This article interrogates the historical, cultural, and ideological role of the Anglosphere—primarily the UK and the US—in shaping the modern political condition of Palestine. The analysis situates this history within a broader Western tradition of dehumanizing colonized peoples, tracing a continuum from literary representations of the master/servant relationship—in such paradigmatic dyads as Prospero/Caliban, Crusoe/Friday, and the figures populating Heart of Darkness—to present day Zionist political rhetoric that casts Palestinians as sub human in order to legitimize dispossession and genocide. In dialogue with anticolonial thought (Césaire and Fanon) and postcolonial literary criticism (Achebe and Said), the essay highlights how Palestinian writers and activists figurately reappropriate the character of Caliban to reclaim agency, language, and historical presence. Their interventions reveal that struggles over linguistic representation are inseparable from struggles over land, self-government, and humanity. Ultimately, the essay contends that recognizing the discursive and political genealogy of dehumanization in Western colonial history is essential to understanding the ongoing structures of violent settler colonial power in Israel/Palestine.
Luigi Carmine Cazzato (2026) studied this question.