Language is the bloodstream of civilization. It carries memory, law, morality, and imagination. When we allow its richest words to be debased, we do not merely commit a scholarly misdemeanor; we chip away at the very foundations of our common humanity.
This is why I find myself appalled and more than a little frightened by the way in which the word “genocide” has lately been tossed about like loose change, with Israel the principal victim of this verbal vandalism.
The accusation of genocide, once reserved for the darkest abysses of human cruelty, now seems to have become a kind of lazy shorthand for “something I strongly dislike.” It was not meant to be this way. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term in 1944, did so with the ashes of Europe still warm.
The United Nations codified it in 1948 to capture a crime that went beyond mass killing, beyond battlefield slaughter: the deliberate attempt to annihilate a people in whole or in part. The Holocaust, Rwanda, Armenia, Srebrenica – these are the somber, thunderous names that justify the existence of the word. Its essence is intent, that cold and conscious determination to obliterate.
Yet, in certain quarters of activism and academia, the term has been quietly stretched. Amnesty International and others have adopted a more “elastic” usage, suggesting that one need not prove intent if the effects are sufficiently grim. By this logic, any conflict that produces large civilian casualties may be called genocide, regardless of what was intended.
This is not merely sloppy; it is catastrophic. If consequence alone equals genocide, then Dresden, Hiroshima, the Syrian civil war, even Britain’s own bombing of Hamburg might fall under the same category. The word ceases to discriminate and thus ceases to mean.
Israel, naturally, is the stage upon which this linguistic sleight of hand is most theatrically performed. The state is accused, relentlessly and monotonously, of genocide in Gaza.
But what precisely is meant? Israel is a country whose hospitals treat Palestinians, whose army calls civilians before strikes, whose leaders – however outrageous some of their rhetoric – have not adopted a policy of extermination. It is a democracy at war with a terrorist organization that openly proclaims genocidal intent toward Jews. To collapse this complexity into the single word “genocide” is not moral clarity; it is moral laziness dressed up as virtue.
THE CONSEQUENCES of such linguistic vandalism are not confined to seminars and op-eds. They seep into the bloodstream of society. To scream “genocide” at Israel is to suggest equivalence with Auschwitz or Kigali. That accusation trickles onto social media, campuses, and rallies until it curdles into rage against Jews in London, Paris, or New York.
Synagogues are defaced, Jewish schoolchildren are told to hide their uniforms, and families are harassed in the street. A word intended to safeguard the memory of Jewish destruction is turned, with perverse irony, into a weapon against Jews alive today.
None of this is to say that Israel should be immune from scrutiny. It should not. Every nation at war must be judged by the laws of war, and Israel has much to answer for in its conduct of operations. But there is a difference – an essential, luminous difference – between accusing a state of disproportionate force and accusing it of genocide.
The first invites debate, investigation, and evidence. The second shuts down conversation entirely, replacing it with moral hysteria.
Using correct terminology in wartime
What is required is not silence on Israel but precision. Words matter. If civilians die in large numbers, the correct terms are “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” or “violations of humanitarian law.” These are not weak phrases; they carry weight and sanction.
However, they are not genocide, and to insist on accuracy is not pedantry but responsibility. The world will never confront future genocides if the very word has been dulled into a political cliché.
It is also worth insisting that balance requires courage. If intent is the essence of genocide, then one must dare to name it where it truly resides. Hamas, after all, does not veil its purpose; it writes of exterminating Jews with a candor that chills the spine. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are no less explicit, calling for Israel’s eradication in speeches and sermons.
Yet, curiously, those who hurl the term at Israel fall silent when confronted with actors who actually articulate exterminatory designs. It is easier, apparently, to accuse a democracy of genocide than to confront terrorists and theocrats who boast of it openly.
SO, WHAT is to be done? First, we must reclaim reverence for language itself. Genocide should be spoken as one might toll a great bell, with awe and with evidence. To debase it is to rob future generations of the ability to recognize the crime when it truly appears.
Second, we must demand that NGOs, politicians, and commentators observe the discipline of law. The United Nations Convention is not optional; it is the standard. If intent cannot be proved, then genocide cannot be alleged.
Third, we must insist that our debates admit complexity. One may oppose Israeli policies fiercely, as many Israelis themselves do, without resorting to vocabulary that belongs to the gas chamber and the machete.
Finally, we must confront the paradox: to cheapen the word “genocide” to attack Israel is to harm Palestinians as well. For if everything is genocide, then nothing is. If Israel’s war is genocide, then Sudan’s famine, Myanmar’s atrocities against the Rohingya, China’s repression of the Uyghurs – all lose the sharp edge of distinction. The Palestinian tragedy deserves to be addressed on its own terms, not inflated into an ersatz Holocaust that convinces no one serious and inflames everyone reckless.
We live in a time when Parliament in the UK can debate Israel 10 times more than Sudan, where half a million children have starved to death. That imbalance already tells us something about our hunger for moral theater over moral proportion. The promiscuous misuse of the word “genocide” is another symptom of that disorder. It is not born of compassion but of obsession, not of justice but of rhetorical convenience.
Let us, therefore, draw a line. Let us treat the word “genocide” with the gravity it deserves, using it only where it belongs. Let us criticize Israel, by all means, but let us do so with the rigor that truth demands, not with the lazy cudgels of political theater.
For in the end, to debase the language of atrocity is to debase ourselves and to darken the very room in which we struggle to see the suffering of others clearly.
The writer is executive director of We Believe In Israel.