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A Human Pig: Yair Netanyahu, son of the monster worse than his dad.
Studies consistently show that Jewish Israelis view Palestinians as less than human. This deep-seated racism is rooted in the Zionist colonial project and helps explain the broad support for the Gaza genocide.
In the midst of the fighting in the Gaza Strip, two political psychologists from elite American universities conducted a survey among 521 Israelis. Respondents were presented with a hypothetical scenario: an injured Israeli soldier lies in an area controlled by Palestinian forces. To rescue him, interviewees were told, it would be necessary to shell a Palestinian civilian neighborhood. How many Palestinian civilians would be justified to kill for this purpose? The naïve researchers proposed a scale between 0 and 1,000, hoping to observe a wide range of responses. In practice, about half of the respondents selected the maximum number—1,000. Although the sample was not designed to be representative, the political leanings of respondents skewed only slightly more to the right than those reported in a survey conducted three months later by the Israel Democracy Institute. Moreover, even among those who self-identified as left-wing or left-leaning, about a quarter chose the maximum number.
Some might believe something like ‘after the shock of Hamas’s cruelty on October 7, Israelis have lost the capacity for empathy toward Palestinians.’ Were it not for that massacre, they might say, the numbers would have been different. But Emile Bruneau and Nour Kteily, two political psychologists, conducted this survey in early August 2014. By chance, it was carried out the same week that Israel massacred hundreds of Palestinian civilians in Rafah (an incident known as “Black Friday”), in an incident that brought the survey’s scenario to life. The Israeli army is the people’s army and behaved in line with public opinion. The Chief Military Prosecutor refrained from launching a criminal investigation. In any case, the sequence of events clearly shows that October 7 is not the reason for the devaluation of Palestinian life in the eyes of Israelis.
Others might say—that in a situation of violent, prolonged conflict, it is only natural for hatred to develop between the warring sides and for the enemy’s life to lose value. After all, the principle that “Charity begins at home” is a common human sentiment. This claim is valid but insufficient to explain the extreme results.
Just a few weeks after that survey, the researchers conducted another one, this time among 354 Palestinians from the West Bank, representing a range of political views. The Palestinian participants were presented with a scenario in which they witness two cars plunging into a ravine—one carrying four Israeli settler children, and the other carrying a Palestinian man. They only have time to stop one of the cars. The researchers asked: to what extent is it morally right to save the Israeli children at the expense of the Palestinian? (on a scale of 0 to 100). About half of the respondents said, with more than 50% certainty, that saving the Israeli children would be the right thing to do. One in six respondents was 100% certain this was the morally correct choice. It is important to note that this survey was conducted shortly after what was then the deadliest assault on Gaza, which killed more than 550 Palestinian children—15 times more than the number of Israeli children killed on October 7. In other words, at least in 2014, the bloody conflict and high death toll did not sweep the entire Palestinian public into a vengeful and merciless mindset.
Furthermore, both groups were shown what is known as the “Ascent of Man” scale. On the right side appears a modern human, while the left side shows a Neanderthal-like figure walking on all fours. Respondents were asked to rate both themselves and members of the rival nationality on a scale from 0 (ape-like human) to 100 (fully evolved human). The gap between self-rating and rating of the other is regarded by political psychologists as a measure of dehumanization. The results showed that Israeli dehumanization of Palestinians was six points higher than the reverse. In fact, the dehumanization of Palestinians by Israelis was the highest measured using this tool up to that point (similar studies had been previously conducted in Hungary, the United States, and England).
The view of Palestinians as ape-like creatures has echoed chillingly over the past two years. “Animals in human form [hayot adam in Hebrew]!! Erase Gaza from the face of the earth!!” “Animals in human form, from baby to old man—wipe out all of Gaza.” Quotes like these appeared in countless variations on social media in the days after October 7, posted by normative Israelis. Many echoed the statement of the then-Defense Minister, who expressed a similar idea. Demanding the annihilation of millions requires distancing the victims from the human family, thereby overriding social norms that regard the killing of civilians and especially children as immoral.
Jews are not inherently more or less cruel than members of other groups. But in Israel, Jews live in a colonial political context that demands ever-increasing dehumanization and a continual depreciation of Palestinian life. The need to justify the ongoing dispossession since 1948, the regime of Jewish supremacy, and the deadly repression of the resistance that followed—all require Israelis to diminish the humanity of Palestinians. For this purpose, a unique vocabulary was developed in contemporary Hebrew: the “mehabel” (loosely translated as “terrorist,” but used almost exclusively for Palestinians) – a person without history and without personality, whose “hisul” (elimination) is permitted and even desirable, and anyone who enters the “shithei hashmada” (“extermination zones”) will be “neutralized”.
Therefore, since the founding of the state, it has been rare for a Jewish Israeli to be properly punished for killing an Arab. Dehumanization enabled the killing of thousands of Palestinians who tried to return to their lands in the early years of the state, without trial or process. All those convicted for the Kafr Qasim massacre in 1956 were home within less than three years and some of them were rewarded with public sector jobs. Those responsible for the massacres in Khan Younis and Rafah in the following weeks were never tried, nor were those who carried out the massacre in Qibya a few years earlier. A direct line runs from these massacres to the pardon of members of the Jewish Underground in the 1980s, to the absurdly light sentence of the soldier Elor Azaria who murdered and injured a Palestinian man in front of the cameras in 2016, and to the recent de facto license to kill granted to settlers in the West Bank. Legal leniency has created a normative world in which Palestinian lives are forfeit.
The current days of horror, with images of starving children in the Gaza ghetto, and the late awakening of even the remnants of the Zionist left to name the crime—genocide—are rooted in decades of dehumanization and blood-permission that brought us to this point.
How would the responses have been distributed if the 2014 study had offered a higher ceiling than 1,000 Palestinian casualties? Another zero? Another two? Or perhaps a well-known seven-digit number? The widespread indifference to the genocide Israel is now committing offers us a clue.
An earlier version of this article was published in Hebrew by Siha Mekomit.
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