BORDEAUX, France, Jan 12 (IPS) – Before providing military aid, deploying troops or dropping bombs, the United States lays the foundation for its political violence by first stripping its opponents of their humanity. Diplomacy is sidelined, legal restrictions are treated as inconveniences and profits are considered more important than human lives. This machinery of dehumanization, imposed around the world for decades and heightened in Gaza over the past three years, has now returned home, turned inward against Americans by the elected officials and systems meant to protect them.
The human and financial costs of America’s war addiction were a constant presence in my youth. For my generation, war was ruthlessly pursued by the political establishment, laundered through media narratives, and foisted on the working class and the poor with taxes and blood.
I was not yet two when my family immigrated to the United States in April 1970, as the Vietnam War raged and Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia.
By the time these wars were over, new interventions, proxy wars, coups and ‘wars on terror’ followed, using the language of dehumanization to sell and maintain each conflict. Vietnamese civilians were reduced to “free-fire targets,” and indigenous peasants in Cold War Latin America were labeled “peasants and subversives” to justify massacres.
After September 11, Iraqis were portrayed as “collateral damage,” and during America’s longest war, Afghan “military-age men” were considered “terrorists” and “for want of guilt.”
In all cases, dehumanization preceded and justified the violence.
The Laboratory of Dehumanization
And always, decade after decade, American patronage of Israel’s own wars continued, especially when it came to Palestinian self-determination.
Israeli human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories – excessive force, collective punishment, illegal settlement expansion and arbitrary detention – have been documented in US State Department reports since the 1970s. Yet Washington continued to expand military aid, making Israel the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign aid in history.
After October 7, despite warnings from multiple US government officials that Israel’s response to Hamas amounted to the collective punishment of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents, nearly half of whom are children, both the Biden and Trump administrations approved tens of billions of dollars in emergency arms transfers.
These transfers continued despite evidence that US-supplied weapons, including chemical weapons and 2,000-pound bombs, were being used by Israel in Gaza’s densely populated civilian neighborhoods – in violation of both international law and domestic laws, namely the US Arms Export Control Act and the Leahy Act.
Over decades of support, but especially over the past three years, American support for Israel has helped refine its own language of dehumanization toward Palestinians by consistently framing the killings of civilians as nameless and “inevitable” incidents of Israel’s right to self-defense and by laying the rhetorical foundation for the genocide in Gaza.
The kingdom is coming home
The militarized ICE attacks now taking place in the United States rely on tactics, equipment, and doctrine provided by the highly military industrial complex that has profited from Gaza.
The same officials who reduced Palestinians to “terrorists” or those who protected them now use that language at home, viewing the Americans who protect their communities as “threats to be neutralized” rather than citizens with inalienable rights.
President Trump’s unwillingness to speak Renée Good’s name after a federal ICE agent fatally shot her in Minneapolis last week — describing the encounter as “self-defense” — reflects how Palestinians killed in Gaza by U.S.-supplied weapons and political cover are discussed as abstract, nameless victims.
Naming the powerful while nameless the vulnerable protects perpetrators and exposes the persistent logic of dehumanization that now bridges American foreign policy and domestic policing.
Reclaiming our humanity
In his 1961 farewell address, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that an unchecked military-industrial complex could disrupt democratic governance at home. But as he spoke, he overlooked the very coups and interventions that anchored permanent militarization. We now live in the reality he feared.
Washington’s continued complicity in Gaza, its increasingly aggressive stance toward Venezuela and Greenland, and its authoritarian behavior at home are stark reminders: when dehumanization in US foreign policy goes unchecked, it is only a matter of time before it goes unchecked at home.
If the long history of dehumanization in Gaza and America has taught us anything, it is that Americans cannot trust their political elites to curb their appetite for abuse of authority.
The average citizen must move beyond mere condemnation and towards sustainable citizen action. This means voting out officials dependent on belligerent lobbies, reasserting Congress’s power over the executive branch, and demanding enforcement of laws designed to prevent American complicity in human rights abuses abroad and the rule of law at home.
The challenge ahead is truly enormous – but ending the machinery of dehumanization is not inevitable and remains within the reach of Americans determined to reclaim their shared humanity for each other and the world.
Melek Zahine is a writer and advocate who focuses on the intersection of humanitarian aid and U.S. foreign policy.
IPS UN Office
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