In everyday idiom a “white lie” is a harmless fib aimed at easing the discomfort of the addressee. The etymology is clear, according to Grammarist: ““White” is placed in front of this phrase because of old associations with black and white colors. “White” connotes goodness or purity, while “black” implies evil or darkness because of day and night.” They add: “It has nothing to do with race.”

Except that in a world built on century-old racial regimes such as colonialism and slavery, the hierarchy of racial difference is entrenched in the very structures of our language. The purported innocence of a white lie and malevolence of a black lie are themselves shaped by these epidermal legacies.

The truth about White Lies, when seen through a lens that credits the ongoing impacts of these historical, economic and cultural structures and forces, is that their very assumed ‘wholesomeness’ is indispensable to the maintenance of these forces. And the reason why they are so intractable, recurring and persistent.

Here I’m using White Lies in its more literal and historically resonant sense, to describe the distortions Europeans have invented about people of colour, particularly to justify their colonisation, enslavement, dispossession and persecution. For example, using White Lies the English racialised the ‘bog’ Irish as they colonised them. White Lies are inbuilt to systems of discrimination. Indeed, they are how Europeans discriminated between their self-bestowed (white) supremacy, and all the people on the face of this Earth that they profited from — usually through taking their land, property and its bounty, or their labour. Or all those and more.

In the course of my research, over ten years, I traced and tracked the origin and circulation of the most pervasive White Lies told about Aboriginal women by colonists. They are bloodcurdlingly repugnant, vicious and dehumanising. It is hard to believe anyone ever believed such fantastical slurs about other humans — that is, until you see how reviling race operates within settler-colonialism — and how the original inhabitants must be rendered less than human to justify the unjustifiable.

I first realised how this dynamic worked during a long interview just after my survey of racist distortion, Skin Deep was published in 2016. It is so simple. In fact, incandescently transparent. Within all hierarchies of racial categorisation, or differentiation between humans that denigrates, dispossessed peoples are denied the full spectrum of human emotional connection. They are said to be incapable of feeling. The mothers “soon forget” their children. The women and girls are “easy for the taking”. The men abuse their wives and pimp their daughters. Families leave their elderly behind, for dead. And on and on it goes.

In present times, if individuals came out with such dehumanising tropes, they’d be rightly cancelled without ceremony. But many First Nation people and people of colour tell us these ideas have found other means of expression. White Lies and racial distortion have “gone underground.” The inherent violence of hierarchised racial differentiation, be it slow or explosive, pervades western wealth built on Indigenous lands, and so much of it made by black hands.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart demanded settlers hear Aboriginal connection and strength of feeling. One line in particular rings out, asserting that the rates of child removal and youth incarceration cannot be because Aboriginal people are without love for their children. This is the torment of our powerlessness, it cries. The statement calls upon non-indigenous Australians to imagine how Aboriginal people must be feeling — to credit their suffering, feel for them and with them. At last year’s referendum, the majority of Australians said nuh, we won’t feel for you. Sure, there were some who said our feeling is acute, but this referendum is badly timed and not the way to bring about the redress needed. But mostly the defeat came from a deadened, unfeeling void of empathy. Which itself depends on a wilful ignorance of history — the precondition for any White Lie.

There are historical ruptures that require us to go to the heart of the matter, to our human capacity to connect and empathise. Times when horrific suffering is occurring under our noses, obscured by propaganda that serves to disconnect us from that suffering. Racialised tropes have become far more subtle and sophisticated, not to mention technical. Dehumanising operates now through imbalanced media reportage, doctored footage, baseless allegations, the targeting of journalists — all operate to shore up White Lies about people of colour. Also in play, as we find ourselves bearing witness to an atrocity the scale of which we did not think could happen in our lifetimes, is the profound disconnect of drone strikes — a staggering alienation from human action and consequence raining down from the sky and controlled from sites hundreds miles away. Bodies having things done to them that no human could do with their bare hands. Atrocities that have to be impelled through technologies because their devastation and destruction are simply beyond human capacity and reach.

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One week before Australia’s rejection of the Voice referendum, Hamas militants attacked southern Israel, and Israel’s occupying forces mobilised, unleashing a response that quickly became disproportionate. There may be no causal relation between these geopolitical wounds rupturing on opposite ends of the Earth. But both were brutal acts of realignment of the status quo of settler-colonialism. The link is historical and economic. It is the shared logic of elimination that Patrick Wolfe identified as inhering in settler-colonial regimes of dispossession, through the demographic take-over of a sovereign people’s land. And you cannot eliminate a people from their land without spreading White Lies first.

So, what was said about the Palestinians? Firstly, the entire population was collapsed into Hamas. Israel’s President Isaac Herzog declared, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime.” Hamas itself was also undifferentiated from a civil governing body running hospitals and its militants.

Secondly, Palestinians were dehumanised through a series of since-disproven allegations, including by major Israeli media outlets. All circulated within the whorl of shock following the horror of the October 7 attacks, allowing its Defence Minister Yoav Gallanta to say, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Several Israeli politicians, military and clergy variously described Palestinians as “cockroaches”, “a cancer”, and “vermin”, that should be “annihilated”.

Thirdly, Netanyahu called his response a “battle of civilization against barbarism”, that if not won by Israel will spread and ultimately be fought on each of our doorsteps.

The detailed plans of October 7 show Hamas intended to start a war, not merely raid villages. It sought to bring the conflict to a head. Likud, for its part, seeks to level Gaza and render it uninhabitable. To eliminate by death, disease and starvation as many of the people who have a claim to that land as it can.

It was persuasively agued by the South African case in the International Court of Justice that genocide has been the stated intent of a number of the members of Likud. Accordingly, the Court moved to order Israel to prevent acts of genocide and its incitement. In response, as international condemnation of civilian deaths mounted, Netanyahu called out ‘women’s rights organisations’ for failing to loudly denounce the sexual violence of the Hamas attack, as if those acts negated the effects of Likud’s policies or the conduct of the IOF.

Israel is a European settler-colony of intergenerationally traumatised people. Its nationhood is partly built on dehumanising an occupied people of colour through a propaganda war that is reminiscent of the Nazis’ own strategies of vilification (think of the “cockroaches” comparison). Distortion and caricature arise from the rubble of the IOF’s artillery strikes, just as its iron walls and checkpoints are lined with queues of people who are rendered abject in their daily humiliation. After rounds of illegal settlements, sieges, missile and white phosphorus strikes and settler aggression in the Westbank, Palestinians are saying of this latest merciless campaign: “We will never forget.”

First Nation people, who don’t live out their lives under the widespread amnesia over colonial offensives, see the disparity in casualities for what it is. Disproportionate and indiscriminate violence is a hallmark of settler-colonialism to any form of Indigenous resistance, redress or revenge. The indiscriminateness is about ‘striking fear’ into the hearts of the ‘native’ to avert counterattack to occupation. It is why Netanyahu is utterly indifferent to the majority of those 30,000-plus dead being women and children. It is part of his gameplan not only to dispossess, but to disinherit.

Jewish organisations such as the International Anti-Zionist Network banner their sit-ins with Never Again for Anyone. Young American Jews worldwide are mobilising against Netanyahu’s ‘conduct of this war’ as the ABC has euphemistically put it. A growing number of Jewish people are demanding bilateral and international condemnation for his disregard for international rules of conflict in his siege on Gaza, focused now on Rafah, where the IOF directed Palestinians to safety and shelter.

The work of disproving and debunking White Lies was underway before this war, and it could be informed and supported by truth-telling initiatives from settler-colonies the world over. We’ve seen the human capacity to empathise can be reawakened against the myopia of trauma, and it starts by setting down historical truths. Dispelling White Lies while acknowledging their past harms, knowing and sharing knowledge of the past across boundaries, differences and polarities, ending the causes of trauma and then trying to see through and past it, and condemning and redressing any violence for any political causes, is the only way towards peace. If they are to coexist — and how else can the people of Israel and Palestine go forward — they will need a truth and reconciliation commission. Israel must decisively vote out Likud and listen to rather than diminish and deny the suffering it has perpetrated and provide redress and justice for its wrongs. This is Israel’s responsibility, since their occupying forces are the original aggressors, and following the Nakba of 1948 their ‘defence’ has been disproportionate and without regard for civilian life.

Restoring a historical context should not be conflated with sanctioning, justification or forgiveness. We know from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that re-establishing any kind of equilibrium of humanity across lines of apartheid and trauma begins with historical understanding. Meanwhile we cannot stand by while children are being amputated without anaesthetic and dying of malnutrition. Our disconnect from that extremity of atrocity and suffering can only be affected through White Lies. We must not let it happen.

Image: World Economic Forum, Flickr