How racism deeply ingrained in Zionist ideology enabled genocidal war on Gaza

By Humaira Ahad

"Harbu Darbu," a song celebrating genocide, topped the popularity charts in the occupied Palestinian territories following the launch of the genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023.

The racist song, titled "Raining Hell on Gaza," compared Palestinians to rats. It became the unofficial anthem for Israel’s military and even called for the death of pro-Palestinian celebrities worldwide. 

Videos of Israeli settlers dancing and singing to the song went viral, further amplifying its hateful message. However, the incitement was not limited to the song alone. It spread on social media platforms as Israeli cartoonists depicted Palestinians as cockroaches and rats to be exterminated.

According to polls released in November 2023, more than half of the Israeli settler population believed their army was using too little firepower in Gaza, despite reports of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians being killed in indiscriminate bombings.

The polling also revealed overwhelming support for the project of ethnically cleansing the besieged coastal territory of its indigenous Palestinian population.

Palestinians have been victims of Israel’s institutionalized racism for decades. The regime, founded on Zionist ideology, is deeply rooted in the white supremacist movement of the West.

On November 10, 1975, the United Nations formally recognized Zionism as a racist movement. UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 called for a ban on Zionism, a move supported by the majority of the international community.

"Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination," stated UN Resolution 3379.

The United States played a primary role in rejecting the resolution, and over the years, Zionism – an insidious ideology – has manipulated the truth to spread disinformation about historical facts, including the existence of Palestine, the nature of Palestinian Arab culture and identity, the occupation of Palestine, the nature of Israeli occupation, and the identity of Zionist culture, among many other issues.

Racism ingrained in Zionism

Since October 2023, the world has witnessed a sharp rise in racism and hatred against Palestinians. The biased coverage of the US-Israel genocidal war on Gaza by Western media, the censorship of pro-Palestine voices on social media platforms, and calls for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza all exemplify the racism perpetuated and sustained by Western imperialism.

Today, Western imperialism manifests in the form of Israeli imperialism, rooted in Zionist ideology, which is designed to eliminate the indigenous Palestinian population and replace it with the “white population” of the imperial conqueror.

The founding father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, recognized that Zionism was an unequivocally racist movement. In 1902, Herzl wrote a letter to Cecil Rhodes, a mining magnate and white supremacist British colonialist responsible for the deaths of thousands of Africans, explicitly framing Zionism as a colonial endeavor.

“The idea of Zionism, which is a colonial idea,” Herzl wrote, “doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor, not Englishmen but Jews… How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial. I want you to… put the stamp of your authority on the Zionist plan.”

As a white supremacist movement, Zionism has opportunistically and selectively syncretized Judaism to obscure and justify its settler-colonialist and genocidal activities.

Arthur Ruppin, considered the "father of Israeli sociology," stated that “Zionism required weeding out inferior Semitic racial elements among Eastern European Jews (Ostjuden) and selecting only those whose biology was best adapted to the soil and climate of Palestine, where, through productive agriculture and militarization, they would vindicate their racial affinity with biblical Hebrews.”

In 1934, Ruppin successfully blocked the implementation of a proposal by Polish Zionist Yaakov Faitlovitch to bring Ethiopian Jews to Palestine, as he believed they were "niggers" who had been forcibly converted to Judaism in 2600 BCE.

Abba Eban, former deputy prime minister of Israel, openly stated that Israel’s goal was not integration. “Quite the contrary, integration is rather something to be avoided.” In a 1957 book, he expressed his fears of “brother Jews” arriving from “Oriental” countries, warning that their presence might “force Israel to equalize its cultural level with that of the neighboring world.”

According to Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa, “White supremacy is dominant within Israeli society, which privileges white-skinned Ashkenazi Jews at the expense of dark-skinned African Jews, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, as well as African refugees. African/Black Jewish communities are often denied recognition by Israeli authorities, with some members even deported.”

Zionism: An unapologetic apartheid movement

The connection between Zionism and Apartheid is evident in their shared origins.

In Zionism, South Africa, and Apartheid: The Paradoxical Triangle, Richard P. Stevens highlights that the same group of politicians responsible for the successful adoption of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which designated Palestine as a site for Jewish settlement, were also central to the passage of the South African Act of Union in 1909, which unified British colonies in Africa under a racially discriminatory system.

Furthering Israel’s apartheid policies, prominent Israeli historian Benny Morris lamented that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 had not been fully completed.

“If [David Ben-Gurion] was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job,” Morris stated in a 2004 interview with Haaretz.

“Something like a cage has to be built for them [the Palestinians]. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal out there that has to be locked up in one way or another.”  

In 2010, Israeli Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur authored Torat HaMelekh (The King’s Torah), a rabbinical manual that outlined the “acceptable” murder of Gentile babies, children, and adults, claiming that the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” applies only to Jews.

The book was widely distributed throughout the occupied territories, with its publication and dissemination funded by the Israeli regime and US tax-exempt charities.

In 2016, Israel’s chief Sephardic Rabbi, Yitzhak Yosef, publicly declared that non-Jews should not be permitted to live in the occupied territories except as servants to Jews.

In March 2018, Yosef compared Black people to monkeys and later defended his remarks by citing the Jewish holy book, the Talmud.

In April 2018, a translation of Rabbi Ophir Wallas’ lecture revealed that he was teaching Israeli regime soldiers that they were religiously permitted to commit genocide against Palestinians.

“Zionism is a racist and settler-colonialist movement, which opportunistically co-opts aspects of Judaism in an attempt to justify its criminal practices of apartheid and genocide against indigenous Palestinians,” writes Abulhawa.

The trend of dehumanizing Palestinians

Experts believe that the decades-long racism propagated by the Israeli regime against Palestinians enabled the recent genocidal war on Gaza, which killed nearly 49,000 as per official records, while rendering nearly 2 million homeless.

Since the illegal occupation of Palestine began in 1948, there has been a continuous effort to dehumanize Palestinians through racist propaganda disseminated across various platforms.

Israeli school textbooks erase Palestinians from history or depict them as uncultured, violent individuals. The curriculum categorizes Palestinians as both a problem and a threat to the Zionist occupation.

“This [racism] has a lot to do with how Israelis are educated and how fear is a huge part of our identity. And there’s a lot of political interest in keeping it that way. You can’t maintain such a high level of militarization in a society without fear,” Jewish activist Sahar Vardi said in an interview with a media outlet.

“You can’t stand at a checkpoint and stop people from going where they need to go without either going crazy or becoming racist... The next time you’re in a situation where you have to push them [Palestinians], it’ll be easy enough for you to push them. And then, when you have to shoot them, it’ll be easy enough for you to shoot them.”

Israeli textbooks deliberately omit information about Palestinian land confiscation and the brutality of the occupation. The syllabus taught in Israeli schools portrays Palestinians living on their native land as Arab settlers who have built “illegal settlements.”

They are depicted as people suffering due to their “own doing” or their so-called “beastly nature.”

Experts argue that this culture of dehumanization originates in the military and later permeates society. Today, racism has become a normalized and accepted part of Zionist discourse.

This racist rhetoric, designed to dehumanize Palestinians, serves to neutralize public outrage over Israel’s genocidal war crimes.

Social psychological research has shown that dehumanized populations elicit reduced activation in brain regions associated with empathy and social cognition.

“A subtler form of dehumanization is infrahumanization, which involves denying the dehumanized group the capacity for complex emotions and motivations, instead assigning them emotions typically associated with animals. This manifests in several ways, including minimizing and delegitimizing Palestinians’ grief and suffering,” wrote behavioral psychologist Afreen Zehra in The Electronic Intifada.

According to renowned social psychologist J.P. Leyens, “Infrahumanization sometimes involves animalizing, sometimes ‘objectifying,’ but it also involves emphasizing essential differences in culture, religion, or physical appearance.”

The apartheid regime employs this technique to highlight differences, reinforcing the idea that Israelis are “more human” than Palestinians.

Reinforcing this narrative, Israel’s far-right former minister Itamar Ben Gvir declared in August 2023 that his rights were “more important” than those of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and that further measures were necessary to ensure the security of settlers.

Genocidal rhetoric since Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza

Since October 2023, when Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza, dehumanizing and demonizing rhetoric against Palestinians has sharply increased. Israeli politicians and settlers in the occupied territories have used incendiary speech to justify violence against Palestinians.

“The language of systemic dehumanization is evident here,” lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi stated at the International Court of Justice in The Hague in January 2024, as South Africa presented its lawsuit against Israel for genocide in the Gaza Strip.

“Genocidal utterances are therefore not out on the fringes. They are embodied in state policy,” Ngcukaitobi added.

Immediately after the assault on Gaza began, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked apocalyptic rhetoric, using biblical references to justify the war.

“You must remember what Amalek has done to you,” he said.

“Amalek” refers to an ancient nation that, according to biblical accounts, launched a surprise attack on the Jewish people. The biblical commandment regarding Amalek speaks of annihilating them entirely, killing every man, woman, child, and even livestock.

“It’s about total destruction,” explained Motti Inbari, a professor of religion at the University of North Carolina.

Advancing the racist narrative that Palestinians are lesser humans than Israelis, Netanyahu framed the war as “a battle between the children of light and the children of darkness.”

Israeli President Isaac Herzog further legitimized violence against civilians, stating, “Civilians in Gaza are absolutely legitimate targets. It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” he said, justifying the relentless bombing of the coastal strip.

Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, posted on X, declaring a common goal among Israelis: “Burn Gaza now, nothing less.”

Israeli Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, insisting that “there are no uninvolved civilians” in the territory.

Former Israeli minister Ayelet Shaked openly made genocidal and dehumanizing threats against Palestinians, referring to them as “little snakes.”

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich went so far as to claim that the deaths of two million Palestinians in Gaza from starvation might be “justified and moral.”

Former minister Itamar Ben Gvir called for the execution of Palestinian prisoners to ease overcrowding in Israeli jails.

Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, advocated for the complete destruction of Gaza, down to “every school, every mosque.”

Knesset member Moshe Saada echoed this sentiment, stating that “all the Gazans need to be destroyed.”

Meanwhile, Knesset member Tally Gotliv justified the use of hunger and thirst as weapons of war, arguing that starvation could be used to “recruit collaborators” in Gaza.

She declared that those who refuse to leave their homes “deserve death.”

Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, who heads an indoctrination school in occupied Jaffa, encouraged the killing of Palestinians in a video that was widely circulated on social media.

“In our mitzvah (holy) war, in our situation in Gaza, according to what the law says, ‘Not every soul shall live,’ and the logic of this is very clear: if you do not kill them, they will kill you,” the Rabbi said.

Daniella Weiss, director of the Israeli settler organization, Nachala said that, “Arabs will not stay” in Gaza and will be replaced by Jews. Normal people don't want to live in hell.”

When asked, this sounds like a plan for ethnic cleansing.” Weiss replied, “You can call it ethnic cleansing, you can call it refugees, whatever you want... apartheid... you choose your definition...”

As a proof of hate and racism ingrained in the very soul of Israel, the shocking video shows Israeli children loading ammunition used to kill Palestinians.

An Israeli settler interviewed on Sky News called for the mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

In a TV show on Channel 12, an Israeli journalist said that “all people in Gaza deserve death”

David Azoulai, head of a local council in the occupied territories, proposed sending all Gazans to refugee camps in Lebanon and flattening the whole Strip so it becomes an empty museum like Auschwitz.

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