This article surveys the terms which are encountered in Israeli narratives that zoomorphically classify Palestinians as members of different kinds of non-human species, as opposed to commonly-used derogatory terms like "(sand)niggers", "savages" or "red Indians", that simply imply racial inferiority. Mutual dehumanization is commonplace among both the occupying and occupied peoples in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 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, and at least once, protesting Gazans have been described as mere ammunition weaponized by their "cannibal" leaders. 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.
A recurrent metaphor, going back to a statement by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 1996 which pictured Israel, a "vanguard of culture against barbarism" 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". 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.
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. Gaza itself has been called "a hornets' nest" or "nest of wasps" (by Moshe Dayan) just as Ain el-Hilweh, the Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, has been.
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 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. 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.
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. 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. 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.The incendiary use of such theriomorphic pejoratives describing Palestinians as animals witnessed a dramatic upswing during the Israel-Hamas war of 2023–2024.
"Animal" without any specific taxonomic distinction has been used to abuse Palestinians, a usage that extends to prominent Jewish leaders.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". The sense that Israelis considered and treated them like animals became widespread among Palestinians during the First Intifada.
At times, denigrators can allow that they are human: Yonathan Netanyahu considered them cavemen while the Likud MP Oren Hazan allows that Palestinians are human, but only in so far as they are morons. 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".
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". 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).
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. 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") 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.
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". 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." 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".
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. 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.
A study of Israeli children's drawings of an Arab type found a number of pictures which depicted Arabs as pigs. 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.
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." Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken both of Palestinians and Arabs beyond the borders as "wild beasts/predators" (hayotteref).
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.
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."
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".
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." 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." Palestinians are often ordered by Israeli police to behave as though they were dogs.
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".
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.
For the leader of the Stern gang, Avraham Stern the Arabs were "beasts of the desert," a murderous population of desert moles.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, "the most widely respected rabbinical figure among Oriental and Sephardic Jews throughout the world", known for his expressed hope that Palestinians might disappear from the face of the earth, called them "snakes". 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. 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.
In August 2000, Ehud Barak likened Palestinians to crocodiles in that, in his view, "The more you give them meat, the more they want."
Yehoshua Palmon described the Palestinian middlemen who acted as front men for Jewish land-purchase operations as leeches.
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.
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.
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." 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". 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."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."
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."
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. 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. 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", 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.
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", in a clear allusion to 13:33 KJV. 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. The statement was both criticized for likening Palestinians to insects and defended by some as having been misconstrued.
Likud member Yehiel Hazan stated in the Knesset in 2004 that Arabs are worms. 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.
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.