The war’s name is a switch, not a description |
The war’s name is a switch, not a description
David Horovitz’s warning about the attempt to brand the Gaza war as a “War of Revival” is not merely a complaint about rhetoric. It is a precise diagnosis of how a political system tries to relocate the beginning of an Event in order to relocate accountability. And it matters even more because Horovitz is not just another voice in the Times of Israel ecosystem. He is one of the figures who helps define what counts as sober, responsible public speech inside that institutional gravity well. That is exactly why his alarm has weight.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/beware-netanyahus-orwellian-war-of-revival-doublespeak/
Here is the mechanism in its simplest form. If the war is anchored as “the October 7 war,” the temporal origin is an imposed breach: catastrophe, failure, exposed seams in governance. The default public demand becomes audit. How did this happen. What failed. Who failed. Which chains of decision and warning collapsed. In that regime, inquiry is native. Audit is not an attack; it is the ordinary continuation of survival by other means.
If the war is anchored as “revival,” the temporal origin flips. The war becomes a chosen arc, a teleology, a mission-story. Once that happens, the same facts do not disappear; they lose operational force. Failure no longer demands audit. Failure becomes the inevitable price of a historic process. Responsibility dilutes into destiny. This does not require bad faith. It is how institutional language works once it becomes infrastructure.
Horovitz points to exactly the right symptoms. The push to impose the “revival” label even on soldiers’ graves is not a detail; it is the tell. When a term is engraved, it stops being an opinion and becomes a future constraint on speech. Likewise, the reported effort to remove the word “massacre” from proposed annual commemoration legislation is not a stylistic choice. It is the removal of a high-energy descriptor that forces a specific causal and moral topology. Remove it, and the Event’s capacity to compel inquiry is weakened.
The non-obvious point is that this kind of device does not even need to persuade. It only needs to shift the baseline of what sounds normal. Once the baseline moves, inquiry begins to sound political, audit begins to sound divisive, and refusal begins to sound like betrayal. The system does not censor; it reclassifies. And reclassification is more efficient than censorship, because it recruits citizens into doing the policing themselves.
There is a second-order effect that deserves attention: it also captures critics. When the beginning is relocated, even opponents are pressured to argue within the new starting point. The most efficient device is the one that recruits its opponents into debating on its chosen terrain. The conflict can remain loud while the parameters quietly close.
A name therefore works like a switch on the conditions of discussion. It does not change the facts themselves; it changes which facts can lead to consequences. It determines which questions sound natural and which begin to sound inappropriate.
When the reference point is October 7, questions about failure follow naturally: where information broke down, where procedures failed, who made the wrong decisions. When the reference point becomes “revival,” those same questions begin to sound like an attempt to undermine purpose. Critique does not need to be refuted. It only needs to be made socially unaskable.
So the dispute is not about taste. It is about whether a society retains the capacity to audit itself while grieving, rather than being instructed to grieve inside a prefabricated teleology. Horovitz is effectively defending the possibility of audit. Without that, revival becomes a polite name for insulating failure.
The most effective renaming does not persuade people — it makes everyone start talking about something else.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig