Dehumanizing the Jews, Then and Now

Before Mrs. Tzeela Gez, the latest victim of Palestinian Arab terrorism, was even buried, the process of dehumanizing her was well underway.

Hananel Gez was driving his nine-months-pregnant wife to a hospital on May 14 to deliver their fourth child, when terrorists raked their car with gunfire.

The official Palestinian Authority news agency, Wafa, did not report the murder of Mrs. Gez. It did quote an Israeli cabinet minister calling for a forceful response to the attack—but it did not explain what he was responding to. That’s one way to dehumanize a victim—pretend she does not exist.

The Qatar-funded, pro-Hamas news agency Al Jazeera likewise focused on the cabinet minister’s statement, but used a slightly different approach. A sub-heading in a 31-paragraph article declared, “ ‘We Have to Flatten the West Bank’,” but in the 28th paragraph, readers learned that the minister actually spoke of flattening “terror hubs,” not flattening “the West Bank.” The article then noted in half a sentence that he was referring to the region “where an Israeli settler was killed.”

Used in this way, the term “settler” robs the victim of her human identity. Mrs. Gez is not identified as a woman, as a wife, or as a mother of three—she is a thing, not a person, and her only noteworthy characteristic is that her very existence is an illegitimate encroachment on somebody else’s land.

The Israeli community where the Gez family resides, Bruchin, happens to be located in the area that the Oslo accords designate as Israeli-administered. Nothing in the accords—which were signed by both the Palestinian Authority and Israel—forbids Jews from residing there.

In any event, the terrorists who murdered Mrs. Gez and wounded her husband had no way of knowing whether their victims were “settlers.” Highway 446, on which they were traveling, is used by motorists of various faiths, nationalities, and residential preferences. The killers knew only that the people in the car probably were Jews.

Palestine Chronicle, another prominent English-language news site advocating the Palestinian Arab cause, is headed by the former deputy managing editor of Al Jazeera. The Chronicle reported that “a settler” (no name or gender) was “targeted by the resistance.” The Chronicle also published a statement by a Hamas spokesman saying he “blesses the heroic shooting operation.”

Ma’an, a Palestinian Arab news agency that claims to be independent but closely toes the extremist line, described the murder of Mrs. Gez as “a shooting incident,” in an article focusing on Israeli efforts to capture the shooters. Ma’an characterized those efforts as “aggression.”

None of these reports mentioned that Mrs. Gez was nine months pregnant, and was on her way to the hospital to give birth. Acknowledging those facts would have humanized her.

By contrast, journalists frequently referred to the pregnancy of the wife of Hamas supporter Mahmoud Khalil, during the recent controversy over his pending deportation from the United States. Many media outlets also quoted amply from a letter that Khalil wrote to his newborn child. One wonders how many news agencies would give equal space to a letter from Hananel Gez to his infant son, who is in critical condition and will never know his mother.

The Palestinian Authority and its collaborators find it necessary to dehumanize Jews because the terrorists who wage war on Israel were not born killers. Neither were children in Nazi Germany. They had to be educated that way in order to carry out the ruling regime’s violent agenda.

Significant numbers of Palestinian Arab teenagers and children—some age 10 or even younger—participated in the atrocities of October 7, according to security camera footage and survivors’ testimony. Those children studied in schools, and attended summer camps, where they were taught that Jews are evil sub-humans who deserve to be slaughtered. They heard speeches by PA and Hamas leaders comparing Jews to vermin. Once Jews were dehumanized, killing them became not only permissible but admirable.

In Nazi Germany, too, schools and summer camps were used as breeding grounds for an entire generation of violent antisemites. They were taught that Jews were dangerous rodents and parasites who had to be eliminated.

As a result, teenage and even pre-teen members of the Hitler Youth movement often participated in atrocities, from forcing Jews to scrub the streets of Vienna with toothbrushes in 1938, to gunning down Jews swimming from sinking boats in the German harbor of Lubeck in 1945. While most branches of the Nazi apparatus collapsed or surrendered in the final days of World War II, the fanatically loyal Hitler Youth remained devoted to their Fuhrer until the very end.

Auschwitz survivor Menachem Weinryb, who was part of a death march from Poland to Germany, later described how when they reached Belsen on April 13, 1945, the German guards went to a nearby town “and returned with a lot of young people from the Hitler Youth [and local police officers]…They chased us all into a large barn…we were five to six thousand people…[They] poured out petrol and set the barn on fire. Several thousand people were burned alive.”

The Palestinian Arabs who burned Jews alive in southern Israel on October 7, and those who murdered a pregnant woman on Highway 466 this week, likewise were products of an educational system that seeks precisely that outcome. This dehumanization process, whether utilized by the Nazi regime in the 1930s or by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas today, is the necessary prelude to murder.

Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His book The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews will be published on October 1, 2025, by The Jewish Publication Society / University of Nebraska Press.