On the road from Jenin to Nablus, West Bank, Palestine (Photo credit: Almonroth)

According to a report from the Washington Post today, Israeli settlers set fire to a mosque in a Palestinian village in the West Bank, after a court order to remove apartment buildings housing some 30 settler families.

This is news that while terrifying is not news, likely because stories on individual injustices by settlers in the Palestinian territories have become so routine. Here’s one. Here’s another one.

On The Washington Post article page for today’s massacre, I found this novel multimedia element on “Life in the Palestinian territories.”

There is something terribly subversive about a slideshow that humanizes Palestine — that acknowledges its existence by virtue of seemingly benign photographs of everyday life. In fact, they are very potent.

The Atlantic has made several attempts (my own included) to humanize another country, Iran, in light of ever-intensifying relations between Washington and Tehran.

As Azar Nafisi told me, it’s harder to neglect the implications of bombing a people whose culture you can envision.

What’s magnificent about these attempts to humanize peoples who are de-humanized by perpetual conflict and misunderstanding is not only their great soft power cachet — It’s also that it challenges people who see the nascent danger in these practices. Art – photographs of people living lives – threaten to destabilize their status quo.

*Massoud Hayoun is a staff writer at Muftah. He also edits Kansastan, a blog on the intersections between the West and the Middle East and North Africa region.