Metaphors They Kill by: Dehumanization of Palestinians by Israeli Officials and Sympathizers

Within the cognitive paradigm, metaphors are said to play a key role “not just in language but in thought and action” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: p. 3). As a form of action, genocide in recent human history has been incited by metaphor, with Holocaust Jews as “parasites” (Musolff 2010), Iraqis as “rapists” (Lakoff 1991), Rwandan Tutsis as “cockroaches” (Hintjens 1999; Mowarin 2014), Bosnians as “Islamic fundamentalists” (Karčić 2022), etc. The aim of the present study is to investigate the ongoing genocide committed by Israel against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by bringing political ideology to bear on cognition both in thought and action (Gibbs 2017). In particular, it will be shown that the conceptual metaphor politics is religion (Charteris-Black 2004) in the Christian Zionists’ in-group’s socio-cultural cognition, acts in tandem with and motivates the “animalized dehumanization” (Sevillano and Fiske 2023) of Palestinians. Such an ideology, which is tainted by psychological essentialism (Leyens et al. 2001) of the Jews supremacy, is instrumentalizing the deliberate, superordinate conceptual metaphor (Steen 2023) humans are animals and other basic-level metaphors such as Palestinians are rats, ants and cockroaches, therefore stripping the Palestinian outgroup of their humanity (Leyens et al. 2000; Leyens et al. 2003; Haslam 23.2.2024, 2006; Haslam, Loughnan and Sun 2011; Harris and Fiske 2011) in order to legitimize the Palestinian genocide. Animalized dehumanization, which is a blue print for genocide, will be accounted for using Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980, 1999) Conceptual Theory of Metaphor together with Lakoff and Turner’s (1989) Great Chain of Being Metaphor.