The Weaponization of Language Against the Jewish People

I. Introduction

There is a bitter irony at the foundation of modern human rights law. The word “genocide” is new, coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who lost dozens of relatives to the Nazis, in his study “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.” He fused Greek genos (people) with Latin cide (to kill), then lobbied until the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in December 1948.¹ A Jew gave the world the word to name its gravest crime. Today, that word is marshaled, with surgical cynicism, against the one Jewish state.

This is not an accident of careless usage. It is a method. Words carry moral weight accumulated over decades and centuries; to seize a word is to seize that weight and aim it. When a campaigner calls Israel “genocidal,” he is not making an argument — he is borrowing the moral authority of Auschwitz and pointing it at the descendants of its victims. The tactic works precisely because most listeners never check the definition. As Orwell warned, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”²

This analysis inventories the most consequential captured words. In each case, the pattern is identical: a term with a precise, hard-won meaning is stretched, inverted, or hollowed out to delegitimize Jewish self-defense, Jewish peoplehood, and the Jewish state. Reclaiming these words is not pedantry. As Lemkin understood, an unnamed crime cannot be prosecuted or fully seen — and when language loses precision, the vulnerable lose their last defense.

II. “Genocide”: The Theft of Lemkin’s Word

The legal definition is exact and demanding. Article II of the 1948 Convention defines genocide as acts committed with “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”³ The United Nations’ own guidance stresses that the crime turns on a mental element — what jurists call dolus specialis, special intent to annihilate a people as such. War is not genocide. Even a disproportionately lethal war is not genocide. The category was drafted narrowly on purpose, so that it would mean something.

Applied honestly, the accusation against Israel collapses on its central element: intent. A state pursuing the destruction of a people does not telephone civilians to warn them of strikes, drop leaflets, open evacuation corridors, or truck humanitarian aid to the very population it is allegedly exterminating. Genocidal regimes do not preside over rising populations among their supposed victims. The charge survives only by quietly deleting the word “intent” from a definition built entirely around it.

The deeper perversity is the inversion. Genuine eliminationist intent in this conflict is a matter of public record — not Israeli, but directed at Israel. The 1988 Hamas Covenant declares that Israel will exist “until Islam will obliterate it,”⁴ and the slogan “from the river to the sea” describes a map on which no Israel exists. To take the word forged from the ashes of the Jewish people and brand the Jewish state with it, while the party openly proclaiming annihilation is recast as a “resistance movement,” is the most audacious theft of meaning of our era. Reasonable people may debate the conduct of any war, but “genocide” is now deployed as a chant, not a finding — verdict first, evidence never. And every time it is spent on a war that is not won, it is devalued for the day a real genocide demands the world’s attention, and the alarm has already worn out.

This inversion now has a name in the legal literature: the reverse accusation. In a 2025 Israel Law Review study, the legal scholar Avraham Russell Shalev argues that the October 7th massacre itself satisfies the legal threshold for genocide — the physical acts together with the special intent visible in Hamas’s founding Covenant, its curriculum of incitement, and the orders of its commanders, one of whom directed his fighters to kill Jews “wherever you may find them” — and that the genocide charge against Israel has functioned as a “rhetorical shield” to deflect recognition of Hamas’s own crime.⁵ The maneuver is not novel. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it justified the assault by accusing Ukraine of genocide against Russian-speakers; the International Court of Justice found no evidence to substantiate the claim and doubted that the Convention authorized one state to invade another to ‘prevent’ a genocide. The accusation had become the instrument of aggression rather than its remedy. The historian Robert Wistrich identified this eliminationist antisemitism precisely — the will to a world without Jews — as the shared core of Nazism, Communism, and Islamism, dressed in each era in the moral vocabulary of its day.

III. “Apartheid”: A Borrowed Costume

The word is Afrikaans for “apartness.” It names a specific historical horror: the system that governed South Africa from 1948 to 1991, under which a racial minority stripped the majority of the vote, of movement, of marriage across the color line, of citizenship itself.⁶ International law later codified it. The Rome Statute defines the crime of apartheid as inhumane acts committed in the context of “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group” over another, with the intention of maintaining that regime.⁷

Hold Israel proper against that definition, and it fails at the threshold. Roughly one in five Israeli citizens is Arab. They vote. They sit in the Knesset, in both the coalition and opposition, in Arab parties and Zionist ones alike.⁸ They serve on the Supreme Court — Israel has maintained a tradition of appointing an Arab justice, and Arab jurists have ruled on the state’s most sensitive questions.⁹ They serve as diplomats, ambassadors, hospital directors, professors, and officers. An apartheid regime, by definition, is one in which a dominant group rules a subordinate one. A system where members of the allegedly oppressed group help legislate the country’s laws and judge its government is, however imperfect, the opposite of what the word describes. Further, Jews and Arabs are not separate “races”—the framework is a borrowed costume.

Honesty means conceding the harder case: the West Bank, where a real occupation has produced two legal systems and genuine, debatable injustices, is distinct and disputed. But that is the point. The “apartheid” charge is not aimed at a particular policy or territory; it is leveled at Israel’s existence — at Tel Aviv as much as Hebron. It turns a word that should anchor a serious argument into a slur that insults the millions who actually lived under South African apartheid, for whom voting and serving as a Supreme Court justice were unimaginable.

IV. The Manufactured Firewall: “Anti-Zionist, Not Antisemitic”

This is the most sophisticated of the maneuvers because it is built as a defense in advance. “I have nothing against Jews,” the formula runs. “I am only anti-Zionist.” The sentence is engineered to license hostility to Jews while pre-empting the charge of antisemitism, a firewall of plausible deniability.

It dissolves on inspection. Zionism is nothing more exotic than the belief that the Jewish people, like every other people, have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. To be “anti-Zionist” is therefore to hold, alone among all the peoples of the earth, that the Jews and only the Jews may not have a state. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, adopted by dozens of governments, identifies “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” as a form of antisemitism.¹⁰ The dissident Natan Sharansky proposed a simple test: demonization, double standards, and delegitimization. When Israel alone is demonized, held to standards demanded of no other nation, and denied the very legitimacy granted to all others, the “anti-Zionism” has crossed into the older hatred wearing a newer coat.¹¹

For Jews, this is not an external political stance; for most, it runs through the faith itself. Traditional liturgy turns toward Jerusalem three times daily; the Passover seder ends with “Next year in Jerusalem.” There are, of course, individual Jews who reject Zionism. But globally, “anti-Zionism” is not theological hair-splitting. Its evidence is empirical and bloody: when anti-Zionist fury rises, it is Jewish schoolchildren, worshippers, and shopkeepers—never Israeli soldiers—who pay the price in Paris, Pittsburgh, and Montreal. A doctrine that claims to target only a state yet reliably harms Jews elsewhere has already answered what it really is.

V. The Semantic Downgrade: From “Hate Crime” to “Just Murder”

There is a recurring asymmetry in how violence against Jews is named. When a member of almost any other group is attacked, the presumption of bias is the starting point of the inquiry. When the victim is a Jew, the antisemitic dimension is frequently the first thing officials hasten to rule out.

Consider Paul Kessler. In November 2023, the 69-year-old Jewish man attended a pro-Israel demonstration in Thousand Oaks, California, and died after a confrontation with a pro-Palestinian counter-protester who struck him and caused a fatal fall. The assailant pleaded guilty in May 2026 — but to involuntary manslaughter and battery, not to a hate crime.¹² Prosecutors stated that, while antisemitic speech was heard at the rally, there was “no evidence those words were said by Alnaji.”¹³ A Jewish man is dead, killed at a rally for Israel, and the killing is filed under the most neutral heading available — in the defense’s framing, merely “two older guys arguing.”¹² The Jewish dimension is sanded off the language until only an ordinary tragedy remains.

The pattern repeated, more painfully, in Montreal. On June 22, 2026, a gunman opened fire in the Côte-des-Neiges/Snowdon district — the most densely Jewish neighborhood in Canada, ringed by kosher restaurants, Jewish schools, a Chabad center, and synagogues. A police officer was killed; so was a beloved Jewish community member, Michael Moshe Mizrahi, originally from Lebanon and later an Israeli citizen.¹⁴ Within hours, officials moved to define the event: Quebec’s security minister said it was not linked to terrorism, police said the Jewish community had not been targeted, and reports attributed the shooter’s motive to “incel” ideology, with suggestions that Mizrahi may even have been struck by errant fire.^15,16

Intellectual honesty demands acknowledging that the police may be right about this gunman’s motive, and that the facts remain unsettled. But honesty also demands noticing the reflex — the speed and certainty with which “terrorism” and “antisemitism” were ruled out, in the heart of Jewish Montreal, before any investigation could be complete. As the historian Gil Troy argued, even if Jew-hatred did not pull this particular trigger, the surrounding climate of incitement against Jews, Zionism, and Israel is the atmosphere in which such violence breeds — and that climate has thickened since October 7.¹⁷ The weaponization here is quiet but corrosive, and it lives in the choice of nouns. “Hate crime” becomes “altercation.” “Terrorism” becomes “tragedy.” “Antisemitic murder” becomes “an incident.” Each downgrade is defensible in isolation; together, they teach a society that when Jews are killed, the killing means less.

VI. Self-Preservation Reclassified as Aggression

The final and perhaps most strategically damaging inversion turns the act of survival into the crime of aggression. A nation invaded, rocketed, and subjected to the mass murder and abduction of its citizens defends itself, and the vocabulary of the discourse promptly recasts it as the aggressor.

The language does the work. “Cycle of violence” erases the distinction between the arsonist and the firefighter, implying symmetry between those who initiate slaughter and those who respond to it. “Escalation” is applied to the response but rarely to the attack that provoked it. “Disproportionate” — a precise term in the law of armed conflict, concerning the balance between expected civilian harm and concrete military advantage in a given strike — is corrupted into a crude body-count tally, as though justice in war required matching one’s enemy casualty for casualty.

In June 2026, the principle was articulated at the highest level. In a New York Times interview published on 18 June, U.S. Vice President JD Vance pressed Israeli ministers who opposed his administration’s understanding with Iran, telling them that a country of nine million people “can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem.”¹⁸ One may grant the practical wisdom in the warning while still seeing the asymmetry it encodes. It is difficult to imagine the same counsel — that force cannot secure you, that you must simply absorb the threat — offered to any other sovereign state facing an enemy openly sworn to its destruction. The unspoken premise is that the Jewish state, uniquely, must seek its security in restraint rather than in victory; that for Israel alone, decisive self-defense is itself the provocation. A people that has learned in the hardest possible way what befalls Jews who cannot defend themselves is told that the act of defense itself is the problem.

VII. The Wider Lexicon: “Settler-Colonialism,” “Resistance,” and “Zionism Is Racism”

The same machinery has captured a cluster of related terms, chief among them “colonizer.” The label “settler-colonialism” imports the moral framework of European empires seizing foreign continents and stamps it onto Jews returning to the one land to which they have a continuous, three-thousand-year attachment — a land where Hebrew was born, where Jewish kingdoms rose and fell, and toward which Jerusalem has remained the focus of Jewish longing through every exile. To brand an indigenous people “colonizers” of their own homeland is to erase history in a single compound word, and to perform the very inversion cataloged above: the native is relabeled the invader, the dispossessed reimagined as the dispossessor. The term now structures the work of UN officials and academic theorists who recast the Jewish national movement as a colonial enterprise and, on that premise, license its undoing.¹⁹

“Resistance” and “by any means necessary” launder atrocity, dressing the deliberate murder of civilians in the borrowed dignity of anti-colonial struggle. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is marketed as a hopeful cry for liberation; read as geography, it describes a territory from the Jordan to the Mediterranean in which the Jewish state has been erased. The slogan is a map, and Israel is not on it.

None of this is new. In 1975, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, declaring Zionism “a form of racism.”²⁰ The American ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan rose to warn that the United Nations was about to make antisemitism international law, and that “a great evil has been loosed upon the world.”²¹ The resolution stood for sixteen years before it was finally revoked in 1991. It was the template for everything described above — the original capture of a respectable word to make the oldest hatred sound like a human-rights position.

VIII. Conclusion: Reclaiming the Words

Lemkin coined the word “genocide” because he understood that an unnamed crime cannot be prosecuted, prevented, or even fully seen. Naming is the first act of justice. That is exactly why the corruption of these words is so dangerous, and why it so often targets Jews: the libels against the Jewish people have always arrived dressed in the most respectable vocabulary of their age — theological in one century, racial-scientific in the next, and today the polished language of human rights and international law. Its newest form is the reverse accusation — branding the attacked party the ‘génocidaire,’ the ‘colonizer,’ the ‘apartheid state,’ so that the perpetrator’s crime is laundered into the language of the victim.

The defense is not censorship, and not the silencing of criticism; Israel, like every state, may be criticized, and is, ceaselessly, by its own citizens most of all. The defense is precision. It insists that “genocide” retain its meaning so that it is available when the real thing returns; holding “apartheid” to its definition so that the memory of its actual victims is not cheapened; naming an antisemitic murder as what it is rather than retreating into the comfort of neutral nouns. When a word can be made to mean anything, it means nothing — and a people that has been the target of history’s deadliest lies cannot afford a world in which words mean nothing. Reclaiming them is not merely a Jewish interest. It is the precondition for any honest moral language at all.

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Notes

1. Facing History & Ourselves, “Raphael Lemkin and the Genocide Convention”: https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/raphael-lemkin-genocide-convention
2. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946), The Orwell Foundation: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/
3. UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, “Definitions — Genocide”: https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition
4. The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), 18 August 1988, Yale Law School Avalon Project: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp
5. Avraham Russell Shalev, ‘Hamas’ October 7th Genocide: Legal Analysis and the Weaponisation of Reverse Accusations – A Study in Modern Genocide Recognition and Denial,’ Israel Law Review 58(2–3) (2025), 343–382, DOI 10.1017/S0021223725100009: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/israel-law-review/article/hamas-october-7th-genocide-legal-analysis-and-the-weaponisation-of-reverse-accusations-a-study-in-modern-genocide-recognition-and-denial/322198E636341BE82F37ED7147FEB0F5
6. “Crime of apartheid,” incl. the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_apartheid
7. Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Article 7(2)(h), UN OHCHR: https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/rome-statute-international-criminal-court
8. “Arab citizens of Israel” (representation in the Knesset and public institutions): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel
9. Israel Democracy Institute, “Arab Representation in the Judiciary Is Under Threat” (April 2025): https://en.idi.org.il/articles/58926
10. International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, Working Definition of Antisemitism: https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism
11. Natan Sharansky, “3D Test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization” (2004), Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs: https://jcfa.org/article/3d-test-of-anti-semitism-demonization-double-standards-delegitimization/
12. “Man pleads guilty in fatal Thousand Oaks protest confrontation,” Thousand Oaks Acorn (May 2026): https://www.toacorn.com/articles/man-pleads-guilty-in-fatal-thousand-oaks-protest-confrontation/
13. “Killing of Paul Kessler,” incl. Ventura County District Attorney statements (2024–2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Paul_Kessler
14. “Three killed, including shooter, in Montreal shooting in Jewish neighborhood,” The Jerusalem Post (June 2026): https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-900180
15. “Jewish Israeli man killed in Montreal shooting,” The Times of Israel (June 2026): https://www.timesofisrael.com/shooting-in-jewish-area-of-montreal-leaves-civilian-police-officer-dead-motive-unclear/
16. “What we know about the deadly Montreal shootings that shook a Jewish neighbourhood,” The Canadian Jewish News (June 2026): https://thecjn.ca/news/what-we-know-about-the-deadly-montreal-shootings-that-shook-a-jewish-neighbourhood/
17. Gil Troy, “Jew-hatred drove the Montreal violence, even if it didn’t trigger it,” The Jerusalem Post (June 2026): https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-900237
18. “JD Vance tells Israel ‘you can’t kill your way out’ of security problems,” Al Jazeera, reporting a New York Times interview, 18 June 2026: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/18/jd-vance-tells-israel-you-cant-kill-your-way-out-of-security-problems
19. For representative deployments of the ‘settler-colonial’/’colonizer’ framing against Israel, see, e.g., Avi Shlaim, ‘Zionist Settler-Colonialism and the Logic of Genocide in Gaza,’ Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies (2025): https://euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/hlps.2025.0349 ; and the reports of the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories.
20. UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 (10 Nov. 1975) and its revocation by Resolution 46/86 (16 Dec. 1991): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly_Resolution_3379
21. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, address to the UN General Assembly, 10 November 1975, UN Watch: https://unwatch.org/moynihans-moment-the-historic-1975-u-n-speech-in-response-to-zionism-is-racism/