Israelis' Selective Compassion: Empathy Toward a West Bank Dog but Not Palestinian Kids
While shedding justifiable tears for Lucy the dog after it was abused by a settler in the West Bank, Israelis keep on not perceiving Palestinians as individuals, but as a dehumanized mass labeled by words like 'Amalek'
The shock of the "Lucy the Dog" story was real. On Friday, Lucy was tied up in a yard in the West Bank village of Atara, when a masked settler was filmed savagely beating her with a club. The Israeli public was shocked by the violence directed at Lucy, sympathized with her pain and demanded justice for the dog.
The Israeli capacity for compassion hit a peak; the Israeli response to suffering, especially when experienced by helpless animals, was self-evident.
The Lucy incident not only demonstrated the existence of empathy in Israeli society but also the way it operates within very clear limits. The same society that knows how to quickly rally around a dog or an injured animal has existed for decades in a reality where Palestinians under its control are humiliated, beaten, deported and killed, without causing any moral turmoil.t
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It's not that Israelis lack feeling or morals – the Lucy affair begs to differ. They're just selective, in a deadly sense. Israelis remind me of Tony Soprano, a fictional mafioso who readily kills people, but loses it over the killing of a racehorse.
Palestinians aren't seen in the Israeli consciousness as individuals, but as a collective. They don't appear as human beings, but as an inhuman mass labeled by words like "Amalek," "terrorism" and "demographic threat." In Israel, a Palestinian child can't even be just a helpless child – they're born straight into dehumanization.
Otherwise, it's difficult to explain how a society that's capable of feeling such great compassion for animals manages to live in the face of the deaths of thousands of children in Gaza without disintegrating morally. Israel has killed more than 17,000 children and teenagers in Gaza – a number impossible for an ordinary mind to grasp.
And yet, in Israeli discourse, Palestinian children aren't helpless victims, even after their death. Instead of Israelis awakening their conscience, they waken their inner Shin Bet: "who were these children's parents;" "why were they in that spot to begin with;" "what could those children have grown up to be in the future." By the mere fact that they're Palestinian, they're deprived of automatic "innocent" status that Israeli society almost instantly gives to animals.
This violence and dehumanization towards Palestinians didn't start with the Gaza war. Even the supposedly quiet occupation entailed a daily reality of checkpoints, night raids, arrests, humiliations and continuing violence, all of which failed to truly shake Israeli society's conscience.
Eighteen-year-old Israeli boys and adult reservists, fathers and mothers of children, were sent to place children their own age under administrative arrest, beat men who could be their grandfathers, keep old men at checkpoints for hours and delay medical treatment approvals for terminally ill patients.
Settler violence in the West Bank has developed to monstrous proportions under the nose of the Israeli public, but elicits almost no real shock. Palestinian villages have been set on fire. Olive groves have been uprooted. Homes and businesses have been burned. Families have been attacked in the dead of night. Shepherds have been driven from their lands and Palestinian livestock has been slaughtered. For most of Israeli society, this has been just background noise.
Israelis can love dogs and be shocked by animal abuse, but not be shocked by the mass killing of Palestinians, by the death of an old man chained in the cold or by the thousands of children killed in Gaza, none of them any less helpless than poor Lucy the dog. Due to the occupation, Israel's borders have no limits, but the Israeli conscience does.