Introduction
This article argues that dehumanization — commonly understood as the erasure of the other’s humanity — may be more precisely understood as a distorted acknowledgment of it: a fear-driven recognition of the other’s agency and
power, recast as contaminating threat.
Drawing on the psychology of humiliation, the article introduces a distinction between honor-humiliation, rooted in hierarchical rank, and dignity-humiliation, which arises from violations of equal human worth and carries far greater explosive potential.
The primary responsibility for overcoming humiliation lies with the global community. What is needed is a global therapeutic responsibility: the structural accompaniment of traumatized communities through dignity-centered economic systems, global governance grounded in ontological humility, and the pursuit of egality — the principle of equal dignity for all — embedded in mutual solidarity. The overarching ethical vision orienting these prescriptions is a commitment to egality and mutual solidarity as the moral foundation for a world of unity in diversity, operationalized as mutual solidarity-based glob-egality, a global society that places human dignity ahead of dominance, profit and division.
It is a great honor for me to be invited to contribute to this issue of the Palestine-Israel Journal, devoted to the question: What Should Be Done Now? After more than two years of violence in the wider West Asian region, this question carries particular urgency.
I especially welcome that the editorial board has highlighted dehumanization as a central concern and that the editorial board acknowledged that Israeli and Palestinian societies are living with profound trauma. For many Israelis, the Hamas attack on October 7th, 2023, resonates with historical memories of existential threat, including the Holocaust, while for many Palestinians, the devastation of Gaza evokes the enduring legacy of the Nakba. These layers of memory and suffering shape perception, emotion, and action on all sides.
Dehumanization as Acknowledgment
Dehumanization offers an important lens for understanding the rhetoric that circulates in times of acute violence. It captures a recurring pattern whereby adversaries are described as vermin, disease, or dirt to be removed.
However, I want to suggest that dehumanization is better understood as a distorted acknowledgment of the other’s humanity rather than an erasure of it. Reframing dehumanization in this way opens a path to understanding cycles of violence such as those we are witnessing, and toward ending, healing, and preventing them.
Dehumanizing language entails an acknowledgment of the others’ force rather than an erasure of their humanity — albeit a distorted, fear‑driven acknowledgment. The enemy is framed as contaminating dirt precisely because they are seen to be potent and dangerous, inspiring a dread of what they are capable of. Perpetrators use dehumanization to manage the psychological weight of their own fear.
Understood in this way, the act of dehumanization starts from recognition — from the cognitive and social recognition of the others’ agency, power, and social standing, and from a deep emotional understanding of their vulnerabilities.
This reframing, however, has significant cost for those who engage in it. It is self-defeating in many respects. It interacts with ideals of honor and dignity in ways that make it destructive also for the perpetrator, potentially hurting the perpetrator even more than the victim. Dehumanization and honor.
Militarized cultural mindsets grounded in ideals of masculine honor depend on the presence of an adversary who can be construed as a worthy opponent threatening from outside rather than on dirt to be removed from inside. For soldiers trained to imagine themselves as heroic warriors, honor is earned through facing an enemy capable of resistance rather than through performing tasks associated with domestic labor or sanitation. Such a mindset depends on respect for a formidable foe.
Work framed as “cleaning” carries additional connotations. Apart from evoking feminized drudgery and servility, it risks symbolically contaminating those who engage in it — “dirty” work has traditionally been relegated to “untouchables,” and this included executioners. “Outcasts” were seen as dangerously “impure” due to their proximity to hazardous contamination.1
The metaphor of “cleaning” thus situates violence within a domain associated with both subordination and contamination. All this creates a profound tension between the aspiration to a heroic identity on one side and the framing of violence as degrading labor on the other.
Violence directed at defenseless civilians intensifies this tension even further. It is profoundly incompatible with the sense of self of elite combatants. When violence is directed at defenseless civilians rather than armed rivals, it risks appearing more than just unheroic — it is actively degrading its perpetrators, threatening the very codes of honor that sustain military identity. The codes of warrior honor need reciprocity and risk, and only a worthy opponent can supply that. When these elements are absent, the moral and symbolic grounding of action becomes unstable.
It is within such ideological tensions that Naz i l e ader Heinrich Himmler attempted to reconcile the SS’s sense of self as an honor‑bound elite with the reality of their participation in utterly unheroic mass murder. His addresses to the SS are well-documented instances of this logic. Through this rhetoric, Himmler attempted to consecrate mass murder as the twisted duty of “honorable” men to engage in inherently dishonorable acts. He presented violence as both repugnant and necessary, dishonorable in form yet honorable in intent.
While the role and character of the SS was known, “The myth that the Nazi-era German armed forces, the Wehrmacht, were not involved in war crimes persisted for decades after the war.”2 The reason was the profound dishonor such acts implied and their incompatibility with the desired military image.
I could have used another historical example. Yet, I grew up in Germany and wrote my doctoral dissertation on the psychology of humiliation in relation to war and genocide, with case studies of Rwanda and Somalia, against the background of Nazi Germany.3
Humiliation: The Nuclear Bomb of the Emotions
In more than five decades of fieldwork on all continents — embedded in communities that had lived through mass killings, occupation, displacement, and the long aftermath of collective violence — I have come to understand that dignity-humiliation can trigger responses that are unprecedented in both cruelty and reach. It can touch the dignity of large numbers of ordinary citizens at the core of their humanity, rather than the honor of a much smaller group of specialized soldiers. When leaders channel the feelings of humiliation present in populations into unified narratives of humiliation, promising salvation, this also democratizes violence, enabling mass violence, and it makes it extremely cost-effective. In contrast, standoffs between military combatants require much more costly investment. In Rwanda, I concluded that feelings of humiliation, if mobilized in this way, are the nuclear bomb of the emotions, disregarding any rational strategy and even at the cost of self-destruction.
Both shame and humiliation are relational and social, since humans are fundamentally relational.4 I work together with relational psychologist Linda Hartling, who has developed a questionnaire to assess humiliation that focuses on derision, degradation, and debasement.5 Shame tends to turn inward and often makes people passive. Humiliation can lead to shame and passivity as well,6 yet it can also turn outward into violence, it can trigger humiliated fury.7 This happens when humiliation is experienced as an undeserved degradation done by another person or group, an undue lowering, a denial of the sense of worth to which one feels entitled. In an era when human rights ideals of equal dignity for all have spread globally, the explosive potential of humiliation has intensified, because the gap between what is promised and what is delivered has never been more visible, more global, and more deeply felt.
Two societies in protracted violent confrontation carry, between them, an accumulation of humiliation that goes back generations. Both have experienced what I distinguish as honor-humiliation and dignity-humiliation, and both forms are at work simultaneously, interacting in ways that make the cycles extraordinarily difficult to interrupt.
As discussed above, honor-humiliation belongs to a world of hierarchical codes, where status must be defended and where an attack on one’s group unleashes the duty to respond. Dignity-humiliation is newer and, in many ways, more explosive. It arises when the universal principle of equal human worth — the foundational promise of the international human rights framework — is violated. When it is proclaimed in rhetoric only to be violated in practice, it amounts to double humiliation: first the pain from the degradation itself, and then the disappointment of discovering that the system which promised protection regards one’s suffering as acceptable, or lesser, or the collateral cost of someone else’s security. (This is also why the current return of authoritarianism elicits particularly strong feelings of humiliation in those who believed that its time was over.)
Both societies that are the focus of this journal have experienced this double humiliation in their own ways, across their own recent timelines, through their own encounters with a world that proclaimed care and delivered abandonment. A dynamic I have observed in violent conflict after violent conflict is that humiliation, when unaddressed and unwitnessed, waits rather than dissipates. It accumulates across generations, transmitted through memory and story and the body. When it finally erupts — when the humiliated find the means and the moment — those who believed the matter was settled, react with genuine shock, labeling the eruption as irrational, incomprehensible, or outright evil. This incomprehension is a symptom of the original failure to see, and it deepens the wounds on all sides.
Layered over these structural dynamics is what I call humiliation entrepreneurship. It is the deliberate exploitation of collective humiliation by political actors who convert accumulated grievances into power. Humiliation entrepreneurs typically craft narratives of victimhood and promise redemption, redirecting shame into rage, only to channel that rage toward purposes that in many cases serve their own interests rather than the genuine healing of the communities they claim to represent. This is a recurring pattern wherever protracted humiliation meets political opportunism. It has become even more virulent in the age of global media and algorithmically amplified outrage.
The Mandela Path and the Dynamics of Mass Mobilization
The only way to healing which is coherent with the ideal of equal dignity for all is what I call the “Mandela path” out of humiliation. This is a constructive path toward systemic change.
The Mandela path is the remedy that is coherent with dignity, the path that should be taken after feeling one’s dignity violated. However, this is a difficult and complex path, and the toolkit for avenging honor is much more readily available. I call it crossing back when feelings of dignity-humiliation fail to inspire the Mandela path, when they instead find their way back into the “Hitler-SS path.”8 This is what happened in Rwanda in 1994.
Following my doctoral research in Rwanda, I conceptualized genocide through a distinction between honor‑humiliation and dignity‑humiliation. This lens helped me understand the differences I observed between Nazi Germany and Rwanda. In Rwanda in 1994, the humiliation narrative transmitted via radio was in many ways similar to that in Nazi Germany — in my words, “To prevent future humiliation, we need to exterminate those who plan to become our future humiliators.” This has some unfortunate echoes in statements by some Israeli right-wing leaders after the humiliation of the Hamas attack against southern Israel on October 7th.
What I saw in Rwanda during the genocide against the Tutsi was a degree of cruelty that reached far beyond the meaning of the term genocide. The suffix -cide comes from Latin caedere, which means killing. However, killing was often only the endpoint of elaborate time-consuming processes of humiliation. To give one example: as arrogance was one of the characteristics associated with Tutsi identity, some perpetrators of Hutu background went to their Hutu neighbors to cut their legs shorter — symbolically “cutting down” their arrogance — doing so piece by piece until the victim perished.9
With respect to the term ethnic cleansing, here too I wondered whether the other ethnic group is the only target, or whether the perpetrators try to cleanse something else within their own psyche — perhaps their own shame
over having been subservient to humiliation in the past?10
The bottom-up path manifests when grievances of whatever origin have accumulated in populations to the point that leaders, even if they have no personal history of humiliation, can use them as a resource. Elites seeking self-protection through displacing accountability for their own failures through scapegoating can target sufficiently powerless groups, channel popular frustration into a coherent narrative of humiliation, and direct outrage toward that group. In this case, violence emerges from the political instrumentalization of the cleaning metaphor by elites who need a target onto which popular frustration can be displaced. The identity of the target is incidental, as what matters is the availability of powerless people. This is humiliation as a tool of governance rather than as a psychic compulsion on the side of the instigators. Both dynamics can coexist or they can be superimposed upon each other.
Even though the German population in Nazi Germany did not engage in mass slaughter with their own hands as happened in Rwanda in 1994, the Nazi mobilization strategy was successful enough to render profound psychodynamic consequences: it left the German population facing the unbearable question of their own role as bystanders whose passivity made the Holocaust possible.11
The effect of violating the dignity of the Jewish population by way of dehumanization was also for them more devastating than if they had been framed as worthy enemies. The expression that Jews went passively to their deaths “like sheep to the slaughter” has been used in Israel to contrast Diaspora “passivity” with Zionist militancy — a usage that, even though it is now widely criticized by historians,12 expresses the depth of pain and carries the potential need to turn having been humiliated into the need to humiliate.
Dehumanization inflicts dignity-humiliation on everyone, calling on everyone to react to it. If this humiliation is not healed, victims risk becoming perpetrators of it. This turns humiliation-by-way-of-dehumanization, particularly if victims believe that everyone’s dignity ought to be respected as equal, into a very strong weapon in the hands of leaders’ intent on sidelining the “Mandela path.” Furthermore, as this weapon is available to everyone, it vastly expands the range of “weaponry.” In a dignity-based context, dehumanization is therefore potentially a much more potent mobilizing force into violence than in a context of honor, both in explosivity and outreach.
I personally feel my humanity deeply violated when I see people, on whatever side, caught in violent cycles of humiliation. Responsibility for healing cannot be offloaded to military personnel or specialized outcasts — it belongs to all of humanity. What is currently happening, to me, amounts to a declaration of bankruptcy for humanity.
The only way out is the “Mandela path” of healing, and this is the path for all humanity. In a world where human rights ideals of equal dignity in mutual solidarity are salient, everyone who is not among the victims, perpetrators, or victims-turned-perpetrators is at least a bystander.
Everyone’s dignity is being soiled by standing by in the face of humiliation rather than standing up. This means that the psychological integrity of all humanity is now at stake. I myself could not sleep at night if I were not dedicating my entire life to working for a world where the dignity of all can flourish.
Standing up cannot mean strengthening one side against the other and thus sharpening polarization and holding the rest of the world hostage of this polarization. Standing up must mean building a world where all are integrated and can live in dignity. The core statement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights highlights that every human being is an equal member of the human family by saying, “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
A global order oriented toward healing — toward what I call a dignity economy13 — is now required to cultivate the conditions for equal dignity and mutual solidarity. We need the humanization of globalization through egality, which is my term for equal dignity for all, so that we can achieve mutual solidarity-based glob-egality. The aim is to organize global incentive structures around care, around the repair of harm, around the long-term flourishing of communities rather than the short-term accumulation of the powerful. Returning economics to something like its original meaning — oikonomia as household-keeping for all members of the global household — is the structural precondition for a world in which therapeutic accompaniment of traumatized communities becomes genuinely possible, rather than a noble aspiration that the incentive landscape systematically defeats.
The Astronaut Perspective and the Next Step in Human Evolution
There is an experience that many astronauts describe upon first seeing the Earth from space: when they look down at the planet — luminous, impossibly small, utterly fragile — the borders they had spent their whole lives taking seriously simply become invisible. Literally invisible — there are no lines. There is one world, one thin membrane of atmosphere, one interconnected living system. The question that imposes itself — which astronauts often describe as both exhilarating and vertiginous — is how to carry that clarity back into a world organized around the assumption that the lines are real and that defending them is worth almost any cost.
Following anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani’s analysis, the nationstate model, which has dominated global governance for several centuries, was born in 1492, with its cruel sides being mitigated in 1648, albeit only for Europe, while cruelty was intensified in the colonies.14 The nation-state concept carries structural limitations that become more visible and more costly the more interconnected the world becomes: it is organized around competition between units rather than cooperation among them, and it provides no adequate mechanism for managing what belongs to all — the atmosphere, the oceans, global health, and, crucially, the cycles of humiliation that run across borders and across generations, generating conflicts that destabilize entire regions. The “bankruptcy declaration of humanity” that the current situation represents is, at the deepest level, a bankruptcy also of this model — a demonstration that the nation-state, organized around sovereignty and competition, cannot by itself protect the dignity of all human beings.
To overhaul this model is to embed it within larger frameworks — ones that take seriously what the astronaut can see from orbit, namely, that the human family is one, that its home is finite and shared, and that its survival at the next level of development depends on learning to act on this knowledge. What I call dignism — an ethical vision grounded in mutual solidarity and egality, my term for the principle of equal dignity for all — names the kind of world that such a transformation would make possible. It is a world of unity in diversity — the affirmation of difference within a framework that guarantees the equal dignity of every human being, rather than the suppression of difference or the imposition of uniformity. It is a world where all living creatures are acknowledged as neighbors in a shared habitat.
In this situation, it is insufficient to wait for a few Mandela-like personalities to lead the world away from the abyss. When the United Nations fail to honor their initial aims and devolve into what might be called “Disunited Nations,” United People are needed — all citizens of the world are called on as individuals to manifest the “Mandela path” systemically at the global level.15 What waits to be established are forms of global governance with genuine authority, democratic accountability, and a fundamental orientation toward the dignity and flourishing of all — the citizens of powerful states and of powerless ones alike, those whose suffering is currently legible to international media and those rendered invisible by it.
It requires the cultivation of what I call ontological humility — the recognition, felt as well as known, that we are all neighbors on one fragile planet, and that the suffering of any part is, in the end, a concern of the whole. Exploitative globalization awaits its transcendence into the humanization of globalization through egality — manifesting equal dignity for all — embedded in mutual solidarity, in short: mutual solidarity-based glob-egality. The Israeli-Palestinian tragedy is among the most searing demonstrations of why that transcendence can no longer be deferred.
What Should Be Done Now?
We must relearn what earlier millennia taught us to forget: that wellbeing and lasting peace in dignity arise from cooperation rather than from competition for domination. In the divided world of the past, only shortlived respites from war could be achieved through the logic of domination. Si vis pacem, para bellum (“If you want peace, prepare for war”)16 drove what political scientists call the security dilemma — a dilemma because peace and security were the aim, while war was the result.
The situation is profoundly different in a globally interconnected world. Humanity’s current predicament is a great paradox. Unprecedented crises that threaten planetary survival — from violence against one another to the systematic destruction of the natural world — coincide with unparalleled openings for rescue. For the first time in human history, it is feasible to realize another tenet: “If you want peace, prepare for peace,” or Gandhi’s insight that “Peace is the path to peace.” The security dilemmas can be transcended together with the notion of military security in a divided world, and sovereignty can be reimagined in terms of human security within a global community.
The immediate humanitarian imperatives — protection of civilians, delivery of aid, accountability for atrocities, the release of those held captive — are urgent, necessary, and beyond question. These necessities, however, cannot by themselves end or heal the cycles of humiliation that have been building for generations and that will, if unaddressed, generate new eruptions of violence after the last one subsides. Crisis management followed by neglect is a way of ensuring that the next crisis arrives, rather than preventing it.
What should be done now, at the structural level, is to take seriously the global community’s therapeutic responsibility — and to build institutions capable of fulfilling it. This means investing in the long-term, structurally serious accompaniment of traumatized societies. It means redesigning economic systems so that they are organized around care and the dignity of all members of the global household rather than around the maximization of profit for those already most powerful.
The enemy category must be abolished and replaced with a shared membership in the global village. Thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, and Mahmood Mamdani all converge on a single political insight: a stable and just political community cannot be built on the permanent classification of some people as enemies, because that category licenses domination, exclusion, and ultimately extermination.17
We should try to be prepared for a new Eleanor Roosevelt moment — a window like the one that opened after WWII, when the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights became possible. Such a moment may come again, creating space for renewed global ambition. Alexander Stubb, the 13th President of Finland and a former Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Finance Minister, calls for a new San Francisco moment. In 1945, the world came together to found the United Nations,18 and now is the
time to form a new rules-based global order, one of values-based realism and dignified foreign policy, he argues.19
The fact that devastating cycles of humiliation can unfold in the Levant in the twenty-first century, particularly in Israel-Palestine, amounts to what I perceive as a collective bankruptcy declaration of humanity — a reckoning with how thoroughly the global community during my lifetime has failed to build systems that could have prevented these cycles from reaching their current intensity. Instead of stewarding the planet and nurturing the social fabric, the Global North celebrated a party using the planet’s heirloom
silver — drawing on the resources of future generations — and mistook the party for an achievement that had established a better normality. Now that the party nears its end, a few have accumulated unprecedented material wealth and begin to throw the rest overboard.
The cycles of humiliation tearing the Levant apart did not begin on October 7th. They are the product of a global order that has, for too long, organized itself around dominance rather than care, around the security of some at the expense of the dignity of others.
The building of a new order begins with seeing clearly — calling what is happening by its right name: humiliation, rather than dehumanization — the predictable, delayed consequence of unaddressed wounds, rather than an irrational eruption of evil. It begins with understanding that what two traumatized communities locked in cycles of mutual humiliation need, above all, is to be accompanied — by a global community that has built the structures, reformed the economics, and developed the institutions capable of holding that responsibility. With the seriousness, and with the love, that every human being deserves.