Beware Netanyahu’s Orwellian ‘War of Revival’ doublespeak |
This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is determinedly seeking to have us all remember the war Israel had to wage against Hamas after the terrorists invaded on October 7, 2023, as the “War of Revival.”
By cabinet fiat last October, Netanyahu replaced the official IDF designation of the conflict, “Swords of Iron,” which had been announced on the very day that Hamas carried out its invasion, with his carefully chosen “War of Revival.” He routinely utilizes the term in his Knesset speeches. Presumably, it is what his planned self-appointed and self-mandated political commission of inquiry into the war would investigate, and pronounce Netanyahu unstained.
As things stand, the wording on the graves of soldiers killed on and since October 7 simply states, in lieu of a formal decision, that they “fell in battle,” without specifying a name for the war in which they were killed. The IDF noted this week that no decision has yet been made by the government as to whether to impose the “War of Revival” wording on the soldiers’ graves — a potential requirement that some families are bitterly vowing to resist.
In similar vein, last week, Netanyahu’s office ordered the excision of the word “massacre” from the title of legislation establishing an annual commemoration of the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught.
The prime minister’s goal, needless to say, is to remove or at least marginalize the failures surrounding the Hamas-led invasion from the public consciousness and thus escape his crushing personal responsibility.
Most Israelis think of the two years of fighting, bluntly, simply and accurately, as “the October 7 war.” Netanyahu’s doublespeak seeks to misrepresent what was an essential resort to force — against any enemy that had been unfathomably allowed to breach Israel’s defenses and carry out the worst massacre in modern Israeli history — as some kind of war of choice, an initiated conflict that Israel opted to embark upon in order to achieve a glorious revitalization.
The war that Israel launched after thousands of Hamas-led terrorists brutally murdered some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in southern Israel and abducted 251 to Gaza was not a “war of revival.” Neither, as some cynics have sniped, was it the “war of self-revival” for Netanyahu.
It was, rather, a war of survival, a necessary........