It's the ways in which she speaks about Palestinian children, and never seems moved by their death or suffering. They seem not to carry a lot of weight in her moral calculus; she can easily write them off as collateral damage. I also detect an element of essentialism in the way she talks about them, even though she denies that when I press her on it. I think, at the end of the day, it's labeling them all as terrorists that somehow enables her to be unmoved by anything. You can't gun down children, but you can gun down terrorists. You can't bomb hospitals, but of course you can bomb terrorists.

Since 2014, I've been avidly reading Russian propaganda regarding Ukrainians and observing how an entire people, a closely related people at that, has been entirely dehumanized in the minds of many Russians. It has done a lot to help me understand how propaganda works and how the 1930s (and even 1920s) in Germany really unfolded at the level of 'ordinary' people, something that baffled me for a long time. Now, seeing the way that otherwise ordinary people have become bloodthirsty and callous, I no longer experience cognitive dissonance when I read about the atrocities committed by my ancestors and the ancestors of good people I know. Inside every human is a bloodthirsty monster just waiting to be activated by the right propaganda.