Dehumanization of Palestinians in the press

Israel’s war in Gaza has heightened interest in the nature and prevalence of dehumanizing rhetoric. Dehumanizing language can both signal and reflect dehumanization, and thus serves as an important warning sign. We have developed several different metrics for measuring how much dehumanizing text appears in the coverage of Palestinians, as compared to Israelis, in the press of several different countries (including Israel itself).

_{Illustration: Voice of America, https://picryl.com/media/destroyed-gaza-area-1507b5, Wikimedia commons license}

Systematically measuring dehumanisation of Palestinians in the media

Israel’s war in Gaza has drawn heightened attention to dehumanization and, relatedly, dehumanizing rhetoric.

The STAIR lab project for Spring 2024 was develop and apply a theoretically guided lexicon of dehumanizing words that permits a systematic analysis of dehumanizing rhetoric. By comparing the prevalence of dehumanizing words in the coverage of a particular group to the presence of that same language in a baseline category, we can identify the excess presence of dehumanizing language.

In this first paper applying the method, we analyze a corpus of British and Irish media coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict since 2010. We find more dehumanization associated with Palestinians than with Israelis or people in general.