wrong at all.
The family of Amjad Youssef holds up a mirror that the world would rather not look into - because what it reflects is not a uniquely Syrian, or uniquely Arab, or uniquely extremist phenomenon. It reflects what any society risks becoming when it decides, for long enough, that some lives simply do not count.
And the most urgent question is not whether we can see that in others. It is whether we have the honesty to see it in ourselves.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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