Fear, hatred and power: Why Israel’s far right needs Palestinians dehumanized 
Hatred and racism are not incidental features of Israel’s far right. They are among its most important political instruments.
That may sound severe, but it is the only serious way to understand the logic shaping a significant part of Israeli political life today. The sustained demonization of Palestinians did not arise spontaneously from fear or from the trauma of conflict alone. It has been cultivated, reinforced and normalized through years of political rhetoric, cultural conditioning, and public discourse designed to make cruelty appear necessary and empathy appear dangerous.
At the heart of this project lies a simple calculation: A society is more willing to tolerate domination when it is taught not to see the dominated as fully human.
This is why the far right fears moral contact. It fears the moment when ordinary Israelis see Palestinians not as abstractions, demographic threats, or permanent enemies, but as human beings with grief, dignity, memory and legitimate aspirations. Once that happens, the ideological architecture begins to weaken.
There are three reasons for this. The first is that dehumanization is essential to sustaining the daily reality of occupation. No system built on indefinite control over another people can survive on force alone. It also requires moral distancing. It requires a public culture in which Palestinian suffering is minimized, rationalized, or ignored. Without that distancing, it becomes much harder to justify routine humiliation, dispossession, settlement expansion and the denial of self-determination. Once Palestinians are recognized as a people entitled to the same moral consideration as anyone else, permanent domination becomes harder to defend.
The second reason is political. The humanization of Palestinians threatens the electoral and ideological foundations of the Israeli far right. A citizenry exposed to the human reality of Palestinian life is less likely to embrace absolutism. It may not suddenly move leftward, but it may begin to reject the moral numbness and ethnic hostility on which far-right politics depends. Even a modest shift toward the center, toward restraint, coexistence, or civic equality, would threaten those whose power depends on fear and polarization.
No state can preserve moral credibility while teaching generation after generation that another people’s pain matters less
The third reason is perhaps the most disturbing. Extreme ethnocentrism also serves a military function. Israel’s leadership has reason to worry about the psychological toll the Gaza war has taken on its soldiers. Reuters reported in January 2026 that the Gaza war had inflicted a heavy psychological toll on Israeli soldiers, with about 60 percent of roughly 22,300 cases processed through Israel’s military rehabilitation system involving post-traumatic stress, while an Israeli parliamentary review recorded 279 suicide attempts among soldiers from January 2024 to July 2025.
This is where the far right’s social project becomes especially dangerous. The less empathy soldiers are allowed to feel, the easier it becomes to issue brutal orders, carry them out and suppress moral hesitation afterward. Strip Palestinians of their humanity in the minds of young soldiers, institutionalize hatred and racism, and the calculation becomes brutally simple: Fewer will recoil, and fewer will break under the weight of what they were ordered to do. In that sense, racism is not only a political tool. It becomes a method of emotional conditioning for war.
The result is a culture in which compassion itself becomes suspect.
That should alarm anyone who cares not only about Palestinians, but also about Israel’s future. History offers no shortage of warnings about the corrosive power of ethnocentric ideologies. Societies that organize themselves around superiority, exclusion and the systematic degradation of others do not emerge stronger in the long run. They become harsher, more paranoid, less humane and, ultimately, more brittle. Hatred may unify a political camp for a time, but it also deforms the institutions, language and moral instincts of the society that embraces it.
Cool-headed Israelis have a responsibility that goes far beyond partisan politics. The challenge is not merely to oppose one government or another, nor only to protest one military campaign. It is to confront a deeper social and moral drift: the normalization of dehumanization as a basis for national life.
No healthy society can endure on that foundation. No state can preserve moral credibility while teaching generation after generation that another people’s pain matters less. And no army, however disciplined or powerful, emerges unscathed from a political culture that treats empathy as a liability.
The tragedy is that the far right understands this perfectly. It knows that once Israelis begin to see Palestinians in human rather than ideological terms, fear loses some of its power. So does hatred. So do the politics built on both. That is why dehumanization has become so central to the far right’s project. When a state begins to fear empathy, it is already in moral decline.
• Salman Al-Ansari is a Saudi geopolitical researcher and a frequent guest on CNN, BBC and France 24. He was ranked the most influential political pundit in the Middle East in 2021 by Arab News. X: @Salansar1
