They’re animals! Savages! They’re vermin. No one wants to take them in! This land, that was theirs, is now ours. It’s our destiny to have it, and expand it. This property, that was theirs, is being taken and claimed for our own. They don’t deserve it. They should be moved to some distant land, where they can live amongst their own kind, away from us, the chosen; the superior.

Native Americans
Enslaved Africans
Jews
Palestinians

Are just a few of the folks this has happened to. More examples of this exist in our world’s history, everywhere, that don’t get as much attention.

Similar name calling. Similar arguments. Similar “solutions,” though each unique in their barbarity.

Native Americans were faced with dehumanization, genocide, forced migration, occupation, restricted movement, sexual violence, and a whole host of atrocities committed by European settlers in the Americas. In the generations that followed, those settlers and their ancestors told the story of their settlements, making Natives out to be “savages” and themselves out to be the daring adventurers and heroes, claiming and taming a “new world.”

Enslaved Africans were faced with dehumanization, capture, sale, forced migration, forced labor, restricted movement, sexual violence, and a whole host of atrocities. In the generations that followed, the folks who enslaved them and committed those atrocities wanted to claim the war fought over maintaining chattel slavery was really about State rights and “Southern Pride.” They wanted people to “get over it,” I.E. erase that part of our history, because it “makes white people feel bad.” They tell us, “nothing is owed – that happened a long time ago.” They erected national monuments for the enslavers while attacking efforts to learn about and come to terms with what slavery has done not only to our past, but our present.

Jews were faced with dehumanization, false allegations, stereotypes, accusations, assault, vandalism, forced removal from their homes, confiscated property by the state, restricted movement, forced relocation into ghettos, violent suppression, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. In the decades that followed, we were informed about the dangers of ethnonationalism and how it can lead to genocide, as it did in Nazi Germany. We learned about this in the midst of decades of Jim Crow in the United States, and throughout the Zionist colonization of Palestine.

Palestinians are faced with dehumanization, false allegations, stereotypes, accusations, assault, vandalism, apartheid conditions, second class citizenship, forced removal from their homes, confiscated property by an occupying state, forced relocation into ever-shrinking areas, restricted movement, violent suppression, ethnic cleansing and genocide. We are being told that Palestinians are terrorists, and antisemites, to excuse and justify the mass execution of Palestinians and the total destruction of their civilian infrastructure, as the leadership in Israel demands unrelenting and unsympathetic barbarism; as the leadership in the United States on one side talks about building resort property in Gaza and on the other talks about their jobs being to keep “the left” pro-Israel, as both vote to approve Congressional resolutions in a bipartisan manner that condemn antisemitism and define antisemitism as any and all criticism of the state of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism.

Never again? …never learn.