The recent spat between Secretary State Antony Blinken and the former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren makes one think twice. No, three times.

Blinken, you may recall, said at a February 7 press conference in Tel Aviv:

Israelis were dehumanized in the most horrific way on October 7. The hostages have been dehumanized every day since. But that cannot be a license to dehumanize others. The overwhelming majority of people in Gaza had nothing to do with the attacks of October 7th, and the families in Gaza whose survival depends on deliveries of aid from Israel are just like our families. They’re mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. . . . We cannot, we must not, lose sight of our common humanity.

To which Oren replied a few days later:

When the secretary of state accuses Israel—inaccurately, unfairly, libelously—of dehumanizing Palestinians, he dehumanizes us and contributes to the delegitimization of Israel and the demonization of Jews worldwide.

Am I wrong in thinking that the use of “to dehumanize” has increased exponentially in the last decade or two? The verb has become, so it seems, a blanket term for egregious behavior of all kinds. Have you used hurtful language toward me? You’ve dehumanized me. Have I overlooked or belittled you? I’ve dehumanized you. Have we failed to respect someone’s feelings? We’ve dehumanized him. Once, acts and words that were callous, insensitive, or cruel were called callous, insensitive, and cruel. Today, they’re dehumanizing.

This is part of a general inflation of language that has taken place in our culture, in which ordinary words don’t seem enough anymore, and the result is an obfuscation of the very wrongs that are purportedly condemned. No, dear Antony Blinken: Israelis were not “dehumanized” on October 7; they were murdered, raped, and abducted. And Palestinians are not being “dehumanized” in Gaza now; they are being bombed, killed, maimed, and rendered hungry and homeless. When one speaks of Israelis and Palestinians dehumanizing each other, one not only creates a false equivalency, since Hamas’s motivations and actions on October 7 and Israel’s motivations and actions in its Gaza campaign have nothing in common, one euphemistically blunts the horror of what each side has gone through. Yes, we all share a common humanity. And yes, too, callousness and insensitivity are not the same as murder and mayhem.

The second thing that struck me about the Blinken-Oren exchange is that if Blinken was slipshod in his choice of words, Oren was silly. “You say we’ve dehumanized the Palestinians? Then you’re dehumanizing us!” This makes me think of the fights among children in which the standard tactic is to fling back at your accuser the same charge that has been made against you. “You’re a liar!” “You’re a bigger one!” “Your father is a drunk!” “So is yours, and your mother is, too!” Why try to defend yourself by saying something true or intelligent, never an easy task under any circumstance, when you can simply return the insult?

And yet the former ambassador is a thoughtful person, not child, and his response is typical of the level to which public debate often sinks today, Gaza being just one example. “You’re committing genocide!” “No, you are!” Of course Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza—but neither is it genocide to massacre 1,200 Israelis, let alone to chant “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.” Nor would pro-Israel groups be saying that it was if anti-Israel groups hadn’t hurled the genocide charge first. But while tit for tat may be fair play, it’s a bad way of arguing and an even worse way of thinking.

The third thought is this: is it not absurd of us to use words like “dehumanizing” and “inhuman” for coarse or barbarous behavior when human beings have behaved coarsely and barbarously toward each other since the origin of the species and show no sign of letting up? Where is the historical period, our own included, that has not been replete with war, slaughter, and deliberately wreaked destruction? How much wishful thinking and self-flattery there is in we humans conceiving of humanness as distinguished by kindness, love, and caring while consigning whatever is cruel, hate-filled, or sadistic to the category of the “inhuman!”

In this, it needs to be said, we are not dealing just with something recent. The word humanitas in the sense of kindness goes back to late Latin, and English “inhuman” as its opposite already occurs in the 14th century and was common by Shakespeare’s time. Here is Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus speaking in the last act of the bloody tragedy named for him to the brothers Chiron and Demetrius, who have chopped off his and his daughter Lavinia’s hands before cutting out her tongue and raping her:

Inhuman traitors! . . .
Hark, wretches, how I mean to martyr you:
This one hand yet is left to cut your throats
Whiles that Lavinia ’tween her stumps doth hold
The basin that reveals your guilty blood.

He will then, Titus goes on, grind Chiron and Demetrius’ bones to powder, stir in their blood, bake a pastry from the dough, and force their mother Tamora to eat it. Titus is not aware of the irony in his thinking of Chiron and Demetrius as being less “human” than he is, but Shakespeare certainly was.

“To dehumanize” in the sense of rendering inhuman is a later word, dating to the 19th century, while its contemporary meaning of to think of or treat someone as not human is a 20th-century development, roughly contemporary with the Holocaust. If the Nazis were human, as they most surely were, it’s a pity they weren’t dehumanized in time.