Dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli discourse

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. The Israeli rhetoric classifies Palestinians as non-human species, such as "animals," "vermin," or "insects," a practice which scholars indicate can serve to enable violence and 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 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.