A displaced Palestinian boy sleeps as Gazans flee northern Gaza due to an Israeli military operation, in the central Gaza Strip Friday. Credit: Mahmoud Issa/REUTERS

“We’re fighting human beasts, and we’ll act accordingly,” former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared two days after the Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023. Widely quoted in the local and international media, Gallant likened the enemy to a hybrid creature – part human, part animal – vowing that the erupting campaign would be waged “accordingly.” But how, exactly, does one act “accordingly?” And what creatures, exactly, are we talking about?

A possible answer appeared in a post on X by Likud lawmaker Tally Gotliv, in May 2024: “Remember lice? Lice eggs? Then lice again, then eggs again? That’s Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad! They must be dealt with, exterminated. With all kinds of treatments. Like those used for lice.”

It seems that we are actually talking about vermin here. Increasingly, since October 7, the media has describes Hamas terrorists, and Gazans in general, as “swarms” – a term connoting large groups of insects. The Israel Defense Forces is tasked with “purifying” Palestinian towns – language that evokes cleansing bodily impurity.

The metaphors do not stop there: “Wasps’ nest,” “head of the serpent” (which must be crushed) and “octopus tentacles” – references to creatures traditionally regarded as shratzim (vermin), according to halakha, traditional Jewish law – recall both biblical iconography and the infamous caricatures of Jewish “human beasts” disseminated in Central and Eastern Europe in the early 20^th century.

An investigation by The New York Times found that the IDF even classified certain Palestinian detainees as “wasps” or “mosquitoes,” based on their operational or intelligence roles, and devised a so-called “mosquito protocol” that called for the use of Palestinians as “human” shields.

This dehumanizing language is not confined to generals and politicians; it appears among entertainers and media figures as well. Ahead of the most recent Holocaust Remembrance Day, comedian Gil Kopatz wrote on social media: “If you feed sharks, they’ll eventually eat you; if you feed Gazans, they’ll eventually eat you. I support exterminating sharks and eradicating Gazans. It’s not genocide, it’s pesticide.”

In a television interview, actress Tzufit Grant described Gazans as “disgusting, losers, foul-smelling, wearing flip-flops, repulsive – there’s nothing human about them… If you raise someone like vermin, that’s what they become.”

This terminology is not the exclusive domain of the right. Even on the pages of this newspaper, terrorists have been described as “swarming,” and Palestinian towns as in need of “purification.” For example, in an opinion piece titled “Israelis Have No Kafka to Chronicle the Hostages’ Harrowing Ordeal,” published in Haaretz last year, literature scholar Nitza Ben-Dov wrote, “One morning, on October 7, 2023, dozens of men, women and children woke in their familiar rooms, in their soft beds… they were not transformed into giant vermin, but instead were surrounded and dragged away by such.”

“Beetle and Spider” by Mori Shunkei (c. 1880). Since Oct. 7, the media has describes Hamas terrorists, and Gazans, as “swarms” – a term connoting large groups of insects. Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Comparisons of human beings to vermin are not new and recur in various historical contexts. Such rhetoric typically emerges during periods of conflict involving ethnic cleansing and genocide (pest control). Its Jewish roots are deep, linked to the laws of impurity and purity (tum’ah and taharah, respectively), as well as to modern Jewish history and the mass murder of Jews.

In its Hebrew-language manifestation, such comparisons are not limited to non-Jewish enemies but also encompass the “enemy within”: The ultra-Orthodox community is often described as a black swarm of blood-sucking parasites, uncontrollably multiplying and polluting society from within. This terminology is also not new: As early as the 1980s, then-IDF Chief of Staff Rafael (Raful) Eitan called the Palestinians “drugged cockroaches in a bottle,” for which he was widely condemned.

Four decades later, author David Grossman responded to Gallant’s crude remarks in an article in Haaretz in October 2023, saying: “I don’t know whether to call Hamas members ’human beasts,’ but without question they lack humanity.” But are the violence and heinous crimes committed by those people on that day truly beyond human comprehension? Are mass slaughter, rape and looting, an ideology steeped in cruelty and joy in others’ suffering – are these really alien to human nature?

In the same interview in which she called Gazans “vermin,” Grant confessed to an attitude that has since become widespread in Israeli society: On October 7, she said, “some humane part of my brain, the sweeping compassion that ’we are all human beings,’” was itself murdered. Her concept of compassion for other creatures, which she has expressed by declaring herself a vegan several years ago, is based on the “humanity” we share with other people. But it seems the boundaries of that “humanity” do not extend to all humans – there’s always a way of justifying or excluding someone.

The illusion that equates the humane with the compassionate, reflected in our everyday language in times of peace (or cease-fire) and even more so in times of war, stems from what we believe to be a biological gap between us and other creatures – from which we want to differentiate ourselves – even if our genetic foundations may be almost completely identical. Another explanation for Gallant’s remarks could be: If our enemies are not human, we must behave toward them accordingly, in other words, to dispense with “our humanity.” That is the nature of dehumanization: It is always two-sided, a double-edged sword that first and foremost denies the “humanity” of those who project its absence onto the “other.”

Compared to beetles and butterflies – studied mainly for their brilliant coloring and varied shapes – research on cockroaches, especially common in our midst, has been driven primarily by disgust. Much of it has focused on developing more effective ways to exterminate them. But, as an article recently published by Netta Ahituv in the Hebrew edition of Haaretz noted, scientists who devote themselves to studying how best to kill cockroaches often become their greatest admirers. They become fascinated by their subjects’ resilience, sensitivity and complexity.

Indeed, cockroaches have extraordinary sensory abilities. Their six legs are equipped with tiny bristles that detect the minutest changes in their surroundings. This mechanism enables them to react and move with astonishing speed. Their hearing mechanisms are located on their knees and are so sensitive that they can pick up even the faintest tremors. Their nervous system has been described by scientists as “beautiful.” Their ability to survive and adapt is particularly impressive and especially evident in the domestic breeds that have learned to thrive alongside humans.

According to entomologist Howard Ensign Evans, despite the widespread reputation of cockroaches as being dirty and diseased, they’re quite clean. The bad reputation they get is due to the human environments they infest: crevices where filth left by humans accumulates and sticks to their bodies, which they then transport with its accompanying diseases from place to place. Thus the image of roaches as dirty does not stem from their habits per se, but from their impressive ability to thrive in the human habitat. The revulsion they evoke in us stems from our own filth and the bacteria they carry on their bodies.

A cockroach in a lab at Ben-Gurion University, a favorite among the researchers. Credit: Ilan Assayag

Our recoil from them, which seems instinctive and healthy, reflects our self-rejection – unwillingness to acknowledge the waste we as humans shed from our bodies and produce in our factories. In their silent, frightened presence, cockroaches remind us of the shadowy side of our proud civilization: the filth it spreads and the violence it uses to elevate and establish itself, its independence and its power.

But cockroaches were here long before us. They are one of the oldest species – living, breathing fossils that honor us with their silent, ancient presence. We can learn from them about adaptation and sensitivity, about clinging stubbornly to life; about existing inside a rejected, vulnerable, disgusting body; about love and its absence; about surviving where one is unwanted; about integrating into a place and accepting the presence of others; about the cracks in the walls of the magnificent human structure we’ve built, the cracks in the walls that protect it. Instead of optimizing ways to rid ourselves of their presence, we should accept that they are here to stay.

We can choose to respect the existence, their right to live. If we dare to challenge the barrier of disgust that separates us from them, we may discover that our boundaries are more flexible and fragile than we thought. Through that open door, our repressed notions creeping toward us may teach us to recognize the accumulated filth, arrogance, pain, vulnerability and violence rife within us.

To find inspiration for such a way of thinking, one need not look far. Even in Jewish culture, where such creatures are considered particularly impure, it can still be found. In “Sha’ar Hamitzvot” (Gate of Commandments), Rabbi Hayyim Vital describes the attitude of his teacher, Ha’ari (Rabbi Isaac Luria, the 16^th-century kabbalist regarded as the father of modern Jewish mysticism), toward these creatures: “For no creature was created in vain, and it is forbidden to kill it unnecessarily, and my late teacher was careful not to kill any vermin, even the smallest and least of them, such as fleas, gnats, flies and the like, even if they upset him.”

In the modern era, a new tradition developed in Jewish writing with respect to cockroaches and other vermin – from the 19^th century pioneer of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, Mendele Mocher Sforim to the Israeli 20^th century playwright Nisim Aloni – linking the Jewish condition, religiously, culturally and politically, to the despised creatures. From the Holocaust emerged an ethical discourse that drew on both the genocide of the Jewish people and the terminology that facilitated it – a broad moral reflection that focused not only on the human, but also on the animal, even vermin. “Since I’ve been treated as if I were a beetle myself, I’ve come to accept things one doesn’t want to accept,” says a Holocaust survivor in Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel “Shosha.”

When people imagine others as subhuman, they often act toward them in degrading and violent ways. But according to dehumanization researcher, philosopher David Livingstone Smith, violence is only a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself. The disease of dehumanization cannot be cured by treating its symptoms alone; the deeper processes that drive it must be addressed first.

The semantic presence of these creatures, which has invaded and multiplied in the Hebrew linguistic domain, marks the ever-shrinking space of what we define as human, and in the process, the shrinking of the “human” within us. The language not only exposes the murderousness infiltrating Hebrew but also entrenches it. We must heal our language.

The good, the merciful and the empathetic should not be identified as “human.” “Humanity” is not compassion. Vengeance, murderousness and hardness of heart are not alien to man. The “beast” is not necessarily the violent one. Pollution is not the nature of the cockroach, but of the waste left by those who have invaded its environment. Some wasps sting; others pollinate sweet flowers. Man heals, man kills. Man’s tikkun (correction) will lie in altering his attitude toward the tikan (cockroach). Only in this way can we, in the words of poet David Avidan, “return humanity to the amoeba and start anew.”

Noga Resh