Israel-Palestine Vocabulary

The Updated Words and Phrases for Talking About Gaza

Talking about Israel/Palestine these days requires a flexible mind that allows for a more nuanced understanding of familiar words and phrases than one would obtain from a dictionary. 

What does the dictionary know about the struggle of the Palestinian people anyway? That’s what we have social media for. And if you don’t want to be blocked on it, you have to be inclusive towards concepts such as:

• “Indigenous people” who took the land by conquest
• “Occupied territory” without a single occupant
• “Refugees” that never left their homelands
• “Genocide” resulting in exponential population growth
• “Famine” with no known deaths from starvation
• “White colonizers” who are brown-skinned and have continuously inhabited the land for 3000 years
• “Imperialist expansion” in which controlled territory only shrinks in withdrawals and unilateral disengagements
• “Freedom fighters” who, within “Free Palestine” under their rule,:
  • Exercise total control over population;
  • Established an authoritarian regime that pervades every aspect of life;
  • Suppress protests;
  • Restrict speech and freedom of expression;
  • Require women to have male’s permission to travel
  • Torture and execute people on the spot
  • Say that civilians are someone else’s responsibility while using them as weapons and human shields
• “Refugee camps” with high-rise buildings, fine dining restaurants and hyper-malls;
• “Taking care of the land” by discharging waste directly into the environment , over-pumping and polluting 97% of drinking water while boasting about turning pipes into rockets;
• “Open-air prison” with a luxury BMW / Mercedes car dealership, a giant mosque, luxury indoor shopping malls, luxury hotels – and not to mention, a booming rocket industry
• “Apartheid state” whose other 20% are citizens with full rights, five political parties, and a Supreme Court justice
• “Blockade” which lets in 500-800 trucks daily, allows 18,000 daily workers to get out to work, and does not apply to the border with Egypt (controlled by, surprisingly, Egypt)
• “Anti-imperialist” movement of the people led by billionaires and KGB agents (not mutually exclusive), backed by (presently, non-imperial) Iran, Turkey, and Russia – and, of course, Qatar’s billions
• “Unity” of people in two disconnected pieces of land that have been in war with each other for almost 20 years
• “Self-defense” acts of rape
• “Aspirational call for peace, equality, and coexistence” that is premised on total expulsion and murder of Jews “from the river to the sea”
• “Ceasefire now” with a group to whom peace talks are a contradiction to founding principles of resistance, breaks ceasefires routinely, and has been rejecting all ceasefire proposals that have a seed of reason in them (acting in accordance with its published doctrine)
• “Peaceful resistance” involving launching tens of thousands of unguided rockets into civilian centers – as opposed to “Indiscriminate bombing” accompanied by advance warnings, evacuation of civilians, and safe zones being set up, resulting in lowest civilian/combatant ratio in modern history
• “Ethnic cleansing” marked by lowest civilian-to-combatant death ratio in decades – even when going by unsubstantiated casualty estimates that are quietly halved without people noticing, based on numbers provided by a “Health ministry” which doesn’t distinguish civilians and combatants and reports to the terrorist organization with an established track of lying about numbers (or outright making them up ), as well as attributing its own killings to the other side
• “Pro-Palestinians” standing for sacrificing countless Palestinians as martyrs in repeated Oct 7th-style attacks
• “Stopping killing babies” by not intervening into affairs of a state that uses child suicide bombers

Of course, everything old is new again; and this evolution of language is exactly what Orwell wrote about in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”, published the same year as Sartre’s book.

And nearly eight decades later, it’s more applicable than ever.