Foreign Policy: A special vocabulary is used for Israel and Palestine

In the West, certain vocabularies have been developed to justify Israel's bloodshed in Palestine. Journalists and officials usually use the passive voice or follow certain grammatical rules when using verbs.  

This language-related process reflects today's Western politics.  

Especially after October 7th, similar vocabulary is widely used to cover up Israel's atrocities in Gaza. An example of this is when government and media officials use statistics from the Palestinian Ministry of Health about Israeli genocide victims along with the phrase "because of HAMAS". Such instructions go against the positions of the World Health Organization and other international humanitarian agencies.  

Refusal to recognize the original figures is the official position of the US government and the Anti-Palestinian League. The specially developed dictionary of the official Washington is used not only in the USA, but also around the world, for example, in the Arab media.

The New York Times, the unofficial voice of the US regime and a model of the Western press, is wary of this linguistics and vocabulary.

The publication's editors restrict journalists from using terms such as "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing," the word Palestine is rarely used, and words describing refugee camps and territories occupied by Israel are censored.

In addition, Western media management urges journalists to be careful when using "seditious" terms such as "slaughter", "massacre" and "atrocity" to describe the killings of the invaders.  

War words

The language used to name wars and military operations also bears witness to this practice of translation. After Israel began massacring Palestinians, pro-Zionists in the press dubbed the occupation the "Israel-Hamas War." Given that Hamas is the legitimate governing body of Gaza, this was a surprising label.

In fact, the Palestinian resistance movement won the last democratically held elections in the West Bank and Gaza in January 2006.

Not long after the movement took over, it faced a US-backed coup that attempted to take back control of the Palestinian Authority and restore its loyal Fatah party.

The American coup succeeded in the West Bank but failed in Gaza. There, the democratically elected government of Hamas defeated the traitors of FATH and their sponsors. Since then, all attempts to hold new elections have been fiercely opposed by the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority.

Based on this well-documented recent history, it was clear that Israel's genocidal war against the Palestinian people should at least be called the "Israeli-Palestinian War."

Given the sharp escalation of Israeli violence and bloodshed against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since October, this is simply not true.

The Israeli government itself has repeatedly declared war on all Palestinians. Despite this, the Western media continues to cite only Hamas as the target of Israel's war. The condemnation of the movement by Western officials allowed politicians and the media to whitewash the Zionist attack on the entire Palestinian people.  

After killing more than 40,000 people and injuring more than 90,000 Palestinians, Israel is still portrayed as fighting illegal terrorists.  

Such naming certainly does not apply to wars initiated by the United States. For example, wouldn't it be correct to use the phrase "Republican war" to describe Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003? From the Civil War to the Reagan administration, all US occupations and foreign wars have been carried out by the Democratic Party. Then, wouldn't it be correct to call the Democratic Party's wars in Vietnam or Korea the "Democratic Party War" instead of the "Vietnam War" or the "Korean War"? Indeed, the late Republican Senator Bob Dole in 1976 referred to these wars as the "Democrat wars." In the same way, we can fully blame the democratic party for the massacres carried out by Israel in Gaza today. But this is always hidden by the mainstream media. He simply looks at Israel's killing of journalists, ambulance workers, and doctors.  

Special terms

For decades, much of the Western press has consistently used bias in reporting on Israeli killings of Palestinians. Palestinians are usually mysteriously "killed" (perhaps by aliens) or accidentally "dead". On the other hand, news stories about Palestinian attacks on Israelis always use a clear ratio and mention the "criminals" by name.

This also applies to the term "terrorist", which is reserved only for Palestinians and from which Israel is protected. The definition of "terrorist" is based not on the act itself, but on the national and racial identity of the perpetrator of a particular atrocious (and sometimes mundane) act.

When Israel deliberately targets civilians and kills tens of thousands of people in schools, shelters, hospitals, on the streets, its crimes are never described as terrorism. A Palestinian attack on Israeli soldiers immediately becomes a "terrorist act".  

This is consistent with the definitions of Israeli political language that we noted earlier. Another popular term in this specialized dictionary has been used for many years.   The word "conflict" has long been the term of choice for the West and the Israeli side to describe the Palestinian-Israeli problem.  

"Neutral" of the West   The term "conflict" is used strictly to defend Israeli colonialism.  

Ideological dictionary

This particular Western vocabulary for all issues of Palestine and Israel is so unique that it even has a big impact on the geography of the countries. From the 9th to the 13th centuries, respectively, all Arabic-speaking peoples and Muslim lands named the cities of Palestine (also known as Bayt al-Maqdis) and al-Khalil after themselves. However, both areas are now referred to by their pre-tenth century Sumerian-Akkadian/Aramaic and Amorite names "Jerusalem" and "Hebron".

This is a denial of the use of the names by which the natives have been calling themselves for a long time.  

At the same time, the Western media refuses to accept the name Türkiye for Turkey. Although the country officially changed its name at the UN in 2021.

Regardless of the changes in the geography and sociology of Palestine in the 14th century, the names of the cities in the country are called in the Christian and Jewish languages.

These lexical choices and the ideological vocabulary that informs them are indicative of the use of Israel against the Palestinian people by Western imperialist governments and media.

The important fact is that in recent years, many Americans and Europeans have refused to accept the above ideological language and designations. They recognize the Palestinian struggle as it really is - a struggle for freedom.

Joseph Massad, Professor of the History of Modern Arab Politics and Thought at Columbia University in New York, author of several works