Dehumanization of Jews and Israelis in Palestinian Discourse

Dehumanization in this context means rhetoric that depicts Jews or Israelis as less than human, animal, diseased, parasitic, demonic, or fit for elimination. The documented record spans distinct institutions rather than a single unified body of speech: PA television and print media, statements by individual officials and clerics, Hamas texts and broadcasts, and specified curriculum materials. Sources repeatedly caution that these examples do not measure beliefs among Palestinians generally.[1][2]

Criticism of Israeli policy is not inherently antisemitic or dehumanizing. The Institute for Jewish Policy Research notes that Israel, like other nation-states, is open to criticism and that wording and context must be judged case by case.[3]

Animal comparisons applied to Jews constitute one of the most frequently documented categories of dehumanizing rhetoric in Palestinian official and affiliated media. The language often draws on Quranic passages describing certain people as transformed into apes and pigs and has appeared in broadcasts over several decades.[4][2]

On January 9, 2012, an imam delivering a Friday sermon on PA television — broadcast in the presence of the PA Minister of Religious Affairs — called Jews "apes and pigs" and recited a hadith stating that Judgment Day would not come before Muslims fought Jews.[5] A September 12, 2004 sermon attributed to Imam Dr. Muhammad Ibrahim Maadi on PA television described Jews as "the brothers of the monkeys and pigs, the Jews and the sons of Zion."[4] On the official PA TV children's program "The Best Home," on May 29, 2015, a young girl recited a poem calling Jews "barbaric monkeys," "the most evil among creations," "impure," and "filth," with the host responding "Bravo!"[6]

Senior Palestinian officials have used similar language in official broadcasts. Mahmoud al-Habbash — identified as a special adviser to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and the PA's Supreme Sharia Judge — delivered a sermon at a Ramallah mosque on September 30, 2022, broadcast on official PA television, in which he referred to Jewish visitors at the Temple Mount as "grazing herds of humanoids" and quoted the description "those whom Allah has cursed … and made of them apes and pigs."[7][6] The U.S. Department of State's 2022 International Religious Freedom Report recorded the same broadcast, noting that al-Habbash appeared to refer to Jewish visitors as "humanoids, apes, and pigs."[7] On July 7, 2023, Palestine TV broadcast remarks by al-Habbash in which he described Jews as following Satan and said they had "left the path of humanity."[8]

Hamas officials have employed comparable rhetoric. In an April 2023 sermon, Hamas official Hamad Al-Regeb called Jews "filthy animals" and "filthy, ugly animals like apes and pigs," and prayed for their "annihilation" and "paralysis."[9] Hamas official Abdallah Jabru, identified as deputy minister for religious endowments, was quoted in a February 28, 2010 Al-Aqsa TV broadcast calling Jews "strange bacteria" and "microbes," and stating "Jews are not humans, they are no people," while calling for their destruction.[2]

Disease and parasite metaphors have appeared alongside animal comparisons. The official PA newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida published a cartoon on December 28, 1999, depicting a small Jewish figure labeled "the illness of the century," and a March 22, 2000 cartoon in the same paper gave a Jewish figure animal features.[10] A 2005 PA television sermon by imam Ibrahim Mudayris described Jews as "a cancer"; in the preceding year he delivered approximately 60 percent of the official Friday sermons on PA television.[4]

Issam Sissalem, identified as chairman of the History Department at the Islamic University of Gaza and a host of PA television educational programs, compared Jews and Israelis to "a parasitic worm that eats a snail and lives in its shell" in broadcasts of the program Jerusalem through the Generations in 2001 and 2004.[11] In a separate broadcast on November 29, 2000, Sissalem called Israel "this foreign entity, implanted as a cancer in our country."[11]

On October 18, 2013, the official PA television program "Sights of Jerusalem" showed Orthodox Jews on a staircase while its narrator said "the crows pass by and caw"; as images of Israeli soldiers appeared, the narrator said "the rats are armed." The same broadcast called Israelis "foreigners" and denied Jewish historical presence in Jerusalem.[12]

Palestinian Authority school curricula have drawn sustained scrutiny from researchers, governments, and international bodies. A PA fifth-grade Islamic Education textbook (Vol. 2, 2020–2021) implies that Jews are the "enemies of Islam in all times and places."[13] An eighth-grade Arabic reading-comprehension story about the Battle of Karameh describes Palestinian terrorists who "cut the necks of enemy soldiers" and "wore explosive belts, thus turning their bodies into fire burning the Zionist tank"; Israeli forces are described leaving bodies and body parts to be eaten by wild animals and birds of prey, with an illustration depicting Israeli soldiers being shot by a Palestinian gunman.[13]

An IMPACT-se review of Palestinian Authority educational packages for Gaza — covering 78 packages across Grades 1–12, introduced for the remote-learning program in September 2024 — examined a Grade 11 Arabic lesson built around Fadwa Tuqan's poem "Martyrs of the Intifada." The poem depicts Palestinians throwing their hearts "as stones, as embers, as fire" at "the monster"; a textbook question identifies the monster as "the Occupying Enemy." IMPACT-se assessed the passage as dehumanizing Israelis and glorifying martyrdom.[14]

An IMPACT-se review of the 2025–2026 PA curriculum examined 290 textbooks and 71 teacher guides used in a curriculum taught to more than 1.3 million students across the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and UNRWA schools. The review found that textbooks described Israelis as "demonic murderers" and compared them to "serpents" and "Satan's aides," and that teacher guides in use from 2018–2019 equated "Jew" and "Zionist" and taught that Israeli Jews were "fated to disappear."[15] The U.S. State Department's 2022 report relayed an IMPACT-se finding that PA textbooks for the 2021–22 school year described Jews as "devious, treacherous, and hostile," invoked Jewish control of global events through financial power and manipulation, demonized Israel, and taught in several lessons that Jewish nationality was a "falsehood."[7]

An EU-commissioned GEI study examined 156 Palestinian textbooks and 16 teacher guides. Eighteen texts were from 2020 and the remainder from 2017–2019. Reporting on the study described attitudes toward Jews as "ambivalent – sometimes hostile" and said frequent negative attributions suggested a perpetuation of anti-Jewish prejudice. Its executive summary nevertheless said the books adhered to UNESCO standards while expressing a narrative of resistance and antagonism toward Israel.[16][17] A separate academic study summarized by the Knesset Research and Information Center found that revised Palestinian educational materials avoided ethnic or racial stereotypes about the "other," while continuing to describe Israel primarily as an "occupying," "colonialist," or "settler" force.[18]

UNRWA schools in the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — and Gaza used the PA curriculum and textbooks. IMPACT-se cited Arabic and Islamic education drill cards used in UNRWA schools as promoting a narrative that Jews were inherently treacherous and hostile to Islam.[7] UNRWA stated in response that it trained teachers in human rights, tolerance, and critical-thinking pedagogy to discuss controversial textbook material, and that there was no place for antisemitism in its programs.[7]

The Congressional Research Service recorded UNRWA's account that it reviewed PA textbooks against UN values and that, in the 2021–22 textbooks, the majority of material identified as not aligned with those values — parts of approximately four percent of all pages — concerned maps and references to the occupation. UNRWA said it used a Critical Thinking Approach to help teachers address identified concerns. The approximate four-percent figure was not presented as a measure of antisemitic content.[19]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, IMPACT-se reviewed UNRWA-produced self-study materials for Palestinian students. Maps in those materials omitted the name Israel and labeled the territory "Full Palestine," while Israel was referred to mainly as "the enemy" or "the Zionist occupation." The materials also allegedly included instructions to "defend the homeland with blood" and claimed Israel had deliberately dumped radioactive waste on Palestinian land. UNRWA said unsuitable content had entered the materials inadvertently, described its review and corrective steps, and stated zero tolerance for discrimination and incitement to hatred or violence.[20]

The 1988 Hamas Charter contains language that researchers have characterized as antisemitic. Article 7 of the charter quotes a hadith describing Muslims fighting and killing Jews, and the text refers predominantly to "Jews" rather than "Israelis" or "Zionists." The charter also contains conspiracy claims about Jews controlling media and secret organizations.[2] The Hamas Charter's framing reflects a broader pattern in the cited Hamas communications of directing hostility toward Jews as a religious category rather than limiting it to political actors or the Israeli state.

Beyond textbooks and sermons, dehumanizing imagery has appeared in official Palestinian print media and in Arabic-language political cartoons. The PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida published cartoons in 1999 and 2000 that depicted Jewish figures with animal features or labeled them as disease.[10] A Palestinian Media Watch report — based on eight years of monitoring Palestinian television and press content — described some materials as portraying Jews as inherently evil, treacherous, corrupt, deceitful, disloyal, enemies of God, and descendants of apes and pigs.[21] The same report cited a children's musical broadcast on Palestinian television in which Jews were called "treacherous," accused of carrying out the Holocaust, and said to have opened ovens to bake people and burned villages and cities.[21]

An ADL review of Arabic-language political cartoons published between October 10 and December 5, 2023, included entries from outlets across the Middle East and the United Kingdom, including the PA newspaper Al-Quds. Across the regional survey, Israel was depicted as a crocodile devouring Gaza in a Saudi outlet and as a snake wrapped around Gaza in a Jordanian outlet. Those examples illustrate the report's regional scope and should not be treated as examples from Palestinian publications specifically.[22]

The State Department's 2022 report noted that the Palestinian Broadcasting Company's formal code of conduct prohibited programming that encouraged violence on the basis of race or religion, while some official PA media channels and Fatah-affiliated social-media accounts nevertheless featured content praising or condoning attacks on Jews and referred to attackers as "martyrs."[7]

International bodies have registered concern about dehumanizing content in Palestinian official settings, while specifying the particular contexts in which it appears. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressed concern about hate speech in "certain media outlets, especially those controlled by Hamas," as well as on social media, in statements by public officials, and in school curricula and textbooks.[23] The committee said this material fueled hatred and might incite violence, particularly hate speech directed at Israelis, which at times also fueled antisemitism, and called for derogatory comments and images to be removed from curricula.[23][24]

The U.S. State Department's 2023 Human Rights Report documented antisemitic rhetoric while attributing it to particular actors. It noted that PA President Mahmoud Abbas, speaking to Fatah members in August 2023, claimed Hitler "fought [Jews] because of their social role and not their religion." The report recorded that the remarks were condemned by governments, Israeli, Palestinian, and international NGOs, and 96 Palestinian intellectuals.[1]

The Knesset Research and Information Center described longstanding criticism of PA educational materials for delegitimizing and demonizing Israel and denying Jewish historical connection to the Land of Israel and Jerusalem, while also recording the Palestinian Authority's rejection of those claims as based on biased studies and incorrect interpretations.[18] At the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination's 2019 review, Palestinian representatives denied that the textbooks contained incitement or antisemitism.[24]

The 2023 religious-freedom report also noted that the Palestinian Broadcasting Company's code of conduct formally prohibits programming encouraging violence on the basis of race, religion, political beliefs, or sex.[8]

Several reports and studies caution that documented examples do not establish the prevalence of dehumanizing views among Palestinians as a whole. The U.S. State Department's 2023 report used the qualifier "some Palestinians and Muslim religious leaders" when describing antisemitic rhetoric, and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination identified particular institutional settings rather than characterizing all Palestinian discourse as hateful.[1][23]

A major contested assessment concerns Palestinian Authority textbooks. IMPACT-se disputes an interim GEI assessment that it quoted as finding an "absence of dehumanization" and an "absence of subjective dehumanization" toward the Jewish and Israeli other in the analyzed materials, arguing that the textbooks contain antisemitic myths and demonizing depictions.[25] Other reporting on the later EU-commissioned GEI study described attitudes toward Jews as "ambivalent – sometimes hostile" and noted frequent negative attributions that suggested a perpetuation of anti-Jewish prejudice.[16][17]

Several individual incidents recorded in the bundle also illustrate the complexity of assessing official Palestinian positions. In 2016, Mahmoud Abbas retracted an allegation made before the European Parliament that Israeli rabbis had called for poisoning Palestinian wells; his office said the attributed statement was unfounded and that Abbas did not intend to harm Judaism or the Jewish people.[26] In 2011, PLO ambassador to the United States Maen Areikat made remarks about separation that were reported as suggesting Jews would be excluded from a future Palestinian state; Palestinian Authority Religious Affairs Minister Mahmoud al-Habbash rejected that interpretation, saying a Palestinian state should welcome people of all faiths.[27]

The Institute for Jewish Policy Research notes that Israel, like other nation-states, is open to criticism and that context matters when interpreting claims about Israel, with cases to be judged individually — a relevant distinction between criticism of Israeli policy and rhetoric that targets Jews or Israelis as people.[3] The 2023 religious-freedom report further observed that Palestinian and Israeli officials both used ethnoreligious language to deny the other community's historical self-identity, and that religion and ethnicity were often closely linked, making classification difficult.[8]