How Semantic Inflation Targets Israel

Last week’s massacre in Bondi Beach, Australia, underscores the lethality of anti-semitism. Two gunmen killed 15 people and wounded 40 as they celebrated Hanukkah. Always preceding such acts comes the ideological incitement to hatred. And in Australia, that incitement exists in phrases calling for murder (“globalize the Intifada”) and the accusation that Israel is perpetrating a genocide. This last canard reflects the fact that ours is a time of semantic inflation and depreciation.

Once-clear terms are hijacked and turned upside down in ways George Orwell would recognize all too well. A case in point is the term “genocide.” Coined by the prominent Polish-Jewish international lawyer Raphael Lemkin to describe the Nazis’ mass murder of European Jewry during World War II, it has long since been subjected to this inflation-depreciation process. Nevertheless, real genocides or attempts to launch them are occurring right before our eyes, even as political figures, either seeking to score profits or points, or simply ignorant and misinformed, aid and abet the process by which this term is devalued.

For example, there can be little doubt that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine fully conforms to the UN’s definition of the term genocide. Russian president Vladimir Putin’s 2021 manifesto, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” depicted an independent Ukrainian state as a “betrayal” of Russian nationhood. The conduct of Russian forces, the mass murders, rapes, and kidnappings of Ukrainian children into Russia, and the ongoing Russification of the territories occupied by Russia, all confirm the genocidal intent behind this invasion. 

Likewise, the wars in Sudan, especially in Darfur, both in 2003-05 and now, and

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