Correct nomenclature, as I have long argued, is essential for our understanding of things, people, events. Unless we name something properly we will not know how to judge it or what the right course of action may be in response to what it does. This is why our public discourse is so mixed up in the matter of what to call things: Naming something rightly is powerful; so is naming something wrongly, or refusing to name it all.

We are now urged — and required by law in many jurisdictions — to accept a definition of “antisemitism” that is beyond preposterous. With the assistance of various committees and Jewish groups, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance has crafted a “working definition” of this term that, to sum up its many clauses, makes criticism of Israel or Zionism antisemitic. This is an absurd misnomer — purposeful and very consequential.

Roughly three dozen states now accept the IHRA definition; as Chris Hedges reported this week, New Jersey is currently debating a law to this effect. An increasing number of institutions, notably but not only universities, are also using the IHRA definition. As Hedges asserts in the above-linked piece, this is a straight-out attack on free speech. Taking the IHRA definition to its logical conclusion, we are headed in the direction of thought control.

There are other cases — many, indeed — wherein the accepted nomenclature is critical. If you do not call the United States an empire you won’t be able to see why and how it has become, for some decades now, the No. 1 most violent, destructive and disruptive force in global affairs. And since we are not supposed to see any such thing, you cannot call the United States an empire and expect to be taken seriously in what is quaintly known as — another misnomer — polite company.

We come now to the question of Israel’s terror campaign in Gaza (and its escalating terror campaign in the West Bank). What shall we call these daily depravities? Do we or do we not witness a genocide?

If there is a more contentious case of getting the name right, I cannot think of it. Call Israel’s assault on Gaza a genocide and you will understand the Zionist state one way and there will be legal ramifications; reject this term and you are wading around in “the right to defend itself” and other such notions — all of them as flimsy as that IHRA definition of antisemitism — and there will be no legal ramifications. It amounts to enabling justice or apologizing for limitless impunity.

I have never found the world to be very honest with itself. And it has been grossly dishonest since the autumn of 2023. For maybe 21 of these past 22 months, many people have insisted that Israel’s daily barbarities against the Palestinian people amount to a genocide. But the Gaza crisis has brought populations across the West face to face with their political impotence. In the seats of global power and among the media that serve them, Israel’s military aggressions and abuses of international law have gone unnamed. The consequences of this refusal can be measured any number of ways. The deaths of at least 60,000 Palestinians — and we can count this a conservative figure — are one of them.

Whether or not Israel is guilty of conducting a genocide should not be a question as the reality of its conduct enters its 22nd month. But it has been made a question, and at last this question-that-is-not-a-question begins to lose its power, its utility as a curtain drawn over Israel’s atrocities. This marks a significant advance, needless to say, in the right direction.

I have never found The New York Times to be very honest with itself, either. But when the once-but-no-longer newspaper of record takes to publishing opinion pieces (plural as of this week) that forthrightly accuse the Israelis not only of genocide but of genocidal intent, it is safe to conclude something of significance is in the hot summer winds.

We must be careful not to overstate what may come of a now-evident shift of opinion on Israel in high places — what and when. But in my read we are amid a sea change, a prelude to concerted action — legal, diplomatic, political, economic — against the Zionist regime.

Let us begin at the beginning. (And I do not mean to dismiss the long century of Israel’s aggressions against Palestinians prior to the afternoon of Oct. 7, 2023, when Israel began its assault on Gaza.)

In January 2024 the International Court of Justice found that it was “plausible” Israel was in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. I remember how disappointed I was to see the ICJ use so self-sabotaging a word. But even this ruling — cautious, provisional — prompted an uproar anyone paying attention will recall. Reflecting this — in my opinion reflecting this, I should say — the ICJ has since refrained from issuing a final, binding judgment and there is no telling when it will do so.

The first signs of an incipient change in the limits of acceptable discourse appeared last spring. There was a sudden spate of opinion pieces in the mainstream British press — The Economist, the Financial Times, The Independent, et al. — in which the atrocities of Israel’s war-that-is-not-war were at last acknowledged. “The longer it goes on,” The Financial Times wrote in a very pointed opinion piece signed by the editorial board, “the more those who remain silent or cowed from speaking out will be complicit.”

These pieces anticipated by a few weeks yet more powerful denunciations of the Jewish state among various government officials. “I condemn Israel for what it is doing to the Palestinian people in Gaza and indeed in the West Bank,” Mark Pritchard, a Conservative MP, said in the House of Commons May 6, “and I’d like to withdraw my support right now for the actions of Israel…. This is a moment in history when people look back, where we’ve got it wrong as a country.”

The headline atop the commentary I published in this space at the time was “Waves Upon the Sea of Silence.” So these were, but what prominent people were suddenly writing and saying in public places was more in the way of ripples. In all the pronouncements and denunciations one read and heard last spring, I know of no case that included the word “genocide.” The term was still all-but-officially off limits.

Now matters take yet another turn. It is as if the Western world is gradually inching its way toward a truthful judgment, with an implicit confession of past silence, of the Israelis’ sadistic attacks — and I consider them this — on the Palestinian people. Of Israel’s conduct of a genocide, this is to say.

Until now a few Israeli peace advocates and other voices of dissent have spoken honestly of the IDF’s purposefully genocidal atrocities. It is another thing when The New York Times publishes a long opinion piece under the headline, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” As many readers instantly understood, Omer Bartov’s essay, which appeared in The Times’s July 15 editions, was a very big deal, for what it said and where it said it. There it was, the “G” word, right in the headline. That yawning space between the sayable and the unsayable in matters to do with Israel suddenly seemed to get narrower.

A little Times-ology here. Bartov’s piece is typical of an old trick to which The Times resorts on occasions of ideological awkwardness. When something must be said that the paper does not want reported as fact in the news pages and with a Times reporter’s byline on it, it brings in an outside voice to hold forth in the opinion pages. So it is with Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown. I imagine The Times’s editors knew they were detonating a bomb when they published his piece; whether or not they knew, it was an explosion of some magnitude.

After explaining his scholarly caution in the first months following the events of October 2023, Bartov surveys the on-the-ground record and the many statements of intent we have heard from Israeli officials and writes:

My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.

Bartov goes on to cite the company he keeps as he declares this judgment: Amnesty International, the South Africans, who brought the above-mentioned genocide case to the ICJ in December 2023, Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, Amnesty International. This week two big names in Israel’s human-rights scene, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights–Israel issued reports, here and here, announcing they have come to the same conclusion. This time The Times reported this in its news pages; it was all over media elsewhere, too.

Curiously enough, The Times ran a long audio interview with Bartov a week after his piece appeared, under the headline, “A Genocide Scholar on the Case Against Israel,” but this disappeared into the archives, so far as I can make out, within a few hours. Then on July 30, another bomb on the opinion page: The Times published “The Death of Gaza in Slow Motion,” another essay denouncing Israel for its genocidal conduct; two of its three authors represent Physicians for Human Rights–Israel.

All kinds of disgraceful apologists have lately rushed to Israel’s defense. Bret Stephens, the most vigorous defender of Israel in The Times’s stable of columnists, published “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide” on July 22, arguing nonsensically that if what we witness were a genocide the Israelis would have gotten it done more quickly. That’s our Bret: Israel could bomb the British Foreign Office tomorrow and he would explain why it was necessary and the right thing to do.

A Briton who self-describes as a journalist and activist, one David Collier, immediately indignantly objected vigorously to a photograph, first published in the British press on July 23, of an emaciated Palestinian child in his mother’s arms. The image of 18–month-old Mohammed Zakariya Ayyoub al–Matouq was widely disseminated, a powerful document as the world faces up to Israel’s weaponization of hunger in Gaza. No, Collier reported: al–Matouq has pre-existing medical conditions, cerebral palsy and hypoxemia, that account for his appearance. “This isn’t the face of famine,” Collier wrote in a piece headlined “The Image That Lied.”

Can you believe The Times of London published Collier’s objections as if the picture was a fraudulent misrepresentation of reality? What is the suggestion here? That there is no epidemic of starvation in Gaza? Can you believe that media across the West, including The New York Times, in one or another way followed suit? Let us hear all about Mohammed Zakariya Ayyoub al–Matouq’s excellent diet and the top-drawer treatment he gets in Gaza’s hospitals, I will add.

I use this kind of unseemly junk as a mirror, an old habit of mine. The Zionist state, having wildly overplayed its hand in Gaza, has been increasingly on its back foot these past 22 months. Now the countless images of starving Palestinians — men, women, children, ordinary people, doctors, nurses, aid workers — have pushed matters to the point we can now call genocide by its proper name and begin thinking about what must be done about it.

Better late than not at all, let’s say. And let’s see where things go from here.

France announced last Thursday, July 24, that it intends to recognize Palestinian statehood at the U.N. General Assembly when it convenes this September. On Wednesday, July 30, Britain did, too. True, Kier Starmer, the prime minister, said the U.K. would withhold recognition if, among other things, the Israelis accept a ceasefire and promise not to annex the West Bank. But as The Times of London reported, “Given Israel’s opposition to these terms, this means recognition of a Palestinian state is almost inevitable.”

The momentum is now obvious. As I was finishing this column Thursday, July 31, Canada and Malta announced that they, too, will recognize Palestinian sovereignty at the General Assembly in September.

Yes, all of these nations are still talking about a two-state solution, which has been a dead letter for years. And no, none uses the term “genocide” in an official capacity: For the time being and the foreseeable future, the legal implications attaching to this term are simply too enormous for this. Neither is there talk in the councils of government anywhere in the West of a full-on sanctions regime such as apartheid South Africa faced, or of investigations of the Zionist state’s plain-as-day crimes against humanity.

Authentic justice, to put this point briefly, is not near. But the honest naming of things brings the end of Israel’s barbarism nearer. Let us not miss which way those summer winds are blowing. They blow in the right direction. And we can expect more gusts.

https://www.unz.com/plawrence/yes-its-a-genocide