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][a] "savages" or "red Indians",[b] that simply imply racial inferiority.[3]Mutual dehumanization is commonplace among both the occupying and occupied peoples in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[4] Among Palestinians, Jews have been referred to as pigs, dogs, and bloodsucking vampires, while in Israeli discourse references to Palestinians as savage animals and or repugnant critters has also been attested,[c] and at least once, protesting Gazans have been described as mere ammunition weaponized by their "cannibal" leaders.[d][7][8] 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.[9][e]
A recurrent metaphor,[10] going back to a statement by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 1996 which pictured Israel, a "vanguard of culture against barbarism"[11] 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".[12][f] 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.[g]
With the aid of similes, Israel's wars have frequently been likened to battles with an adversarial creature. Such comparisons have been used frequently 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 compared them to burning up ants with a magnifying glass or shooting guns into a barrel which is crammed with fish.[h] Gaza itself has been called "a hornets' nest"[21] or "nest of wasps" (by Moshe Dayan)[22] just as Ain el-Hilweh, the Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, has been.[23]
Background
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[i] 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.[j] 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.[k]
Contemporary reciprocal dehumanization
Blatant dehumanization in the asymmetric Israeli-Palestinian conflict is mutual, with people on both sides likening the other's brutality to animal behaviour. Israel is one of the highest income countries in the world, and an advanced military power. The Palestinian territories have no standing army and a GDP of only 3% of Israel's.[24] One recent study conducted during the 2014 Gaza War found that such dehumanization is not exclusive to the Israelis, the dominant group with superior power, but that the disadvantaged Palestinian group, which bears a disproportionate burden of casualties, also dehumanizes Israelis to a similar degree, the research showing comparable results across the massive disparity between empowered Israelis and the disempowered Palestinians at opposite ends of the power gradient.[l][m] Protesting that they are "human beings" while cursing Israeli soldiers and settlers as "animals" is, according to Penny Johnson, the commonest refrain heard from Palestinians held up at Israeli checkpoints.[n]The incendiary use of such theriomorphic pejoratives describing Palestinians as animals witnessed a dramatic upswing during the Israel-Hamas war of 2023–2024.[25][o]
Palestinians as simply "animals"
"Animal" without any specific taxonomic distinction has been used to abuse Palestinians, a usage that extends to prominent Jewish leaders.[26] 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".[27][p] The sense that Israelis considered and treated them like animals became widespread among Palestinians during the First Intifada.[28]
At times, denigrators can allow that they are human: Yonathan Netanyahu considered them cavemen[q] while the Likud MP Oren Hazan allows that Palestinians are human, but only in so far as they are morons.[r] In the first month of the Hamas-Israeli war, Dan Gillerman, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations (2003–2008) expressed his perplexity at world sympathy for Palestinians, stating to Sky News that they were "inhuman animals".[s]
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".[29] 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).[30]
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.[t] 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")[u] 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.[v]
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".[31] 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."[32][33] 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".[w]
The Israeli-American historian of the Holocaust Omer Bartov, who did his PhD on the indoctrination of German soldiers and their subsequent behaviour on the Eastern front, has argued that young Israeli soldiers who have fought inside the Gaza Strip in the ongoing Israel–Hamas war display attitudes towards their enemies similar to those of German soldiers in the Second World War in that they have internalized the view that Hamas militants are 'human animals' and Palestinians generally less than human.[x] One IDF witness to the abuses of Palestinians imprisoned in Sde Teiman testified that guards were indoctrinated to think of the detainees as not being human beings.[y]
Palestinians as non-human mammal species
Pigs
A study of Israeli children's drawings of an Arab type found a number of pictures which depicted Arabs as pigs.[40] 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.[41][z]
During the Israel-Hamas war, the Israeli rappers Subliminal, HaTzel and Raviv Kenner produced a popular song, "It's On Us", in support of Israel in which it is stated of Gazans that: "There is no forgiveness for swarms of rats. They will die in their rat holes."[48]
In 1938, during discussions in the Irgun about tactics to be used against Arabs as reprisals, Yosef Katznelson, an associate of the revisionistZe'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".[49][50]
Dogs
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."[51]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."[52] Palestinians are often ordered by Israeli police to behave as though they were dogs.[53][54][ab]
In just over a month after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, an Israeli musical duo Ness and Stilla produced a song, Harbu Darbu, which quickly became a smash hit. Addressing themselves to Gazans as the sons of Amalek, they wrote promising another X on their rifle, "cause every dog will get what's coming to him".[48]
Monkeys
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.[55]
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, "the most widely respected rabbinical figure among Oriental and Sephardic Jews throughout the world",[57] known for his expressed hope that Palestinians might disappear from the face of the earth, called them "snakes".[58][59][ad]Ayelet Shaked, prior to her appointment as Minister of Justice in Benjamin 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.[60][61][ae] 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.[af]
Crocodiles
In August 2000, Ehud Barak likened Palestinians to crocodiles in that, in his view, "The more you give them meat, the more they want."[33][58]
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.[ai]
Roaches
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."[65][66][67][9] 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".[68] 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."[69]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."[aj]
Ants
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."[70]
Spiders
In 2018 Ehud Rosen writing for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, described the global BDS network supporting disinvestment in Israel as a spider web.[71] In late October 2023, the released Hamas hostage Yocheved Lifshitz described her incarceration as one passed in a "spider's web" of tunnels extending kilometres below Gaza.[72] Some months later, in an essay for The New York Times entitled "Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom," which uses insect metaphors to analyse Middle Eastern countries opposed to Israel, Thomas Friedman, described by Danny Danon as someone whose writings resonate with an "evident passion for Israel",[73] 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.[ak][74][75][al]
Grasshoppers/locusts (hagavim)
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",[am] 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.[76] The statement[an] was both criticized for likening Palestinians to insects[ao] and defended by some as having been misconstrued.[77][76][ap]
Worms
Likud member Yehiel Hazan stated in the Knesset in 2004 that Arabs are worms.[aq] 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.[78]
Salmon
Ehud Barak, according to Benny Morris, thinks that it would take 80 years after 1948 for the Palestinians to be ready to make a compromise with Israel. Palestinians in those decades, he thinks, suffered from a "salmon syndrome" in their desire to return to the lands of their birth. Once those generations die out, few such Palestinian "salmons" will remain who desire to return to Palestine.[ar][79][80]
Termites
In 2023 Pini Badash, an Israeli politician elected to the Knesset on the Tzomet ticket and mayor of Omer, near Beersheba, likened the Bedouin to termites. Regarding planning for a new housing development he said he would block any attempt by Bedouins to purchase a home there, since their presence would eat away at the foundation of the new community:
‘Imagine you built a house, a terrific house, you installed cameras, a fence, no one can get in. But what happened? The termites in the house have eaten you.’ That is our situation. There’s a strong army, there’s intelligence, and in the end we’re eaten from within.” [81]
Microbial, mineral, extraterrestrial and other biological forms
In 1979, in Kiryat Arba, where the terrorist Meir Kahane was reputedly located, a woman settler explained to the journalist Ellen Canterow that there was a chain of being, with Jews on top followed by lesser specimens, and among them, Arabs could be found on the lower rungs.[as]
The phenomenon of terrorism arises, for Ze'ev Boim, at the time the Deputy Minister for Defense, from a "genetic blemish" in the Palestinian people.[82]
According to Geoffrey Aronson, an anonymous but high-ranking officer in the IDF described the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip as "local bacteria"[83][at] Negotiations themselves with Palestinians would only, according to religious Zionist rabbi and settler Moshe Levinger, spread the "virus of peace".[86]
Israeli political, military and religious leaders have variously described Palestinians as a "cancer" and vermin to be exterminated.[au]Moshe Ya’alon the Israeli Chief of Staff and Defense Minister at the time, with regard to the tactics used against the West Bank town of Jenin stated that the threat from Palestinians was a "cancerous manifestation", which could be treated by amputation or, as he preferred, by "chemotherapy".[88][89][58][90] The idea had previously expressed by Meir Kahane who, in his 1980 book They Must Go wrote of Palestinians as a "cancer" in the body of the "Jewish State" that must be excised by any means.[91]
Rabbi Yaacov Perrin claimed that even one million Palestinian Arabs are "not worth a Jewish fingernail".[92][93][94]
↑ "The anger that went into the Israeli clubs and bullets was like that of the Palestinians, fed by several different sources. On one level, many Israelis felt like the homeowner who wakes up one morning and discovers his live-in maid standing in the master bedroom, playing the stereo at full blast, and announcing to the boss that she is not just a faceless object that can be ordered around but that she is an equal-with an equal claim to his house. It was enraging for Israelis to have these 'niggers'— which was exactly how many Israelis viewed the Palestinians..." (Friedman 1995, p.391)
↑ "The conception of the Palestinians as primitive 'natives' who can easily be bought off has deep roots in Zionist history, and is a natural concomitant to 'Weizmann's legacy,' as expressed by Ben-Gurion and others. It was observed long ago by visitors to Palestine. The American journalist Vincent Sheean, for example, arrived in Palestine in 1929 as an avid Zionist sympathizer, and left a few months later as a harsh critic of the Zionist enterprise. He found that the Jewish settlers 'had contempt [for the Arabs] as an 'uncivilized race,' to whom some of them referred as 'Red Indians' and others as 'savages',.. They looked upon the indigenous population as 'mere squatters for thirteen centuries' so that it should 'be feasible for the Zionists, by purchase, persuasion and pressure, to get the Arabs out sooner or later and convert Palestine into a Jewish national home." (Chomsky 1999, p.69)
↑ "Mutual dehumanization is common between Palestinians and Israelis – the former call the latter pigs, dogs, infidels, and bloodsucking vampires, while the latter refer to the former as savage animals, primitives, and uncivilized or repugnant critters," (Gerteiny 2007, pp.92–93)
↑ The analogy of Hamas with "cannibals" was earlier made by Fiamma Nirenstein:"morally speaking, there mustn't be negotiations with Hamas, which thinks that Jews are the sons of monkeys and pigs. You cannot negotiate with cannibals, who eat human beings."[5] In the aftermath of a day when 60 Palestinian civilians were shot dead by Israeli snipers from behind a berm and 2,700 were injured during the 2018–2019 Gaza border protests, the then Israeli Minister for Defense, Avigdor Liberman defended the use of live ammunition as exemplifying a moral rectitude without parallel in the world, likening Hamas militants to cannibals, claiming that the protestors had been weaponized as ammunition. "The Hamas leadership is a bunch of cannibals who treat their children as weaponry," he said. "They have rocket weaponry, they have personal weapons, and they have another kind of weapon: women and children." Liberman defended the army's use of live ammunition against the protesters, saying that "the IDF acted according to moral norms that are not seen anywhere else in the world".[6]
↑ David Miller and William Savage, Jr., (1977) concluded their comparative study of the Roman and American experiences by suggesting that "derogatory stereotypes of alien peoples as subhuman often accompany and expansionist ideology, and not only make atrocities possible, but indeed encourage them." (Moughrabi 1992, p.50)
↑ Benny Morris, alluding to Ariel Sharon's Israeli West Bank barrier, commented: "Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another."[13]Benjamin Netanyahu picked up the simile of Arabs as "beasts of prey" to be fenced off from the villa in remarking: "At the end, in the State of Israel, as I see it, there will be a fence that spans it all. I'll be told, 'this is what you want, to protect the villa?' The answer is yes. Will we surround all of the State of Israel with fences and barriers? The answer is yes."[14][15]
↑ "Alongside this legal discourse, Israel also circulates a colonial narrative that presents the Palestinians as 'human animals' that do not understand the laws of war. By combining these colonial tropes and 'legalese', it frames Palestinians as immoral barbarians who 'deserve to die'. This rhetorical move, in turn, construes Israeli soldiers as the opposite, namely, the 'civilised' and moral 'fighters'" (Gordon 2023).
↑ "You feel like a child playing around with a magnifying glass burning up ants". "Most casualties were inflicted on Palestinians by air strikes, artillery fire, and snipers from afar", a pair of soldiers recalled a year after the invasion."Combat victory? Shooting fish in a barrel is more like it".[16][17][18]Walt Rostow likened the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 to a "turkey shoot".[19] Seib, alluding to Gideon Levy's reportage on the Gaza wars, writes of the "sitting duck nature of the Gaza Strip and its inhabitants".[20]
↑ The Lebanese Shiite exegete Muḥammad Jawād Mughnīyya (1904–1979) in an anti-Zionist tract entitled "The Race of Wickedness", stated that al-Jahiz (776–868/869) in his Kitāb al-Ḥayawān (The book of the Animal) likened Jews to rats, lizards and termites. To this, Mughnīyya added that behind every Jew was a scorprion and viper (Windecker 2023, p.56).
↑ "Islamic authors ... moved and still move in what Stefan Wild described as the 'grey zone between Qur'anic exegesis, theology of history and political propaganda'. They could draw upon a repertory of religious polemics which were directed at non-Muslims, be they Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus or others, which had accumulated over the ages (just as Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus and others had developed their own polemical literature against Islam and the Muslims). Jews occupied a distinctive place in these polemics, but it was not a unique one." (Krämer 2006, pp.243–276, 267)
↑ "If any one, disposed to attribute to animals the possession of reason rather than instinct, were to travel through the length and breadth of Palestine, he would certainly find many arguments in favour of his theory, and perhaps, he would even come to the conclusion (not far from the truth) that the brutes were more intelligent than the men. I at least could not contradict him, as I have formed nearly the same opinion, after an intimate acquaintance with both the one and the other, during several years." (Pierotti 1864, p.2)
↑ On average, Israelis showed the "highest levels of blatant dehumanization towards any outgroup observed to date using the 'Ascent of man' measure of blatant dehumanization", ranking Palestinians 39.81% lower than their own group and significantly closer to man's quadruped ancestors than to modern man, while for Palestinians, Israelis figured at 37.03% on the same scale. the Israelis sampled on average expressed the view that to save one wounded Israeli soldier, they would willingly kill 575 Palestinian civilians. (Israelis) "exhibited relatively low willingness to negotiate, low support for concession making, high support for collective aggression, and strikingly high acceptance of civilian casualties... Among Palestinians, there was moderate support for negotiations, and a similarly moderate level of willingness to sacrifice one Palestinian life to save four Israeli children." (Bruneau & Kteily 2017, pp.1–2, 7–9, 11).
↑ In sum, despite their disadvantaged status, Palestinians reported strikingly high levels of blatant dehumanization of their more powerful Israeli neighbors. Indeed, we observed that the participants in our Palestinian and Israeli samples dramatically dehumanized the outgroup, rating them as closer to animals than full humans. Not only was the degree of outgroup dehumanization quite high among the advantaged and disadvantaged group, but it was also quite potent: as with Israelis, Palestinians' dehumanization of the outgroup was reliably and uniquely associated with aggressive attitudes and support for aggressive policies likely to feed cycles of intergroup violence.(Bruneau & Kteily 2017, p.14).
↑ "Exploring attitudes and anecdotes from Palestinians living under military occupation sharply raises the question of how animal welfare and protection can be advanced when humans are suffering. 'We are human beings' is perhaps the most common refrain from Palestinians facing humiliating treatment at the hands of a bored soldier at a checkpoint. And 'animals' is the most frequent curse an angry Palestinian will hurl against the harsh behavior of Israeli soldiers and settlers." (Johnson 2019, p.xvii)
↑ Attacking the perceived bias in Western media which in his view highlights Israelis as victims while assuming Palestinian lives do not matter, the PA representative at the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, stated that there is a trend whereby "History...begins for some media and politicians when Israelis are killed. Our people have endured one deadly year after another...We [Palestinians] are not sub-humans. Let me repeat: We are not sub-humans. We will never accept a rhetoric that denigrates our humanity and reneges our rights. A rhetoric that ignores the occupation of our land and oppression of our people." (Mitrovica 2023)
↑ "Six weeks after that war six hon. Members of this House, three from each side, including myself, went to Israel and to Jordan as the guests of those countries. There was a horrifying moment for me. We were all present as guests at lunch of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Knesset in Jerusalem. After lunch the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Knesset spoke with great intemperance and at great length to us about the Arabs. When he drew breath I was constrained to say, 'Doctor Hacohen, I am profoundly shocked that you should speak of other human beings in terms similar to those in which Julius Streicher spoke of the Jews. Have you learned nothing?' I shall remember his reply to my dying day. He smote the table with both hands and said, 'But they are not human beings, they are not people, they are Arabs.' He was speaking of the Arab refugees." (Maxwell-Hyslop 1973, p.502)
↑ Likud MK Oren Hazan stated that "We're gonna shut your mouths and we're going to speak the truth. There is no Palestinian People. And there has never been a Palestinian People [in Hebrew, am ha'Falastinai]". However, he continued, "There is a Palestinian Moron, (in vulgar Hebrew slang, Ama Falastinai). And you will stay a Palestinian Moron. And you know that even Ama (a brand of dish detergent liquid) is worth more than the Palestinians. There is no Palestinian people. And there has never been a Palestinian people." However, "there is a Palestinian moron" (Burston 2017).
↑ "I am very puzzled by the constant concern which the world is showing for the Palestinian people and is actually showing for these horrible, inhuman animals who have done the worst atrocities that this century has seen". "I don't remember people shedding tears for the Taliban," he added. (Harb 2023).
↑ "We are talking about people who are sub-humans... there is nothing to be done except for throwing them out of here, and not to Jordan, but far, because if they're in Jordan they will try to return. As far as possible." She continued: "I say in the best circumstances we need to expel them ... If they don't leave? We'll kill them... They're enemies. We have to fight them. If they don't leave, we'll start bombing them. That's the only thing that will help... We don't need to put on airs. We're in a war. A la guerre, comme à la guerre - we must act as if we're in a war. Federman explained: 'The entire Arab street supports the suicide bomber... everyone is complicit in such an act. We can give them an ultimatum to leave here with their possessions intact, and if not, we'll simply send... planes and bomb them and hold on to our land.' In remarks made off the record, Federman asserted: 'Whoever wants to remain alive should leave, and whoever doesn't will be killed'." (Cohen-Almagor 2012, p.52)
↑ Noting Moshe Dayan's point that Palestinians will live like dogs if they choose to stay, and Menachem Begin's description of them as "two-legged beasts", Chomsky argues his view that the "hallmark of the occupation has been humiliation and degradation" of Araboushim who are regularly forced "to urinate and excrete on one another and crawl on the ground while they call out 'Long Live the State of Israel' or lick the earth; or on Holocaust day, to write numbers on their own hands 'in memory of Jews in the extermination camps'." (Chomsky 2002, pp.8–9; Chomsky 1999, p.561)
↑ "The pattern is common. Israeli journalist Tom Segev reports what happened when an Arab lawyer told him that a random walk through Jerusalem would yield ample evidence of intimidation and humiliation of Arabs. Skeptical, Segev walked with him through Jerusalem, where he was stopped repeatedly by Border Guards to check his identification papers. One ordered him: 'Come here, jump.' Laughing, he dropped the papers on the road and ordered the lawyer to pick them up. 'These people will do whatever you tell them to do,' the Border Guards explained to Segev: 'If I tell him to jump, he will jump. Run, he will run. Take your clothes off, he will take them off. If I tell him to kiss the wall, he will kiss it. If I tell him to crawl on the road, won't he crawl?....Everything. Tell him to curse his mother and he will curse her too.' They are 'not human beings.' The Guards then searched the lawyer, slapped him, and ordered him to remove his shoes, warning that they could order him to remove his clothes as well. 'My Arab,' Segev continues, 'kept silent and sat down on the ground' as the Border Guards laughed, saying again 'Really, not humans,' then walked away." (Chomsky 1999, p.562)
↑ "The establishment of a school like this one is a despicable and impure act. Stand in the way and prevent this. Darkness and light cannot be mixed. The people of Israel are pure and Arabs are a nation of asses. The question must be asked, why didn't God give them four legs, because they are asses." The son, Yitzhak Batzri, also made objectionable comments. "The Arabs are beasts and asses," he said. "They are inferior, they want to take our daughters. People say we are racist, but – they are the evil ones, the cruel ones, the scum of snakes. This is war." (Rosner 2006)
↑ 'Unlike the majority of Israelis, these young people had seen the destruction of Gaza with their own eyes. It seemed to me that they had not only internalised a particular view that has become commonplace in Israel – namely, that the destruction of Gaza as such was a legitimate response to 7 October – but had also developed a way of thinking that I had observed many years ago when studying the conduct, worldview and self-perception of German army soldiers in the second world war. Having internalised certain views of the enemy – the Bolsheviks as Untermenschen; Hamas as human animals – and of the wider population as less than human and undeserving of rights, soldiers observing or perpetrating atrocities tend to ascribe them not to their own military, or to themselves, but to the enemy.'[38]
↑ They keep pumping it into your brain that you have to disconnect. That they're not people. That they're not human beings."[39]
↑ Eating meat from pigs was commonplace among early Jewish immigrants to Palestine and the practice was abhorred by the rabbinate. When Jewish butchers sold pork to their Jewish-German customers under the British mandate in WW2, they were harassed and the shops retailing such sausages were the object of frequent protests by religious Jews, who associated eating pork with Hitler, and Nazi Germany. One cry used by demonstrators was "Pig!" (Gilad 2024, pp.98–100)
↑ "The war in Lebanon cannot be interpreted, even by its most devoted proponents, as a war of survival. For this reason, the government has gone to extraordinary lengths to dehumanise the Palestinians. Begin described them in a speech in the Knesset as 'beasts walking on two legs'. Palestinians have often been called 'bugs' while their refugee camps in Lebanon are referred to as 'tourist camps'. In order to rationalise the bombing of civilian populations, Begin emotively declared: 'If Hitler was sitting in a house with 20 other people, would it be correct to blow up the house?'[42] This has been contested as not referring to Palestinians but to terrorists generally. A decade earlier, in response to the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics, Begin had posed a rhetorical question before the Knesset. speaking of the Palestinian militant group responsible for the atrocity in the following terms: 'Is it because of seven hundred nobodies, two-legged ravenous beasts, that Jews will once again bow their heads?', swearing to eliminate the murderers.[43] Begin's actual words in his 1982 speech were: 'The fate of… Jewish children has been different from all the children of the world throughout the generations. No more. We will defend our children. If the hand of any two-footed animal is raised against them, that hand will be cut off, and our children will grow up in joy in the homes of their parents'."[44]
↑ "'They treated us like dogs. They forced us to bark, threatening to beat us if we didn't. We did whatever they asked because if we didn't they would beat us badly,' one man said" (Stepansky et al. 2023).
↑ "The Arabs are not a nation but a mole that grew in the wilderness of the eternal desert. They are nothing but murderers." (Peteet 2005, p.167)
↑ Criticizing Ehu Barak's 2000 peace negotiations, he stated: "Where are this man's brains? He runs a mad dash after them [the Palestinians] to catch them and then he continues to make peace. But what is peace? This is peace? There should be security for the people of Israel. Why are you bringing them close to us? You bring snakes next to us. How can you make peace with a snake?" (LAT 2000)
↑ "What's so horrifying about understanding that the entire Palestinian people is the enemy? Every war is between two peoples, and in every war the people who started the war, that whole people, is the enemy…They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there." (Bryan 2015)
↑ "They arrived here and are trying to become citizens because they want social security and welfare payments. We should get rid of the ones who are not Israeli citizens the same way you get rid of lice. We have to stop this cancer from spreading within us." (The Washington Post 2 July 2001)
↑ Ze'evi also called the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at various times a "viper, a scorpion, a vampire, and a Hitler" (Spector 2009, p.216).
↑ "We're both trying to kill the mosquito...But at the same time we're trying to drain the swamp, while Likud is saying the swamp is ours and we'll never give it up. We believe the only way to overcome terrorism is to solve the source of the problem." (Peteet 2005, p.168)
↑ "Photos of Palestinian men captured by the IDF in the Strip and the bodies of terrorists were captioned: 'Exterminating the roaches... exterminating the Hamas rats...Share this beauty.' A video of a soldier allegedly dipping machine gun bullets in pork fat is captioned: 'What a man!!!!! Greases bullets with lard. You won't get your virgins.' Another caption was: 'Garbage juice!!!! Another dead terrorist!! You have to watch it with the sound, you'll die laughing'." (Kubovich 2024)
↑ "Hamas is like the trap-door spider. The way trap-door spiders operate, according to a nature site, is that 'the spider leaps out at great speed, seizes its prey and hauls it back into the burrow to be devoured, all in a fraction of a second.' Trap-door spiders are adept at camouflaging the doors of their underground nests, so they are hard to see until they're opened." (Friedman 2024)
↑ The Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, in a speech delivered on 26 May 2000 in Bint Jbeil immediately following the withdrawal of Israeli occupying forces from Lebanon, once asserted that Israel was feebler than a spider's web. The phrasing was probably an allusion to verses in the Al-Ankabutsurah of the Qur’an. Al-Ankabut 29:41:"The parable of those who take protectors other than Allah is that of a spider spinning a shelter. And the flimsiest of all shelters is certainly that of a spider, if only they knew" (Hamdi 2022, p.110).
↑ Of the five instances of the use of this term in the Tanakh, one is ambiguous and has been thought to refer to the locust (arbeh), leading some to suggest Shamir was referring to the Palestinians as the latter (Krauthammer 1988)
↑ "Anybody who wants to damage this fortress and other fortresses we are establishing will have his head smashed against the boulders and walls...In remarks aimed at Arab rioters, the Prime Minister said:'We say to them from the heights of this mountain and from the perspective of thousands of years of history that they are like grasshoppers compared to us.'." (Kampeas 2011)
↑ The MK Oren Hazan used a similar analogy when intercepting a bus carrying a Palestinian mother visiting her imprisoned son: MK Oren Hazan confronted families of terrorists from the Gaza Strip who came to visit their imprisoned sons in the south, shouting abuse at them as they rode a bus taking them to the prison. The families on the bus were on their way to Nafha prison, near Sde Boker, from the Gaza Strip in a convoy escorted by the Red Cross. Hazan boarded the bus at the Gaza border with video crews in tow. He said on Twitter he told the relatives that the prisoners were "terrorists who belong in the ground". In a video clip on social media, he shouted at one prisoner's mother that her son was an "insect" and a "dog." (Bender 2017).
↑ "Does anyone feel any qualm that here are men seeking high office who have nothing to say about the forcible internment without trial of almost 5,000 people; who have felt themselves unable to criticize the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, for calling Palestinians 'grasshoppers'? Why doesn't the press, eager to remind the world for the millionth time about Jackson's 'Hymietown', challenge the two white candidates to speak out on this or any of the innumerable racist statements from Israeli leaders about Palestinians?" (Cockburn 1988, p.496)
↑ "The Arabs are worms. You find them everywhere like worms, underground as well as above." Hazan continued: "Until we understand that we're doing business with a nation of assassins and terrorists who don't want us here, there will be no let up. These worms have not stopped attacking Jews for a century." (AJ 2004)
↑ "He seems to think in terms of generations and hesitantly predicts that only 'eighty years' after 1948 will the Palestinians be historically ready for a compromise. By then, most of the generation that experienced the catastrophe of 1948 at first hand will have died; there will be 'very few salmons around who still want to return to their birthplaces to die.' (Barak speaks of a 'salmon syndrome' among the Palestinians—and says that Israel, to a degree, was willing to accommodate it, through the family reunion scheme, allowing elderly refugees to return to be with their families before they die.)" (Morris & Barak 2002)
↑ "One woman said she believed in a 'chain of being': on top, Jews. Then, lesser human specimens. Then animals, vegetables, minerals. Somewhere in the lower reaches of lesser humanity were Arabs." (Canterow 2009)
↑ The then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2008 likewise called Israel "filthy bacteria".[84] Such language, used against Jews, evokes the Nazi slogans that verbally accompanied the Holocaust.[85]
↑ "Tutsis were debased as 'cockroaches', a word also invoked by a then chief of the Israeli defence forces to describe Palestinians. Other Israeli political, military and religious leaders have at different times described Palestinians as 'a cancer', 'vermin', and called for them to be 'annihilated'. They are frequently portrayed as backward and a burden on the country." (McGreal 2023)
Cohen-Almagor, Raphael (Winter 2012). "Is Law Appropriate to Regulate Hateful and Racist Speech? The Israeli Experience". Israel Studies Review. 27 (2): 41–64. doi:10.3167/isr.2012.270204. JSTOR41804802.
The Gaza Strip, also known simply as Gaza, is a small territory located on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea; it is the smaller of the two Palestinian territories, the other being the West Bank, that make up the State of Palestine. Inhabited by mostly Palestinian refugees and their descendants, Gaza is one of the most densely populated territories in the world. Gaza is bordered by Egypt on the southwest and Israel on the east and north. The territory has been under Israeli occupation since 1967.
The Islamic Resistance Movement, abbreviated Hamas, is a Palestinian nationalist Sunni Islamist political organisation with a military wing called the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. It has governed the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip since 2007.
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.
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Palestinian refugees are citizens of Mandatory Palestine, and their descendants, who fled or were expelled from their country, village or house over the course of the 1948 Palestine war and during the 1967 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.
Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Hassan Yassin was a Palestinian politician and imam who founded Hamas in 1987. He also served as the first chairman of the Hamas Shura Council and de facto leader of Hamas since its inception from December 1987 until his assassination in March 2004.
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 acts of violence or terrorism committed by Palestinians with the intent to accomplish political goals, and often carried out in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Common objectives of political violence by Palestinian groups include self-determination in and sovereignty over all of Palestine, or the recognition of a Palestinian state inside the 1967 borders. This includes the objective of ending the Israeli occupation. More limited goals include the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel and recognition of 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.
Anarchism in Israel has been observed in the early Kibbutz movement, among early Labor Zionists as well as an organised movement in Israel following the 1948 Palestine war. Anarchism has also had a mixed relationship with Zionism and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, with +972 Magazine publishing an article claiming anarchists were "the only group in Israel engaged in serious anti-occupation activism." Animal rights are notably popular among Israeli anarchists, even when compared to anarchist movements in other countries.
The Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, commonly known simply as Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), is a Palestinian Islamist paramilitary organization formed in 1981.
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.
The two-state solution is a proposed approach to resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, by creating two states on the territory of the former Mandatory Palestine. It is often contrasted with the one-state solution, which is the establishment a single state in former Mandatory Palestine with equal rights for all its inhabitants. The two-state solution is supported by many countries, and the Palestinian Authority. Israel currently does not support the idea, though it has in the past.
Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany occur frequently in the political discourse of anti-Zionism. Given the legacy of the Holocaust, the legitimacy of and intent behind these accusations are a matter of debate, particularly with regard to their potential nature as a manifestation of antisemitism. Historically, figures like British historian Arnold J. Toynbee have drawn parallels or alleged a relationship between Zionism and Nazism; British professor David Feldman suggests that these comparisons are often rhetorical tools without specific antisemitic intent. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy argues that such comparisons not only lack historical and moral equivalence, but also risk inciting anti-Jewish sentiment. Historian Deborah Lipstadt has called the comparison a form of "soft-core" Holocaust denial The Working Definition of Antisemitism considers such criticismn to be a form of antisemitism." This is controversial because of concerns that it could be seen as defining legitimate criticisms of Israel as antisemitic, as it has been used to censor pro-Palestinian activism. Alternative definitions such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism have been proposed.
The State of Israel has been accused of carrying out a genocide against Palestinians at various times during the longstanding Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Debate on whether Israel's treatment of Palestinians since the Nakba meets the definition of genocide, and whether such actions are continuous or limited to specific periods or events, is ongoing. This treatment has also been characterised as "slow-motion genocide", as well as a corollary or expression of settler colonialism and indigenous land theft.
Jews and Israelis as animals in Palestinian discourse refers to the language and imagery that are encountered in Palestinian narratives that zoomorphically portray Jews and Israelis as members of non-human species that are considered lowly or loathsome. This kind of dehumanization is commonplace on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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