This article surveys the terms which are encountered in Israeli narratives that zoomorphically classify Palestinians [1] as members of different kinds of non-human species, as opposed to commonly-used derogatory terms like "(sand)niggers", [2] [lower-alpha 1] "savages" or "red Indians", [lower-alpha 2] that simply imply racial inferiority. [3] Mutual dehumanization is commonplace among both the occupying and occupied peoples in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestinians have spoken of Jews as pigs, dogs, and bloodsucking vampires, while Israelis have spoken of Palestinians as savage animals and or repugnant critters, [lower-alpha 3] and at least once, referring to protesting Gazans, as mere ammunition weaponized by their "cannibal" leaders. [lower-alpha 4] [6] [7] At times, such dehumanization, the systematic humiliation and oppression of other peoples, which is a characteristic of most conflicts, can form a prelude to genocide. [8] [lower-alpha 5]
A recurrent metaphor, [9] going back to a statement by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 1996 which pictured Israel, a "vanguard of culture against barbarism" [10] as a flourishing "villa in the jungle", implied that those outside the villa's grounds were wild beasts. Ariel Sharon's son Gilad Sharon stated that the aim of Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012 was "a Tarzan-like cry that lets the entire jungle know in no uncertain terms just who won, and just who was defeated". [11] [lower-alpha 6] According to Neve Gordon, who has spoken about statements which have been made during the recent Israel–Hamas war, Israel's military conflicts with Palestinians are frequently framed in terms of a conflict between civilized Israeli soldiers who are serving in the most moral army on earth and their adversaries, Palestinians, who are perceived as 'human animals' incapable of grasping the rules of war. [lower-alpha 7]
With the aid of similes, Israel's wars have frequently been likened to battles with an adversarial creature, particularly, such similes have frequently been used during Israel's conflict with Gazans, who have variously been depicted as "ants", "fish" or "sitting ducks". Soldiers who have spoken about the military operations which they have conducted in the Gaza Strip have frequently compared them to burning up ants with a magnifying glass or they have compared them to shooting guns into a barrel which is crammed with fish. [lower-alpha 8] Gaza itself has been called "a hornets' nest" [20] or "nest of wasps" (by Moshe Dayan) [21] just as Ain el-Hilweh, the Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, has been. [22]
Even though Jews, like a number of other religious minorities, Christians included, were accorded protected status in Islamic societies, the use of abusive stereotypes was not uncommon, some of them were grounded in Quranic and early scholarly [lower-alpha 9] traditions. At the same time, these Jewish, Christian and other minorities developed polemics and used them to disparage members of Muslim majority societies by countering their defamations with similar negative stereotypes. [lower-alpha 10] At times, Orientalist writers on Palestine drew an analogy in which they likened the inhabitants of the country to animals. For example, Ermete Pierotti wrote that the idea that the domestic animals in Palestine are more intelligent than the people is not far from the truth. [lower-alpha 11]
"Animal" without any specific taxonomic distinction has been used to abuse Palestinians, a usage that extends to prominent Jewish leaders. [23] The term "sub-human" and denials that the Arabs are human occur regularly. In the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967 war, Robin Maxwell-Hyslop later revealed, in talks with the former Israeli ambassador to Burma David Hacohen, he took exception to the vehemence of Hacohen's descriptions of Arabs, likening their tenor to what Julius Streicher wrote about Jews, Hacohen replied: "But they are not human beings, they are not people, they are Arabs". [24] [lower-alpha 12] At times, denigrators can allow that they are human: Yonathan Netanyahu considered them cavemen [lower-alpha 13] while the Likud MP Oren Hazan allows that Palestinians are human, but only in so far as they are morons. [lower-alpha 14]
As early as 1985 Adir Cohen's content analysis of 520 Israeli children's books (An ugly face in the mirror: National Stereotypes in Hebrew children's literature) found that 86 works depicted Palestinians as "inhuman, war lovers, devious monsters, bloodthirsty dogs, preying wolves, or vipers". [25] Twenty years later, in 2005, another study by Daniel Bar-Tal and Yona Teichman found that 10% of the drawings in a sample of children asked to sketch a typical Arab depicted them as animals. They also found extensive evidence that Israeli children, when asked about Arabs, spoke of them in terms of pigs and other animals (as well as "barbarians", "Nazis" and murderers). [26]
In an interview for Channel 2 the settler Elisheva Federman the wife of the extremist Noam Federman, used this descriptor in prefacing her reasons for giving Palestinians an option, either leave or be killed. [lower-alpha 15] According to Noam Chomsky, a key feature of the occupation has been a pattern of humiliation of Araboushim (a pejorative term for Arabs similar to "nigger" or "kike") [lower-alpha 16] illustrated by the widespread practice among Border guards, police and soldiers at checkpoints of forcing randomly selected Palestinians to abase themselves by acting, as ordered, unhumanly, as animals: when the Palestinians comply, the compliance is taken as evidence that Palestinians are not human. [lower-alpha 17]
According to Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian scholar and diplomat, while she was part of a peaceful protest outside Bir Zeit University, where she lectured and which had been shut down, an Israeli sniper who shot twice in an attempt to assassinate her, on missing yelled "You Arabs are all animals". [27] Israeli orthodox rabbi and politician Eli Ben-Dahan, subsequently appointed Deputy Defense Minister in the new Netanyahu coalition government in 2015 whose portfolio included running the IDF's Civil Administration governing the West Bank, confided his view in a radio interview in 2013 that Palestinians "aren't human... To me, they are like animals." [28] [29] The same view was expressed by Rabbi David Batzri in protesting against a co-educational Jewish-Arab school in Jerusalem. Palestinians, he stated, are "beasts and asses", the "scum of snakes". [lower-alpha 18]
According to Amnon Kapeliouk, in a 1982 address to the Knesset in justifying the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Menachem Begin likened Palestinians to "two-footed beasts." [lower-alpha 19] Binjamin Netanyahu has spoken both of Palestinians and Arabs beyond the borders as "wild beasts/predators" (hayotteref). [33]
In 1938, during discussions in the Irgun about tactics to be used against Arabs as reprisals, Yosef Katznelson, an associate of the revisionist Ze'ev Jabotinsky, successfully advocated the adoption of terrorism against Palestinians, arguing that: "We must create a situation whereby killing an Arab is like killing a rat, where Arabs are dirt, and thereby showing that we and not they are the power to be reckoned with in Palestine". [34] [35]
Yehoshua Palmon described the Palestinian middlemen who acted as front men for Jewish land-purchase operations as leeches. [36]
For the leader of the Stern gang, Avraham Stern the Arabs were "beasts of the desert," a murderous population of desert moles. [37] [38] [lower-alpha 20]
Rehavam Ze'evi, at the time Minister for Tourism, once referred to the 180,000 Palestinians working in Israel as a cancer, "lice" Israel must rid itself of. [lower-alpha 21] [39] [40] [lower-alpha 22]
In August 2000, Ehud Barak likened Palestinians to crocodiles in that, in his view, "The more you give them meat, the more they want." [29] [41]
In keeping with his comparison of Israel to a villa crowded round by a jungle, Ehud Barak in an interview with the New York Times, stated that both the Labour and Likud parties wished to "kill the mosquito" that swamped Israel, differing only in while his party wished to "drain the swamp", Likud wished to keep it. [lower-alpha 23]
When several Palestinian youths had each been fined $650 for throwing stones at an Israeli police chief's car, Lieutenant-General Raphael Eitan, then chief of staff of the IDF, stated in the Knesset that for every case of stone-throwing, ten settlements should be built in retaliation, adding: "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle." [42] [43] [44] [8] The Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh was once called to account for engaging in a "ploy" for having added his signature to a circular condemning the stabbing of a Jew. The then Israeli military chief asked if "a cockroach (can) write a statement at all?", at which his resident Arab intelligence expert quipped: "Only on strict telephone orders from Arafat, the terrorist magician". [45] In late 2023, a cartoon mounted on his Twitter account in October 2023 by Arsen Ostrovsky depicting Hamas militants as cockroaches, with Palestinian colours, being crushed under an IDF boot, was placed under restriction by Twitter for its use of insect imagery, considered an example of "textbook Nazi propaganda." [46] A Telegram channel operated by an IDF psychological warfare unit designed to influence Israeli opinion ran videos of captured Palestinians and the corpses of Hamas militants with the caption: "Exterminating the roaches... exterminating the Hamas rats...Share this beauty." [lower-alpha 24]
Aryeh King, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, commenting on a photo depicting hundreds of stripped Palestinians detained by the IDF in Beit Lahia, suggested that D9 bulldozer should bury them alive, since they were "Muslim Nazis" and "ants." [47]
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, "the most widely respected rabbinical figure among Oriental and Sephardic Jews throughout the world", [48] known for his expressed hope that Palestinians might disappear from the face of the earth, called them "snakes". [41] [49] [lower-alpha 25] Ayelet Shaked, prior to her appointment as Minister of Justice in Binjamin Netanyahu's 2015 coalition government, gave prominence to an unpublished article on her Facebook page, written by the settler journalist Uri Elitzur. It likened Palestinian mothers to breeders of "little snakes" and appeared to call for their genocide. [50] [51] [lower-alpha 26] The Israeli military metaphor of mowing the lawn, the periodic large-scale bombing runs over the Gaza Strip, has been justified as a practical measure designed to stop "snakes" slithering among unmown weeds. [lower-alpha 27]
In 2024 in the New York Times Thomas Friedman likened Hamas to a trapdoor spider, a simile apparently devised to describe the rapid exit of that species from its nest to seize its prey and then haul it back to the burrow to devour it underground. [lower-alpha 28] [52] Earlier, one hostage released by Hamas had described her incarceration as one passed in a "spider's web" of tunnels extending kilometres below Gaza. [53]
Shmuel Agnon, a future Nobel prize winner, wrote in his 1945 novel Temol shilshom (Only Yesterday), that Arabs are people "without dignity, accepting humiliation, exploiting the settlers, cause of the destruction of the land, annoying, filthy, cheating the Jews, hating civilization, resembling dogs." [38] Moshe Dayan suggested in 1967 that Israel should tell the Palestinian refugees in the conquered territories, "we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads." [54] Palestinians are often ordered by Israeli police to behave as though they were dogs. [55] [56] [lower-alpha 29]
In 1988, the then Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir commenting on Palestinians rising up during the First Intifada, dismissed them saying "Those who want to destroy what we build are as grasshoppers (hagavim) in our own sight. If someone wants to damage this force he will crush his head on these rocks", [lower-alpha 30] in a clear allusion to Numbers 13:33. The implication of the allusion would be that whereas in Biblical times, the Israelites felt like grasshoppers when the Anakim giants threatened them, in modern Israel, it is Israelis themselves who now have become giants, while the Palestinians are the trembling Israelites of yore. [57] The statement [lower-alpha 31] was both criticized for likening Palestinians to insects [lower-alpha 32] and defended by some as having been misconstrued. [58] [57] [lower-alpha 33]
During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 Palestinian and Lebanese detainees were according to the eyewitness testimony of Lieutenant colonel Dov Yermiya, constrained to sit with their heads between their knees as their Israeli guards chanted:"You are a nation of monkeys, you are terrorists, and we will break your heads: You want a state? Build it on the moon". Yermiya was dismissed from the IDF when he went public with his account. [59]
Likud member Yehiel Hazan stated in the Knesset in 2004 that Arabs are worms. [lower-alpha 34] The author of a study of Palestinian children's deaths from Israeli gunfire pondered whether Hazan's attitude could explain an apparent exemption from the application of international law, when a court rendered a not-guilty verdict concerning a captain who had "verified" the killing of a young girl, Iman Darweesh Al Hams by shooting into her wounded body 17 bullets. [60]
A study of Israeli children's drawings of an Arab type found a number of pictures which depicted Arabs as pigs. [61] Porcine caricatures of the Islamic prophet Muhammad done by a recent settler from Russia were found posted on the walls of Hebron during a period of disturbances in 1997. [62] [lower-alpha 35]
In 2015, Bentzi Gopstein, director of the militant far-right anti-assimilationist movement Lehava, who is also known for calling for the burning of Christian churches in Israel, wrote on a website associated with the teachings of Abraham Isaac Kook, the first chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Mandatory Palestine, that Christians in Israel were bloodsucking "vampires" who should be thrown out of the country to stop the drinking once more of Jewish blood. [63] [64]
Hamas, an acronym of its official name, Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, is a Palestinian Sunni Islamist political and military movement governing the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip since 2007.
Zionism is a nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century aiming for the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people, particularly in Palestine, a region roughly corresponding to the Land of Israel in Jewish tradition. Following the establishment of the State of Israel, Zionism became an ideology that supports the development and protection of Israel as a Jewish state. It has also been described as Israel's national or state ideology.
The 1948 Arab–Israeli War, also known as the First Arab–Israeli War, followed the civil war in Mandatory Palestine as the second and final stage of the 1948 Palestine war. The civil war became a war of separate states with the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948, the end of the British Mandate for Palestine at midnight, and the entry of a military coalition of Arab states into the territory of Mandatory Palestine the following morning. The war formally ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements which established the Green Line.
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is an ongoing military and political conflict about land and self-determination within the territory of the former Mandatory Palestine. Key aspects of the conflict include the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the status of Jerusalem, Israeli settlements, borders, security, water rights, the permit regime, Palestinian freedom of movement, and the Palestinian right of return.
Palestinian refugees are citizens of Mandatory Palestine, and their descendants, who fled or were expelled from their country over the course of the 1947–1949 Palestine war and the Six-Day War. Most Palestinian refugees live in or near 68 Palestinian refugee camps across Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In 2019 more than 5.6 million Palestinian refugees were registered with the United Nations.
Media coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has been said, by both sides and independent observers, to be biased. This coverage includes news, academic discussion, film, and social media. These perceptions of bias, possibly exacerbated by the hostile media effect, have generated more complaints of partisan reporting than any other news topic and have led to a proliferation of media watchdog groups.
The history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict traces back to the late 19th century when Zionists sought to establish a homeland for the Jewish people in Ottoman-controlled Palestine, a region roughly corresponding to the Land of Israel in Jewish tradition. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, issued by the British government, endorsed the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which led to an influx of Jewish immigrants to the region. Following World War II and the Holocaust, international pressure mounted for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, leading to the creation of Israel in 1948.
Palestinian political violence refers to actions carried out by Palestinians with the intent to achieve political objectives that can involve the use of force, some of which are considered acts of terror, and often carried out in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the Israeli occupation. Common objectives of political violence by Palestinian groups include self-determination in and sovereignty over Palestine, or the "liberation of Palestine" and recognition of a Palestinian state, either in place of both Israel and the Palestinian territories, or solely in the Palestinian territories. This includes the objective of ending the Israeli occupation. Some of the factions have called for the destruction of the state of Israel. More limited goals include the release of Palestinian prisoners or the Palestinian right of return.
The Arab–Israeli conflict is the phenomenon involving political tension, military conflicts, and other disputes between various Arab countries and Israel, which escalated during the 20th century. The roots of the Arab–Israeli conflict have been attributed to the support by Arab League member countries for the Palestinians, a fellow League member, in the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict; this in turn has been attributed to the simultaneous rise of Zionism and Arab nationalism towards the end of the 19th century, though the two national movements had not clashed until the 1920s.
The Palestinian right of return is the political position or principle that Palestinian refugees, both first-generation refugees and their descendants, have a right to return and a right to the property they themselves or their forebears left behind or were forced to leave in what is now Israel and the Palestinian territories during the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight and the 1967 Six-Day War.
Palestinian fedayeen are militants or guerrillas of a nationalist orientation from among the Palestinian people. Most Palestinians consider the fedayeen to be "freedom fighters", while most Israelis consider them to be "terrorists".
Muslim supporters of Israel refers to both Muslims and cultural Muslims who support the right to self-determination of the Jewish people and the likewise existence of a Jewish homeland in the Southern Levant, traditionally known as the Land of Israel and corresponding to the modern polity known as the State of Israel. Muslim supporters of the Israeli state are widely considered to be a rare phenomenon in light of the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the larger Arab–Israeli conflict. Within the Muslim world, the legitimacy of the State of Israel has been challenged since its inception, and support for Israel's right to exist is a minority orientation. Pro-Israel Muslims have faced opposition from both moderate Muslims and Islamists.
Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism. Although anti-Zionism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, all its proponents agree that the creation of the modern State of Israel, and the movement to create a sovereign Jewish state in the region of Palestine—a region partly coinciding with the biblical Land of Israel—was flawed or unjust in some way.
In the 1948 Palestine war more than 700000 Palestinian Arabs – about half of Mandatory Palestine's Arab population – fled from their homes or were expelled, at first by paramilitaries, and after the establishment of the Israel, by its military. The expulsion and flight was a central component of the fracturing, dispossession, and displacement of Palestinian society, known as the Nakba. Dozens of massacres targeting Arabs were conducted by Israeli military forces and between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed. Village wells were poisoned in a biological warfare programme and properties were looted to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning. Other sites were subject to Hebraization of Palestinian place names.
Racism in the Palestinian territories encompasses all forms and manifestations of racism experienced in the Palestinian Territories, of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, irrespective of the religion, colour, creed, or ethnic origin of the perpetrator and victim, or their citizenship, residency, or visitor status. It may refer to Jewish settler attitudes regarding Palestinians as well as Palestinian attitudes to Jews and the settlement enterprise undertaken in their name.
The Khan Yunis massacre took place on 3 November 1956, perpetrated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the Palestinian town of Khan Yunis and the nearby refugee camp of the same name in the Gaza Strip during the Suez Crisis.
Aside from its use of political violence in pursuit of its goals, the Palestinian political and military organization Hamas has been widely criticised for a variety of reasons, including its alleged use of hate speech by its representatives, alleged use of human shields and child combatants as part of its military operations, alleged restriction of political freedoms within the Gaza Strip, and alleged human rights abuses.
Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany occur frequently in some veins of anti-Zionism in relation to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The legitimacy of these comparisons and their potential antisemitic nature is a matter of debate. Historically, figures like historian Arnold J. Toynbee have drawn parallels between Zionism and Nazism, a stance he maintained despite criticism. Scholar David Feldman suggests these comparisons are often rhetorical tools without specific antisemitic intent. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) sees them as diminishing the Holocaust's significance.
In May 2017 Palestinian political and military organization Hamas unveiled A Document of General Principles and Policies, also referred to as the new or revised Hamas charter. It advocated for a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders, describing this as a "formula of national consensus", but at the same time strove for the "complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea", and did not explicitly recognize Israel. The new charter holds that armed resistance against an occupying power is justified under international law.
Animal stereotypes of Jews in Palestinian discourse are the language and imagery that are encountered in Palestinian narratives that zoomorphically classify Jews as members of different kinds of non-human species that are considered lowly or loathsome, as opposed to terms that only imply racial inferiority within the human species. This kind of dehumanization is commonplace among both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.