Beyond victimhood, towards humanity
A viable future for West Asia requires a focus on human security, on building peace through addressing people’s basic needs and assuring rights and dignity
The increasingly horrific tragedy that is happening in the occupied Palestinian territories, primarily in the Gaza Strip but also throughout the occupied West Bank, cries out not just for compassion and a ceasefire, but also for human security as opposed to military security; for humanising our enemies as well as our friends; and for wisdom and long-term visions as opposed to fury and short-term revenge.

A full and lasting ceasefire is desperately needed and yet it keeps being blocked in the Security Council, even while hospitals are pulverised, medics and patients attacked, journalists killed, and communications cut off, with no food, water, electricity and fuel, and with disease and dehydration spreading rapidly among the nearly two million (some 85% out of a total population of 2.3 million) displaced. Those who fled the bombing in the north to the south and are still being bombed, relentlessly. Many of them are living on the streets and with no shelter or sanitation, in a small area increasingly described as “hell on earth”.
As of now, nearly 20,000 women, children and men have been killed. The wounded are in the tens of thousands with little or no medical treatment: There are only a handful of even semi-functioning hospitals. Israeli soldiers are also arresting many of those who have been told to flee, even to the extent that mothers have been taken from their babies. Not only does it not stop, but the killing spree is spreading to the West Bank as more and more Palestinians are killed there every day, and at the time of writing, hospitals there too are being shelled and surrounded by Israeli tanks.
Even in hell on earth, it is the women who bear the brunt. Palestinian women are traditionally strong and resourceful. In the 75 years since the Nakba of 1948, more than 56 years of Israeli occupation, and 16 years of blockade on the Gaza Strip, they are used to managing without even basic facilities. But now they are mostly without homes, without protection against the elements. There are an estimated 50,000 pregnant women, with more than 180 giving birth every day. They have to struggle without water, often as little as 1.5 litres per person per day, for everything, along with the absence of sanitation and, therefore, increasing filth and disease. Nearly 400,000 newly displaced Palestinians are ill with infectious diseases, such as dysentery, as well as respiratory diseases caused by bombs. All of this with the constant relentless danger from Israeli bombing that can kill or maim at any minute.
Just a year-and-a-half ago, I worked online with a group of Gaza youth — as a Jerusalemite, I have not been able to visit Gaza for more than 20 years due to Israeli restrictions on movement and access — on the basic skills of non-violence, focussing on participatory video as a means to raise their voices to policymakers. One of the films these young people made was about a woman who wanted to become the best baker in Gaza. Recently widowed, she had set up and renovated her bakery and already had five young men working there. She was proud to be supporting five families in poverty-stricken Gaza in addition to her own.
What has happened to her, in the last two months of endless horror? I have not been able to find out. What I do know is that Gaza now has no bakeries. Some were shelled; for the others, there was no flour and no fuel. Women are trying to cook on whatever they can find to burn among the rubble (often heavily polluted), and if they can’t cook, they and their families are eating whatever they can — for the most part, raw onions and aubergines. Families in the north are, if lucky, eating one meal every three days; a meal consisting of a tin of tuna and perhaps, some high-energy biscuits among an entire family.
How can this continue? What makes it possible for human beings to commit and keep on committing such atrocious and inhumane cruelty to others, even when those others are not only women and children, but even tiny newborn babies, struggling to survive outside their (now powerless/useless) incubators? In Israel, over 100 Israeli physicians overrode their Hippocratic oath as they signed a letter urging the military to destroy the “hornet nests and the hospitals shielding them” in the Gaza Strip.
It is perhaps largely because of the dehumanisation of the Palestinian people that the atrocities can be perpetrated, a dehumanisation perpetuated not only by people (by design and with pride) but even by technology via an Artficial Intelligence programme, “Gospel”, which according to a former Israeli army chief is “a machine that produces vast amounts of data more effectively than any human, and translates it into targets for attack”. “In the past, we would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year. Now, this machine produces 100 targets a single day, with 50% of them being attacked,” he said.
They cannot see the proud baker, her hands caked with flour – they see only the enemy.
So this war is not only about land (and no doubt geopolitical interests) and “narrative” around the 75 years since the Nakba and the 56 years of brutal occupation but also about humanity – who is human; who is entitled to sympathy (including who is allowed to be a victim); and who is entitled to basic, let alone full, human and political rights and to a hopeful and viable future.
The cycle of violence needs to be stopped, and with it the cycle of trauma and polarisation into all good versus all evil into “human” versus “human animals”.
A viable future requires a focus on human rather than military security, on building peace through addressing people’s basic needs and assuring their rights and dignity, rather than through dependence on guns and walls and watchtowers with macho male commanders. Real lasting peace requires work on relationships and reciprocal respect, starting with an end to domination and asymmetry. To this end, women need to be at the forefront of negotiations and peacebuilding, on a fully equal footing with men. It is only by seeing each other as full human beings that a just and lasting peace for the entire region can perhaps be generated from the ghastly ruins of Gaza; a peace that will make all of us safer and allow our courageous baker to prosper and rebuild her bakery.
Lucy Nusseibeh is the founder and executive chair of MEND (Middle East Non-violence and Democracy) in East Jerusalem. The views expressed are personal
