Speaking at a youth conference in Germany on Monday, Jordan’s Queen Rania appeared to equate Israel’s attitude toward the Palestinians to Nazi Germany’s dehumanization of Jews.
Rania addressed the One Young World Summit in Munich, which brought together young prospective leaders from all over the world. During her speech, she spoke of hateful rhetoric as a precursor to atrocities around the world.
“To dismiss it as ‘just talk’ is to ignore how every genocide has begun: with words,” she said. “Dehumanizing speech has served as the prelude to some of the worst chapters in human history. In the 1930s in this very city, the Nazi party called Jewish people vermin. In Rwanda, public radio broadcasts described the Tutsis as cockroaches. In Myanmar, nationalists compared the Rohingya to stray dogs.”
Rania, who is of Palestinian descent, recounted that “in the aftermath of the October 7 [Hamas] attacks [on southern Israel], when an Israeli official announced a complete siege on Gaza, he described the population as ‘human animals.’ He was operating from a time-tested playbook: Convince the public you are dealing with beasts, and violence becomes not just acceptable, but necessary,” she said.
Rania was referencing then-defense minister Yoav Gallant, who said two days after the October 7 terror attack, as the dimensions of the atrocities committed by Hamas were becoming clear, that he had ordered “a ‘complete siege’ of the Gaza Strip.”
“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” he said at the time.
In Israel, Gallant’s comments were widely seen as referring to Hamas and other terror groups whose extreme brutality was on display on October 7, when the invaders killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, burning families alive and committing rampant sexual crimes, abuse and torture while kidnapping 251 living and dead to the Strip.
Israel repeatedly said at the time that it was fighting terrorists, and not Gaza’s population as a whole. Gallant himself said later that he was speaking of “the perpetrators and orchestrators of these barbaric attacks” when he made those comments.
But his remarks were widely scrutinized by Israel critics, who have alleged that he was referring to the entire Palestinian population. His comments were also cited by attorneys in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice last year.
Speaking at the gathering on Monday, Rania went on to accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza, saying that “in the past few months, both famine and genocide have been confirmed by independent international and UN-mandated bodies. The world saw it coming, but failed to act to prevent it.”
Israel has repeatedly and forcefully rejected claims of genocide and has asserted that declarations of famine were based on faulty and skewed data.
Rania said that she last addressed the youth conference “days before the war began,” with no mention of Hamas’s October 7 attack nor any reference at all to the terror group.
Since then, she averred, “entire cities have been flattened. Extended families have been wiped out or reduced to a single survivor. Thousands upon thousands of children have been killed, and countless more orphaned, starved, wounded, and scarred by trauma.”
Two years later, she said, “a shaky ceasefire remains in place. And it would be such a relief to declare the bloodshed over, release the collective tension we’ve all been carrying, and just move on.”
However, she asserted, “the enormous task of reconstruction awaits. Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine continues. Its subjugation of the Palestinian people is ongoing. And a just resolution to this decades-long conflict, for both the Israelis and Palestinians, remains elusive.”
While her husband, King Abdullah, maintains close but chilly relations with Israel, Rania has publicly stepped up her harsh criticism of the Jewish state over the past two years.
In October 2023, she expressed skepticism over some accounts of Hamas atrocities on October 7, and in November 2023, she dismissed Israel’s assertion that “they are trying to protect civilians” as an “insult to intelligence.”
In March 2024, Rania said that the humanitarian crisis and hunger in the Gaza Strip was a “deliberate” move by Israel. “The hunger is not a natural disaster. This is a man-made, an Israeli-made disaster. It is deprivation by design,” she charged. “Since the beginning of this war, Israel has cut off everything that is required to sustain a human life.”
