The Human Animals Project

By Aman Rahman and Ali Jacksi. Graphic by Ali Jacksi and Antonio Mochmann.

On Oct. 10, Israeli Major General Ghassan Alian, Head of Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) called the people of Gaza, “human animals [that] must be treated as such.” As the war progressed, any prospects of a peaceful life for Gazans have been dashed by the brutal force exercised by the Israeli government. There is disregard for Palestinian life because the Israeli leadership does not view them as equally human. The following pieces seek to supplant Alian’s dehumanizing rhetoric.

Part 1: To Be Human/Animal

I.

“You need to read A Grief Observed,” my professor says as he slides the novels from class into his navy blue briefcase. The small seminar room is empty now, the afternoon light has dimmed nearly into dusk. I have been writing a paper about suffering, spirituality and medical care, and he is sure that the short, four-sectioned essay will be essential to my writing.

C.S. Lewis, the theologian and author of The Chronicles of Narnia, wrote A Grief Observed about the loss of his wife, referred throughout the text simply as H. Her death left a catastrophic and disfiguring absence in Lewis’ life, leading him to fundamental questions about the nature of life itself. If God was supposedly good, why did loss hurt so much?

I have been writing about grief in a variety of forms for a couple months now. It started with a series of elegies for another class on poetic structures. The structure of a poem, according to that class, consists of how it moves — in subject, setting, tone or whatever else. A poem begins in one place, then there is a turn which brings it somewhere new. Some common forms are self-explanatory in the patterns of their movement: circular, dream-to-waking, metaphor-to-meaning.

In my final project for that class, I wrote 15 poems on one common theme: my relationship with Arabic. The poems explored the sounds of the Qur’an which I memorized but didn’t understand as a child, the Arabic of my name and the names of my schoolmates and the Arab writers who shaped my relationship with the world. 

One of my poems was an elegy titled “Elegy for Edward Said.” It borrowed from the language of Mahmoud Darwish, the acclaimed national poet of Palestine, who honored the life and death of his friend and cultural critic in a poem titled “Tibaq.” In that poem, Darwish wrote that Said worked in English but dreamed in Arabic — a language in which Heaven and Jerusalem conversed. 

An elegy is a poem about loss or mourning. There are three types of archetypal elegiac structures: grief to consolation, grief to a refusal of consolation or grief to a deeper grief. The elegy need not necessarily be about the death of an individual, but it is concerned with how grief moves us or, more precisely, what it moves us toward. 

My elegy moved from grief to a deeper grief. Said’s work transformed how Muslims and other imperial subjects are considered in literature and discourse, and his death signaled another transformation. While grading my final project, my teacher left a comment in the margin of the poem: “write more elegies.” So I did. Over the next few months I wrote over 40 pages of them. Then, I started writing about grief in my academic papers. 

In my personal life, I feel like I’ve grieved a lot — the loss of loved ones, the shed innocence of growing up, the ache of spoiled relationships, the violence of the trauma we inherit, the violence we perpetuate. But grief also feels like something that connects me to others — to the people I hurt, those that hurt me, but also people at a distance, those I know nothing else about.  If we’ve all felt grief — and certainly everyone has, in some form at least — then it must be something that can bring us together; it can allow us to recognize what we share. 

A Grief Observed is a quick find in the library stacks: a small, sand-colored book. The pages are weathered and written over. Stars scatter the margins and a couple lines on each page were underlined. I turn to a large section that was circled with a barely intelligible scribble to its right:

II.

A week later, I’m sitting in The Press office when my friend Ali walks in. It’s 1 p.m. Light filters through the small window onto the desk where my laptop is closed and piled with the books from my classes that I’m cycling through because I refuse to sit with any one text for too long. He tells me he has an idea for a project about the violent language leveraged against Palestinians. 

Ghassan Alian, an Israeli official, called the people of Gaza “human animals.” Ali explained how he wanted to reclaim that configuration. By imagining an expansive “we” — one that connects Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims and their advocates — identification with the “animal” can be seen as an expression of a collective human ingenuity and resilience. 

Alian’s language sought to dehumanize Palestinians, but that kind of violent rhetoric is not new. The Guardian reported that, “In a committee of the Israeli parliament in 1983, General Rafael Eitan boasted of his triumphs on the West Bank. ‘All the Arabs will be able to do is scuttle around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.’”

Reflecting on post-Oct. 7 language, Ramzy Baroud, a journalist and the Editor of the Palestine Chronicle, compared Eitan’s assertion to the line from Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, the station attributed for inciting hatred toward the Tutsi people of Rwanda: “(Tutsis) are cockroaches. We will kill you.” 

To call a people “cockroaches,” then and now, is to evoke filth and overabundance. It constructs a license to kill and seeks to legitimize occupation and state-sanctioned violence. The more recent war in Gaza is a dramatic escalation of a long-standing conflict. Still, more people have died in Gaza since Oct. 7 than make up the entire student body of Stony Brook University. 

Edward Said, the aforementioned academic born in Jerusalem under the British Mandate for Palestine, wrote extensively about this kind of rhetoric. He came to the United States, by way of his American father, to complete his schooling. Eventually, he became a professor of literature at Columbia University with groundbreaking contributions to post-colonial studies. 

In “Permission to Narrate,” Said contextualizes Eitan’s comparison of Gazans to cockroaches with the rhetoric of Israel during that era. The essay explores how Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was, in part, a response to the existential threat of Palestinian existence, which weaved a narrative of self-determination that threatened Israel’s rule. Said wrote, “to destroy Palestinian nationalism and institutions in Lebanon would make it easier to destroy them on the West Bank and in Gaza.”

Further, Said wrote, “Facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain and circulate them.” The vision of Palestinians as terrorists, monsters and animals — as consolidated and perpetuated by figures like Eitan — were “anti-narrative,” reducing Palestinian existence to an antithesis of Western values. 

Violence on the level of narrative and language enables political and military violence. The facts of those atrocities committed against Palestinians, historically and now, need a narrative. The idea of a homeland that Palestinians have historically belonged to and may one day have access to again is an example of such a narrative, but it’s vehemently opposed by Israel’s own national narratives. Eitan’s drugged cockroaches in a bottle, to follow his line of thinking, shouldn’t have a homeland to go back to. In other words, he’s erasing their story, obliterating their histories.

The quote from Lewis echoes in my head; it feels like a necessary counter-narrative. We are — all of us — human animals. We are creatures flailing toward divinity — trying to make something out of the experiment of existence. We lose and feel, tragically, that loss; we wonder if we can even go on. 

III.

I’m sitting in my professor’s office when I’m given another book to read. The morning is gray and unseasonably warm, and the room smells like stale coffee. He hands me a worn copy of “Culture and Imperialism,” one of Said’s most well-known books of criticism. “Just give it back to me at some point,” he says.

As I walk back to The Press office again, I’m thinking about the kindnesses of my professors. Literature has always felt important to me because it’s interested in excavating those narratives that Said described as contextualizing the facts of life. But the literal offices of literature are spaces where books are traded, where language is duly interrogated for the role it plays in shaping the world — it’s a space I feel I belong.

I turn on the light in the office and take off my bag, placing my new book on the long table by the window. I check my phone and see a poem plastered repeatedly on my timeline: “If I Must Die.” I scroll far enough to find a related news article.

On Dec. 7, Refaat Alareer, a professor of comparative literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, was killed in an airstrike. During his life he was heralded for sharing the narratives of Gazans, especially young writers as collected in Gaza Writes Back. Following Alareer’s death, people shared his last poem, which he had posted online himself. It opens:

If I must die, 

you must live 

to tell my story 

to sell my things 

to buy a piece of cloth 

and some strings, 

The language is straightforward, matter of fact. Death is an expected reality, and the speaker is asking for simple things: to be talked about, to let his life have utility in a final request. 

That request is clarified in the following lines, becoming an image impressed upon the reader:

(make it white with a long tail) 

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza 

while looking heaven in the eye 

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze— 

and bid no one farewell 

not even to his flesh 

not even to himself— 

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above 

and thinks for a moment an angel is there 

bringing back love 

The speaker’s final request is to have a kite made. Even in death, the speaker is looking to the humanity of others, wondering how he may bring them relief. The child, by merely being in Gaza, is endangered by insinuations of violence: the blaze, the fact that love is something that must be brought back, the poverty invoked when a dead man’s belongings may be sold for something as commonplace as a kite. Despite the specter of violence — fire, death, absence — there is also divinity in the poem — heaven, an angel, love. And the poem, despite everything, ends with optimism:

If I must die 

let it bring hope 

let it be a tale

The poem is hopeful that love will return, that a story can change something. 

At first glance, “If I Must Die” appears to be a circular poem — beginning and ending with the request that the speaker’s death be made a narrative. The turns of the poem, then, are the movement away from, and then back to, that request. What is emphasized by this structure is the cyclical nature of life itself; it universalizes finding meaning in the narrative of one’s life. 

While a circular structure makes sense visually, it leaves me feeling unsettled. This reading implies the image of the poem doesn’t alter its movement; it just brings us back to the start. I want to believe in grief’s capacity to change us, and in the poem’s capacity to illustrate how grief does its work. I want the kite to be a kind of revelation; I want the speaker’s insistence of it to matter, for it to alter the poem’s course.

Consider the poem’s elegiac structure. The occasion of the poem — the speaker’s death — eventually turns toward that “child, somewhere in Gaza.” This subject which appears suddenly in the poem becomes its arresting image. A boy, waiting for his father, sees a kite “and thinks for a moment an angel is there.” Grief lies both in the speaker’s death and the father’s, but then the poem turns toward this image of sky and flight. The imbuing of divinity in this image orients the reader toward hope.

Though the first line is repeated, in its later instance the request is not desperate but evocative. The poem takes grief — death, absence, violence — and finds a way toward consolation by turning to the child. The poem is hopeful: it lets grief guide it. 

The image of the kite makes the reader look up, following the child’s gaze. Through this gesture, we reckon — like Lewis in “A Grief Observed” — with a cosmic infidelity, that the world that made us has also forsaken us. But like Lewis, Alareer finds grace in grief. It is the experience of loss which makes hope, in its appearance at the very end, a triumph. 

Nearly three months after Alareer was killed, the writer Huda Sobah would make a similar observation about kites in the skies above Gaza. Sobah, a 19-year-old Palestinian currently displaced in Rafah, describes finding solace in the sight of kites after 143 days of war in her “Dispatch from Gaza.” For her, they represent the resilience of the children in Rafah:

IV.

In 2014, Reyhany Jabbari, a 26 year-old Iranian woman, was hanged for defending herself against a man who tried to rape her. Before her sentence, Jabbari recorded a heartfelt message to her mother detailing what happened and asked of her mother one request — that her organs be donated. Faced with brutal injustice, Jabbari’s voice is calm. “Dear soft-hearted Sholeh, in the other world it is you and me who are the accusers and others who are the accused,” she said.

In “Heritage,” a poem from the collection Calling A Wolf A Wolf, Kaveh Akbar mourns and retells her story. Contending with the grief of witnessing such tragedy, he attempts to amplify her voice — careful to not erase her language but build from it. He writes:

you weren’t even killing the roaches in your cell       that you would take them up

by their antennae and flick them through the bars into a courtyard      

where you could see men hammering long planks of cypress into gallows 

In the face of outrageous tragedy, we are capable of transcendent compassion. Jabbari’s only wish from her last letter was that her death be used to save someone else’s life. 

When I think about Eitan’s comment — “All the Arabs will be able to do is scuttle around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle” — I think of Jabbari in her cell. She was kind even to the roaches, giving them the freedom she had been robbed of. In the quiet, intimate space of her prison cell, Jabbari railed against the notion that any group of people should be denied their stories. 

Jabbari wasn’t Arab, but I think grief connects her to this story. We are — all of us — human animals: people just trying to survive and tell stories of our survival. We find grace only accidentally — in the grief of loss, in a kite amidst rubble, in a roach in the prison cell. 

I’m sitting in a dimly lit room for a coffeehouse reading. It’s been months since I first read A Grief Observed, and it’s been a few days since I returned Culture and Imperialism. A law student from my Arabic class reads a story about a boy mourning the death of his younger brother. I have tears welling up when he finishes and sits back down next to me. “I didn’t know you could write like that,” I tell him.

The next time I see him, I have my copy of Akbar’s collection ready to hand over. It’s not that I think there’s a lesson he’d learn from that book, but his grief reminded me of Akbar’s — something about the way their words hung over me the first time I heard them. It’s like his grief is familiar, like it lets me see him clearly. “I have a book for you,” I say.

Part 2: Slaughterhouse Fled

I wish pieces did not need to be written, nor cries needed to be heard; I wish Muslims could know peace and not need to bother using their voices, nor believe their voices to be Palestinians’ last hope. But it’s been made clear to me that as long as you stand in opposition to Israel’s violence, you are reduced to an animal trying to survive. You are an owl, forced to be wise and knowledgeable in all parts and nuances of the situation. You are a gazelle, forced to be vigilant of what you say and how it can be perceived. You are a lion, forced to protect your community. You are a black sheep, alienated from your Jewish community because of your critiques on Zionism. To the Israeli government and American leadership, you are not equal in worth. 

On Oct. 10, Israeli Major General Ghassan Alian, Head of Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) said, “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” These words of collective punishment, and the indiscriminate bombing at the expense of Palestinian lives and homes made it clear his target extended further than just Hamas. The Israeli government makes the position that they see the people of Palestine as beneath them apparent. This mindset expands further to the American conscience, where any Muslims or Arabs in the Middle East are so far removed that their killing en masse does not seem real. Their deaths are so commonplace that it has become normal to see such high numbers. Demonstrators calling for a ceasefire or more regard for civilian life are scoffed at by congresspeople. House representative Tom Suozzi of New York’s 3rd Congressional District recently won his House race on the position that congressional members calling for limiting U.S. aid to Israel were “clueless” and “just not educated about the issues.”

The Israeli government and their supporters dehumanize and infantilize those in opposition to their campaign of violence. To them, Palestinians are not worth the effort to be evacuated when hospitals and refugee camps are bombed. Demonstrators are “uneducated” when they call for a ceasefire or say the actions of Israel are genocidal. Most American voters that are not Muslim or directly affected are unfazed in the face of tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza, with Biden keeping support from his base and his approval ratings only increasing in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks.

I was disgusted when first hearing Alian’s quote and came to realize it astutely explains the behavior of the Israeli government. The indiscriminate massacre of civilians, shelling of hospitals and corralling of people, only to bomb them after, can only evoke the imagery of a slaughterhouse. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview that strengthening Hamas will provide a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority and decrease pressure towards Palestinian statehood, his intention to make the Palestinian issue a perpetual one was clear. If you support Palestinians, you will only be seen as an animal. Your words and movements will never be taken seriously. Yet again, these dehumanizing sentiments echo. 

For months, I stayed silent on the issue. I let it pass in Press meetings, let people grow tired of talking about it and seeing it. I saw protesters’ identities revealed on trucks at Harvard University, which called them antisemites and blacklisted them from jobs. I heard of three students shot for wearing keffiyehs and speaking Arabic. I convinced myself this was the reason I must stay silent: for my safety and for my future. My parents told me this was not my issue, that this was too dangerous to take up. The speakers at the mosque would call for silent prayers, and nothing more. Yet it ate at me. I fervently watched videos explaining the situation, the history and the arguments. I am a Muslim, an editor at The Stony Brook Press, a writer. Is it not my responsibility to write? Do I not have an obligation to it?   

Yet each time I tried writing about the Palestinian cause, I froze. I stopped after each sentence, not wanting to say something I don’t fully mean. “Can you write well enough for people to take you seriously? Will you materially change anything with the words you say? Does what you say matter to anyone?” These insecurities have been recurring since October 2023. However much I care, or talk or stay silent, the killing will continue; the people will die in silence. Post squares on Instagram and boycott Starbucks, but in the end, my people and my cause will begin and end in a history textbook. Does it matter where I stand in my final days if my words have changed nothing?

I never truly understood the value of poetic language, for speaking in ways that brought words to life, until last summer, when I read Pierce Brown’s Golden Son. While initially a standard sci-fi novel about a dystopian world, the author develops his story through poetic dialogue. One of the main antagonists, Karnus au Bellona, speaks to the main character, Darrow, about his motivations and why he continues to fight: “Pride is just a shout into the wind…I will die. You will die. We will all die and the universe will carry on without care. All that we have is that shout into the wind — how we live. How we go. And how we stand before we fall.” If we allow it, our actions are worth nothing. The debilitating nature of these mass killings is by design. If every day the Israeli government kills, killing becomes the norm. When they decide to kill a few hundred less today, they want us to be thankful. They will desensitize us until we become numb to the pain these people see everyday. Like predators to a gazelle, they will instill in us an ever-present fear. Fear that our words will not translate to action; fear that our vote is worthless; fear that in this individual world, we are alone. They are correct only if we allow them to be. If we allow them, we will die, and our people will die. But we will have our shout in the wind.