Are Hamas fighters "human animals"?

Dehumanization is not the way forward

Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant has said “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”

Gallant did not say that the Hamas fighters are humans who have performed evil acts, and he didn’t say that the’re just animals. He said that they are human animals. That matters. A lot.

I am a dehumanization scholar, and as such Gallant’s words are all-too-familiar to me. Throughout history, describing others as human animals has inspired terrible, often genocidal, atrocities. Take virtually any genocide, and you will find that the perpetrators characterize their victims as subhuman organisms in human form. The Armenian genocide, Holocaust, and the Rwanda genocide are just three of very many examples of this.

As I explain in my book Making Monsters, the most dangerous kind of dehumanizing speech portrays others as human and subhuman simultaneously, picturing them as bloodthirsty human animals. This strange alchemy transforms them into monsters, embodiments of evil that must be utterly destroyed, at any cost.

But at times like this, it is vital to remember that monsters are fictional. They do not exist in the real world. Dehumanizing rhetoric is fatally attractive, but it is an obstacle to effectively addressing real problems. It has the power to open the gates of hell, bringing unimaginable suffering and devastation to innocent people.

We can, and should, address the crimes of Hamas, and the crimes of Israel, intelligently, rather than defaulting to the warm glow of self-righteousness that dehumanizing rhetoric elicits. Many innocent human lives depend on it.