Animal stereotypes of Palestinians in Israeli discourse

Add links
Page extended-protected
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article surveys the terms which are encountered in Israeli narratives that zoomorphically classify Palestinians[1] as members of different kinds of sub-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. Palestinians have at times spoken of Jews as pigs, dogs, and vampires, while prominent Israelis have characterised Palestinians as savage animals and or repugnant critters,[c] and at least once, referring to protesting Gazans, as mere ammunition weaponized by their "cannibal" leaders.[d][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][e]

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][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, 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.[h] 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]

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 Qu'ranic 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]

Animal similes by species

"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][l] At times, denigrators can allow that they are human: Yonathan Netanyahu considered them cavemen[m] while the Likud MP Oren Hazan allows that Palestinians are human, but only in so far as they are morons.[n]

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.[o] 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")[p] 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.[q]

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".[r]

Beasts

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."[s] Binjamin Netanyahu has spoken both of Palestinians and Arabs beyond the borders as "wild beasts/predators" (hayotteref).[33]

Rats

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]

Leeches

Yehoshua Palmon described the Palestinian middlemen who acted as front men for Jewish land-purchase operations as leeches.[36]

Moles

For the leader of the Stern gang, Avraham Stern the Arabs were "beasts of the desert," a murderous population of desert moles.[37][38][t]

Lice

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.[u][39][40][v]

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."[29][41]

Mosquitoes

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.[w]

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."[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."[x]

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."[47]

Snakes

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][y] 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][z] 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.[aa]

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."[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."[52] Palestinians are often ordered by Israeli police to behave as though they were dogs.[53][54][ab]

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 that they would be crushed like "grasshoppers" (hagavim),[ac] 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.[55] The statement[ad] was both criticized for likening Palestinians to insects[ae] and defended by some as having been misconstrued.[56][55][af]

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.[57]

Worms

Likud member Yehiel Hazan stated in the Knesset in 2004 that Arabs are worms.[ag] 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.[58]

Pigs

A study of Israeli children's drawings of an Arab type found a number of pictures which depicted Arabs as pigs.[59] 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.[60]

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.[ah]
  • 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.[61]
  • According to Geoffrey Aronson, an anonymous but high-ranking officer in the IDF described the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip as "local bacteria"[62][ai] Negotiations themselves with Palestinians would only, according to religious Zionist rabbi and settler Moshe Levinger spread the "virus of peace".[65]
  • In May 2001, the day after the bodies of two Israeli settler children from Tekoa[2] were found in a cave, where they had been murdered, the former President of Israel Moshe Katsav told a group of mitzvah boys that Palestinians "don't belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy."[66]
  • 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".[67][68][41][69]
  • Rabbi Yaacov Perrin claimed that even one million Palestinian Arabs are "not worth a Jewish fingernail".[70][71][72]

Notes

  1. ^ "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)
  2. ^ "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)
  3. ^ "In the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in the Palestine-Israel situation, the problem of 'symbolization' through differentiation is ubiquitous; it is expressed at all levels; in the different license plates issued to Jewish and non-Jewish vehicles in the Occupied Territories; in the chain of checkpoints and road blocks that control, restrict, and harass only non-Jewish traffic; in the different treatment accorded to the Palestinians and to the Israelis who live in the Occupied Territories; in the democratic laws that apply only to Jewish settlers, and the draconian laws and restrictions that are imposed only upon the Palestinians who live in neighbouring villages; in the financial support available to the Jews for illegally erected buildings, purchasing homes in new, exclusive settlements and in the seizure of Palestinian land and property and in the prompt bulldozing of their buildings erected without proper permits; in the judicial laxity shown towards Jewish settlers' violence and the violent intolerance of Palestinian protests, even by children and women; in the severe water rationing of Palestinians, in comparison with the free flow of water to the settlers; and certainly, in the Jews' right to carry and use arms, while the Palestinians are incarcerated for the same...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)
  4. ^ 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."[4] 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".[5]
  5. ^ 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)
  6. ^ 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."[12] 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."[13][14]
  7. ^ "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).
  8. ^ "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".[15][16][17] Walt Rostow likened the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 to a "turkey shoot".[18] Seib, alluding to Gideon Levy's reportage on the Gaza wars, writes of the "sitting duck nature of the Gaza Strip and its inhabitants".[19]
  9. ^ 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).
  10. ^ "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)
  11. ^ "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)
  12. ^ "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)
  13. ^ "a rabble of cave dwellers" (Shatz 2018)
  14. ^ 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).
  15. ^ "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)
  16. ^ 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)
  17. ^ "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)
  18. ^ "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)
  19. ^ "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?'[30] 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.[31] 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'."[32]
  20. ^ "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)
  21. ^ "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)
  22. ^ 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).
  23. ^ "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)
  24. ^ "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)
  25. ^ 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)
  26. ^ "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)
  27. ^ In 2021, David M. Weinberg of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security wrote in the Jerusalem Post that "If you fail to do so, weeds grow wild and snakes begin to slither around in the brush...Just like mowing your front lawn, this is constant, hard work." (Taylor 2021)
  28. ^ "'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).
  29. ^ 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)
  30. ^ "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)
  31. ^ 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).
  32. ^ "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)
  33. ^ "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)
  34. ^ "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)
  35. ^ The then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2008 likewise called Israel "filthy bacteria".[63] Such language, used against Jews, evokes the Nazi slogans that verbally accompanied the Holocaust.[64]

Citations

  1. ^ Peteet 2005, p. 167.
  2. ^ a b Goldberg 2004.
  3. ^ Peteet 2005, p. 168.
  4. ^ Rapoport 2008.
  5. ^ Winer 2018.
  6. ^ Ben Zikri & Kubovic 2018.
  7. ^ Aaron 2019, pp. 59, 64.
  8. ^ a b Gerteiny 2007, p. 93.
  9. ^ Chomsky & Pappé 2015.
  10. ^ Zalloua 2017, p. 54.
  11. ^ Sharon 2012.
  12. ^ Morris & Shavit 2004.
  13. ^ Oren 2019, pp. 89–118, 89–90.
  14. ^ Salaime 2016.
  15. ^ Finkelstein 2021, p. 74.
  16. ^ Zonszein 2017.
  17. ^ Chomsky 2014.
  18. ^ Finkelstein 2021, p. 16, n.39.
  19. ^ Seib 2016, p. 125.
  20. ^ Hass 2014, p. 9.
  21. ^ Bregman 2002, p. 86.
  22. ^ Chomsky 1999, p. 512.
  23. ^ Beinart 2013.
  24. ^ Dasgupta 2006.
  25. ^ Bar-Tal & Teichman 2005, p. 191.
  26. ^ Bar-Tal & Teichman 2005, p. 359.
  27. ^ Nusseibeh 2009, p. 236.
  28. ^ Pileggi 2015.
  29. ^ a b MEE 2016.
  30. ^ Kapeliouk 1982, p. 12.
  31. ^ Shilon 2012, p. 188.
  32. ^ Normand 2016, p. 209.
  33. ^ Beaumont 2016.
  34. ^ Hoffman 2015.
  35. ^ Kessler 2023, p. 151.
  36. ^ Cohen 2008b, p. 195.
  37. ^ Masalha 1992, p. 30.
  38. ^ a b Jawad 2007, p. 79.
  39. ^ Bregman 2002, p. 233.
  40. ^ Cordesman & Moravitz 2005, p. 157.
  41. ^ a b c Fisk 2006, p. 624.
  42. ^ Chomsky 1999, p. 130.
  43. ^ Joffe 2004.
  44. ^ Nusseibeh 2009, p. 235.
  45. ^ Nusseibeh 2009, p. 219.
  46. ^ CJPME 2023.
  47. ^ MEE 2023.
  48. ^ Horowitz 2006, p. 8.
  49. ^ Haaretz 2010.
  50. ^ Yip 2022, p. 253.
  51. ^ Tharoor 2015.
  52. ^ Chomsky 1999, pp. 561f..
  53. ^ Shalhub-Kifurkiyan 2009, p. 103.
  54. ^ Loewenstein 2009, p. 376,n.32.
  55. ^ a b Wieseltier 1988.
  56. ^ Krauthammer 1988.
  57. ^ Chomsky 1999, pp. 276–277.
  58. ^ Affitto 2007, p. 51.
  59. ^ Bar-Tal & Teichman 2005, p. 369.
  60. ^ Masalha 2000, p. 97.
  61. ^ Mearsheimer & Walt 2008, p. 382 n.46.
  62. ^ Aronson 1987, p. 295.
  63. ^ Cohen 2008a.
  64. ^ CQ 2010, p. 194.
  65. ^ Viorst 1987, p. 223.
  66. ^ Nusseibeh 2009, pp. 448–449.
  67. ^ Mearsheimer & Walt 2008, p. 89.
  68. ^ Cohen 2015.
  69. ^ Kimmerling 2003, p. 165.
  70. ^ Kraft 1994.
  71. ^ Brownfeld 1999, pp. 84–89.
  72. ^ Qureshi & Sells 2003, p. 129.

Sources

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Animal_stereotypes_of_Palestinians_in_Israeli_discourse&oldid=1221756356"