From Armenia to Gaza: The Language of Denial That Makes Atrocities Possible -
In 1947, two years after the collapse of the regime that had threatened his life, the German Jewish philologist Victor Klemperer published a short book titled "The Language of the Third Reich" ("Lingua Tertii Imperii"). Klemperer, who escaped extermination because he was married to a non-Jewish woman, did not write about extermination camps or SS death squads. He wrote about words.
Nazism, he argued, penetrated society not only through speeches and posters in the streets, but primarily through expressions that people unwittingly internalized, like tiny doses of poison entering the bloodstream. Individual words, expressions and syntactic patterns were imposed on the masses through millions of repetitions, then adopted mechanically and unconsciously. The poison, he wrote, does not act immediately. It accumulates.
These terms are familiar to almost everyone today, and that is precisely why they are worth recalling. Consider a few examples: "special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung), a euphemism for killing; "resettlement" or "relocation" (Umsiedlung), a euphemism for forced deportation and extermination; "protective custody" (Schutzhaft), meaning arbitrary detention without judicial review, frequently in a concentration camp; and "mercy death" or "mercy killing" (Gnadentod), a euphemism for the murder of disabled people under the Nazi "euthanasia" program. Then there is the most infamous _expression_ of all, "the Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (Endlösung der Judenfrage), formulated in an unmistakably bureaucratic style: There is a problem, there is a solution, there are no bodies.
In her account of the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt examined what the Nazis called "language rules" (Sprachregelungen), a system of euphemisms and coded expressions used to disguise murder and deportation. She showed that these terms were not intended merely to conceal the crimes from the world. First and foremost, they allowed the perpetrators themselves to continue functioning without having to lie. They gave the murderers words, terms and sentences they could live with.
This phenomenon was not unique to Germany, and it certainly did not end with the fall of the Third Reich. Decades before the Nazi genocide, the Ottoman government presented the forced deportation of Armenians during the First World War as an administrative measure, using the term tehcir, meaning "deportation" or "removal."
Under Argentina's military dictatorship, traslado – or "transfer" – was a euphemism for taking prisoners away to be killed. Some were murdered on the infamous "death flights" – thrown alive into the sea or the Río de la Plata. Officially unaccounted for, they became known as the desaparecidos – "the disappeared" – as though they had simply evaporated. During the Rwandan genocide, Hutu killers called murder "work" and their Tutsi victims "cockroaches."
Similar terms also became entrenched in the United States, each within a particular historical context. "Collateral damage" became increasingly prominent during and after the Vietnam War, when the military needed to quantify the killing of civilians without calling it what it was. After the September 11 attacks, the CIA and the George W. Bush administration used the term "enhanced interrogation techniques" for coercive practices that included waterboarding; in other words, torture. This terminology enabled the use of torture without invoking the word itself, helping prevent those practices from being legally defined as crimes in the first place.
In his canonical 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell wrote that political language is designed "to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable." Later researchers demonstrated that syntax itself can perform an ideological role. The passive voice erases the perpetrators of a crime, leaving only its victims in view: "Palestinians were killed."
Agentless constructions – including passives and sentences built around unaccusative verbs – turn an event into a process that happened by itself, like a change in the weather: "Clashes developed"; "an escalation occurred." The distinction between "us" and "them" creates a superficial dichotomy between the "good" and the "bad." Our actions are described in the language of intentions and circumstances: "an intelligence failure"; "they were accidentally harmed." Their actions, meanwhile, are described in the language of inherent characteristics: "bloodthirsty"; "consumed by profound hatred."
In his 2001 book "States of Denial," Stanley Cohen distinguished literal denial, "it did not happen," from interpretive denial, in which the basic facts are acknowledged but given a different meaning. Yes, people died, but it was not a massacre or a murder. It was an "incident" or an "event." It is not an occupation, but a "situation." It is not an expulsion, but an "evacuation."
And there is no better example than the appalling phrase "encouraging voluntary migration." The state that destroyed most of the homes in the Gaza Strip, cut off supplies of food, water, electricity and medicine, prevented reconstruction and repeatedly displaced a million people has established a dedicated bureau within the Defense Ministry to encourage migration. It offers "infrastructure that allows passage by land, sea and air" and announces that a significant proportion of residents are indeed "interested" in emigrating.
This is a dialectical euphemism. Instead of concealing the expulsion, it turns it on its head. The criminal becomes a service provider, the expelled person becomes a client, and ethnic cleansing becomes the work of a government bureau with a name and a budget. The word "voluntary" assumes the existence of free will. But that will, if it exists at all, is itself a product of devastation and destruction. First, conditions are created in which life becomes impossible. Then fleeing those conditions is presented as a choice. In this way, the liberal language of freedom of movement and personal choice is enlisted in the service of demographic engineering.
Like any euphemism, this one is also an admission. Some have already called the new body by its plain name: "the Transfer Bureau." That is the correct name. It simply goes unmentioned in the compliant media and in public discourse.
The Israeli media now has a complete, efficient and polished lexicon designed to implant euphemistic descriptions of the state's crimes in the minds of Israelis. Mass killing in Gaza falls under the heading of "operational activity." The destruction of entire neighborhoods becomes "mowing the lawn" or "flattening," images borrowed from gardening and construction. A targeted airstrike that kills dozens of innocent people is described as a "thwarting" or "neutralization," terms from the world of intelligence that imply the prevention of some greater evil. An area that continues to be bombed, such as Al-Mawasi in southern Gaza, is called a "humanitarian zone." And when it becomes clear that uninvolved civilians, including children, have been killed, passive formulations take over: "were killed during an operation," "lost their lives," "fatalities were reported."
When one Israeli is killed, we learn their name, age, hometown, parents and spouse or partner. But when dozens of Palestinians are killed, we are given only a number and sometimes the source of the report – "according to the Gaza Health Ministry" – accompanied by an insinuation that the information should not be believed in the first place.
Last month, a group of Israelis entered the outskirts of the village of Tell, west of Nablus, near the mosque. On television news, they were described as "hikers." Not settlers, not a murderous mob, not even a group that had come from the area around the Havat Gilad outpost. Just "hikers," a word that calls to mind a family outing on a Saturday morning. It presents the intruders as entirely innocent people, since someone out for a hike is unlikely to have initiated the violence. By the time the report says that they "encountered Palestinians who attacked them," the whole scene has already been arranged for us: There was a nature outing, a trail and a group of peaceful Saturday hikers. Then, suddenly, Palestinian murderers appeared and brought violence with them.
In reality, raids by armed settlers on villages in the area – Far'ata, Jit, Madama and Jalud – and the attempts by Palestinian residents to stop them had already been documented for days. In the confrontation in Tell, four members of the Ramadan family were killed, along with a member of the Havat Gilad security squad and an IDF officer. The Israeli victims were described in detail, including their names, ages, places of residence and family backgrounds. The Palestinian victims were reduced by most media outlets to a single label: "terrorists."
It is a generic term bestowed retroactively, after a killing, on any Palestinian who harms a Jew, even if he was trying to defend his home and family from armed Jewish thugs. Then comes the familiar description, which itself provides retrospective justification: "the terrorist was eliminated." The definition precedes the investigation and, in practice, makes it unnecessary.
If the same scene had unfolded in reverse, would the language have remained the same? If a group of armed Palestinians had entered the outskirts of an Israeli community on a Saturday morning, near the synagogue, and confronted the residents, would anyone on television news have called them "hikers"? Would the residents who came out to repel them have been called "terrorists"?
This is precisely what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu meant by "symbolic violence." It is not a lie that someone decided to sell or an instruction handed down from above, but a set of categories of thought internalized so deeply that both the person doing the classifying and the person being classified accept them as natural. A news editor who writes "hikers" or "terrorists" does not feel that they are choosing a word. They feel that they are describing reality. That is the power of symbolic violence. It requires no administrative enforcement because it is already embedded in our vocabulary.
The linguistic mechanism Klemperer described exists in every society that wants to continue doing something it already knows it cannot call by its proper name. A euphemism is not decoration or garnish. It is infrastructure. It allows a reasonable, moral citizen to watch the news, say, "What's happening there is terrible," and then move on to the next episode of "Married at First Sight" or "Dancing with the Stars" without anything disturbing their psychological equilibrium.
The great transgression, however, belongs not only to the sanctimonious media. It also belongs to the opposition, which has adopted the very same lexicon. Yair Golan, leader of the opposition party the Democrats, once dared to break through the barrier and say that a sane country "does not kill babies as a hobby." He was universally condemned and rushed to explain, qualify and soften his statement. The lesson Golan appears to have learned concerns not the limits of criticism, but the limits of its vocabulary. One may criticize the conduct of the war or what is happening in the West Bank, but one may not call the consequences by their precise names.
Gadi Eisenkot, currently the leading candidate in the anti-government camp, embodies the same principle in his own way. He demands the establishment of a state commission of inquiry into the October 7 massacre and the subsequent war, and calls for personal responsibility, yet he says almost nothing about settler violence in the West Bank or the "voluntary migration" bureau. This silence cannot be dismissed as a mere electoral tactic, because it has far-reaching historical significance.
When those who claim to offer an alternative to the government speak the government's language, euphemism ceases to be the propaganda of a single political camp and becomes the national voice. In that case, even the mandate of a state commission of inquiry, assuming one is ever established, will be written in the same language. It will therefore be unable to reach accurate conclusions about an event that was never called by its true name: genocide.
The only critical role left to us, as media consumers who still believe in the integrity of language and in humanistic values, is an interpretive one. When we hear a report about an "incident," we must ask who did what to whom. When we hear about "hikers," we must ask where they came from and what weapons they were carrying. When we hear that people "were killed," we must ask who killed them. When we hear the word "terrorist," we must ask who exactly initiated the violence. And when we hear about "operational activity" in Gaza, we must try to understand what is actually happening to the innocent victims, exposed in flimsy tents to a barrage of bombs falling from the sky.
Klemperer wrote that poisonous words had entered his bloodstream. They are entering ours as well. But we can still choose the right words to replace them. For now, that is almost the only thing we have left to do.
Prof. Daniel Blatman is a historian of the Holocaust and genocide.