It’s clear what Israel’s western-facilitated genocide has done to Gaza. But what has it done to us? Palestinians are the “canaries in a coalmine”, the Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada tells me. “We’re screaming of a major warning of what’s about to come your way. When you have a media-political class that’s relishing, delighting in the murder of our children, do you think they’re going to care about yours?”

There is a warning from our recent, terrifying past that we should heed. Colonialism, warned Martinican author Aimé Césaire, “works to decivilise the coloniser, to brutalise him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism”. The horrors of western imperialism – with its dehumanisation and violence – were, he argued, ultimately redirected into Europe in the form of fascism. This was the imperial “boomerang”, as the German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt agreed.

What will boomerang back to the west from the killing fields of Gaza? Every genocide requires the total dehumanisation of its victims, and Palestinians are no exception. They were “human animals” and “human beasts” who would suffer “hell”, declared Israeli leaders. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” said Israeli president Isaac Herzog. Other Israeli politicians called for “erasing all of Gaza from the face of the Earth”. “It is not a far stretch to say there are very few innocent Palestinian civilians,” declared Republican Congressman Brian Mast, while Fox News host Jesse Waters labelled Palestinians “savages”.

But this dehumanisation goes beyond its most violent expressions. There has been no........

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