Some Israeli politicians, media figures, military officials, and other public voices have used zoomorphic and otherwise subhuman rhetoric to describe Palestinians. This kind of dehumanization is commonplace on both sides of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.: "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." The Israeli rhetoric classifies Palestinians as non-human species, such as "animals," "vermin," or "insects"
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 2012 Gaza War 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 ongoing Gaza 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 Palestinians in Gaza, who have variously been depicted as "ants", "fish" or "sitting ducks". IDF 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), as has Ain el-Hilweh, the Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon.
Palestinians as generic "animals" "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, Robin Maxwell-Hyslop revealed in talks with the former Israeli ambassador to Burma David Hacohen that 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 insofar as they are morons. Following the October 7th attacks, Dan Gillerman, former 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, wife of 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".
At the beginning of the Gaza war, then Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Israel would blockade Gaza, stating: "Everything is closed... We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly." This statement has been cited in accusations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, including in South Africa's genocide case against Israel.
The Israeli-American historian of the Holocaust Omer Bartov, who did his PhD on the indoctrination of German soldiers and their subsequent actions on the Eastern front, has argued that young Israeli soldiers who have fought inside the Gaza Strip in the ongoing Gaza 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.
In a 2004 interview with the Israeli journalist Ari Shavit, the Israeli historian Benny Morris justified the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight: "I don't think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands", as well as stating: "Something like a cage has to be built for them [Palestinians]. 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."
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. 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.
Beasts Menachem Begin addressed the Kneset in 1982, justifying the Israeli invasion of Lebanon: "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." 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. Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken both of Palestinians and Arabs beyond the borders as "predators" (hayot teref).
Vampires 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.
Rats During the Gaza 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".
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." 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-Gaza 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".
Monkeys According to Dov Yermiya, during the 1982 Lebanon War, Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners were forced to sit with their heads between their legs, beaten if they moved, while guards shouted at them "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 of the war.
Moles Avraham Stern, leader of the Zionist paramilitary Lehi, said that Arabs were "not a nation but a mole that grew in the wilderness of the eternal desert."
Palestinians as reptilian species Snakes 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.
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."
Palestinians as insects and other animals Leeches