Joseph Massad
Middle East Eye / July 29, 2024
Seeking ideological uniformity on the issue, western officials and their media accomplices have long recognized the centrality of language to their political indoctrination project.
In the official West and its mainstream regime media, there exists a specialized dictionary and thesaurus to translate to the western public all matters Israeli and Palestinian.
Officials and journalists must also adhere to a special grammatical syntax, particularly when using verbs in the active or passive voice.
This definitional and translational practice is central to the politics of western representation. It guarantees ideological uniformity on the issue of Israel and Palestine within the whole range of the respectable political spectrum, which, at least in the US, is so narrow between the Democratic and Republican parties that it could be measured in millimetres.
After 7 October, the enforcement of this dictionary and lexicon was intensified to give cover to Israel’s savagery in Gaza.
This included the demand that government and media officials could not cite the Palestinian health ministry’s statistics on the casualties of Israel’s genocide without prefacing it with “Hamas-run” to cast doubt on the numbers.
Such directives went against the positions of the World Health Organization and other international humanitarian agencies, which expressed full confidence in the accuracy of the casualty figures.
The refusal to accept these figures is the official stance of the US government and the anti-Palestinian Anti-Defamation League, which led the charge in that regard.
The US government was not satisfied with imposing its dictionary within the US alone, however, and sought to impose it on Arab media as well.
In late October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken requested that the Qatari government impose the US dictionary on the Al-Jazeera network in its coverage of the genocide, he assured American Jewish leaders.
Indeed, western governments and financial elites have long recognized the centrality of language to their project of political indoctrination. To this end, their ongoing efforts to police journalists, academics, and the public at large – and enforce compliance with the government-sanctioned ideological dictionary – are imperative.
A review of some examples of these translational efforts by western governments and their subservient media is instructive.
Policing language
The New York Times, the unofficial voice of the US regime and the principal guide to the rest of the western press, leads in its vigilant adherence to these linguistic and dictionarial acrobatics.
In November 2023, The Times’s standards editor, Susan Wessling, along with international editor Philip Pan and their deputies, sent an internal memo to reporters covering Israel’s war on Gaza.
According to its authors, the purpose of the memo was to provide “guidance about some terms and other issues [they] have grappled with since the start of the conflict in October”. This was merely the latest update on language use in the paper’s coverage of Israelis and Palestinians.
The Times editors instructed journalists to restrict the use of terms like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”, not to use the word Palestine “except in rare cases”, and to avoid terms like “refugee camps” and “occupied territory” to describe actual Palestinian refugee camps and Israeli-occupied territories.
The memo further enjoined journalists to be careful in their use of “incendiary” terms like “slaughter”, “massacre”, and “carnage” to describe killings “on all sides”.
Yet, as The Intercept revealed, the paper persisted in using such language “repeatedly to describe attacks against Israelis by Palestinians and almost never in the case of Israel’s large-scale killing of Palestinians”.
In fact, it was anger and infighting among The Times’s own journalists over the outlet’s pro-Israel bias that prompted senior staff to issue this memo and set them straight.
War of words
The language used in naming wars and military operations is also indicative of these translational practices.
Immediately after Israel launched its genocide against the Palestinian people in October, its proponents in the mainstream press rushed to dub it “the Israel-Hamas war“.
This was an interesting label given that Hamas is the legitimate governing body of Gaza. The Palestinian resistance movement had won the last democratically held elections in the West Bank and Gaza in a landslide victory in January 2006.
Soon after it assumed leadership, Hamas was confronted with an American-backed coup to reinstall the collaborating Palestinian Fatah party, which sought to retake control of the Palestinian Authority.
The American coup succeeded in the West Bank but failed in Gaza, where the democratically elected Hamas government defeated the criminal Fatah coup plotters and their backers. All attempts since then to hold new elections have been vehemently opposed by the American-backed, Fatah-run Palestinian Authority, which usurped power in the coup.
Based on this well-documented recent history, Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian people should have at least been referred to as the “Israeli-Palestinian war”, which would be the most neutral description of what has taken place.
This is no less true given the massive escalation in Israeli violence against and killing of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since October.
The Israeli government itself has repeatedly declared war against all Palestinians, yet western media outlets continue to only name Hamas as the target of Israel’s war.
The movement’s condemnation by western officialdom has allowed the political, media, and NGO class to shield Israel from being seen as attacking the Palestinian people as a whole.
Even after killing upwards of 40,000 and injuring more than 90,000 others, Israel continues to be depicted as fighting against illegitimate terrorists.
But if the particular affiliations of movements and political parties in power are so germane to the war, as western politicians and news editors seem to believe, then why not name it the “Likud-Hamas war”?
This naming process, of course, would never be applied to US wars.
Should we speak, for example, of “the Republican-Baath War” to describe Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003?
Since the American Civil War and up to the Reagan administration, all US invasions and foreign wars were launched by the ruling Democratic Party.
Should we then speak of the US Democratic Party’s invasions of Korea and Vietnam instead of the obfuscating nomenclature used in “the Korean War” and “the Vietnam War”? How about the US-Viet Minh War, or to use the racist American term for the Viet Minh, the US-Viet Cong War?
Indeed, the late Republican Senator Bob Dole referred to these wars as “Democrat Wars” in 1976. Were we to do so today, we would, in fact, be entirely accurate in laying the blame on the US Democratic Party for its imperialist carnage, which killed millions in Korea and Vietnam.
It would be equally fair to hold the party responsible for its unconditional backing of Israel’s ongoing carnage in Gaza.
Mainstream outlets like The Times, however, want to hide the truth that Israel is primarily using Hamas as a pretext for its mass killing of the Palestinian people. The number of civilian casualties, including the systematic killing of journalists, doctors, and aid workers, does not seem to sway them from this narrative.
Specialized terms
It has also been noted for decades that The Times and much of the mainstream western press always use the passive voice when reporting on Israeli killings of Palestinians.
Palestinians were mysteriously “killed” (perhaps by extraterrestrials) or they suddenly “die“. On the other hand, news coverage of Palestinian attacks on Israelis always employs the active voice and clearly identifies the perpetrators.
This also applies to the use of “terrorist“, a term reserved only for Palestinians and from which Israel is also shielded.
As I argued two decades ago, the “terrorist” description is based on the national and racial identity of the party committing a certain violent (and sometimes non-violent) act and not on the act itself.
When Israel deliberately targets civilians and kills tens of thousands of them in schools, UN shelters, hospitals, on the streets, and in their homes, its crimes are never described as “terrorist”, whereas Palestinian attacks on Israeli soldiers are instantly branded as “terrorist”.
This is in line with the definitions of the Israeli political lexicon, which I wrote about previously.
Another popular term in this specialized dictionary is one that I have also complained about for decades.
The word “conflict” has long been the term of choice in western and Israeli representations of the Palestinian-Israeli issue, when no one would have ever described French colonialism in Algeria and Algerian anti-colonial resistance as “the French-Algerian conflict”.
This equally applies to the Tunisian, Libyan, Kenyan, Angolan, Zimbabwean and other anti-colonial wars of liberation. Yet the obfuscating western “neutral” term “conflict” is insistently deployed to defend Israeli colonialism.
The refusal to refer to Israeli colonialism made it easy for the official Israeli and western narrative to describe the Hamas Al-Aqsa Flood operation as targeting Israeli Jews on account of their Jewish identity rather than their theft and colonization of Palestinian land.
Such descriptions impose the history of European Christian antisemitism, which victimized Jews, on Palestinian anti-colonial resistance. Their aim is to remove Palestinians from the context of Asian and African anti-colonial struggles of liberation against colonizing Europeans, in which Asians and Africans were the victims, as well as from the context of Israeli Jewish colonialism, which victimizes Palestinians.
Ideological dictionary
The uniqueness of this specialized western dictionary when it comes to all matters Palestinian and Israeli is quite remarkable, as it even extends to geography.
Since the ninth and 13th centuries, respectively, the entire Arabic-speaking and Muslim worlds have recognized the Palestinian cities of al-Quds (also known as Bayt al-Maqdis) and al-Khalil.
Both, however, continue to be rendered in their antiquated pre-ninth century Sumero-Akkadian/Aramaic and the Canaanite/Amorite (often mistaken for Hebrew) respective names of “Jerusalem” and “Hebron” in an obdurate refusal to use the names long established and known by their inhabitants.
Compare this to the western switch in naming “Beiping” and “Peking” as “Beijing” in the 1980s (even if it was decades after the People’s Republic of China had officially adopted “Beijing” as the correct transliteration in 1958) or to the western switch in naming “Bombay” as “Mumbai” in late 1995 once the nationalist Indian government officially adopted the name change.
More recently, when the post-2014 Ukrainian government respelled Russian “Kiev” as “Kyiv” and launched a campaign in 2018 to impose the new spelling internationally, western officialdom and its regime press tripped over themselves in rushing to adopt the new spelling.
Meanwhile, western media outlets still refuse to adopt the name “Türkiye” for Turkey, despite the country officially changing its name at the UN in 2021. The New York Times has even mocked the change.
In the Palestinian case, the names of Palestinian cities must be subject to western Christian and Jewish biblical nomenclature no matter what changes occurred in Palestinian geography and sociology over the last 14 centuries.
In any other case, such biblical terminological use would be laughable.
Would The Times or the secular US government refer to Iraq today as “Mesopotamia”, “Babylon”, or “Ur of the Chaldeans,” for example, because their Bible uses those names?
This intransigent naming is not tenable even in colonial history.
Imagine if the Netherlands today were to insist on calling New York “New Amsterdam”, which is what the Dutch named the southern part of Manhattan when they first colonized it, or “New Netherland” for the eastern United States, or if France were to refer to Haiti as “Saint-Domingue”.
These linguistic choices and the guiding ideological dictionary that informs them are part of the arsenal that western imperialist governments and their mainstream press deploy against the Palestinian people in support of Israel.
They are also used to indoctrinate the western citizenry in the proper and officially sanctioned way to view, or not view, the Palestinian struggle for liberation against a genocidal colonial-settler state.
Indoctrination project
The striking fact that an increasing number of Americans and Europeans have, in recent decades, come to refuse these ideological and translational acrobatics and see through them in their support of the Palestinian struggle is evidence that the West should either use updated and more sophisticated methods of ideological indoctrination or come clean as a most avid supporter and defender of genocide against non-white peoples, which it has always been.
That white supremacist racists are gaining political power in the US and Europe should make such open commitment to racism and genocide easier and more acceptable to a large portion of the white supremacist citizenry. At the very least, it will spare western governments and liberal mainstream media from continued charges of hypocrisy.
This was demonstrated by major concerns that US officials, along with university administrators and their boards of trustees, have expressed over the massive student movement and campus protests supporting the Palestinian struggle.
The rise of fascist and white supremacist political culture in the West has made it possible for members of Congress, US billionaires, and university administrators to come out more openly and shamelessly against academic freedom and freedom of opinion with few apologies.
In light of western governmental and media officials’ failed ideological indoctrination project, attention has shifted to universities to suppress the production of academic knowledge. Such designs seek to transform academics fully into purveyors of the same propaganda disseminated by the media and western governments.
Alex Karp, the CEO of the CIA-backed Palantir, a major US government contractor with close ties to Israel, was most honest when he warned recently: “We kind of just think these things that are happening, across college campuses especially, are like a sideshow – no, they are the show.”
The self-described “progressive” went on to explain: “Because if we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.”
He is joined by other billionaires who urged the mayor of New York to unleash police forces to repress Columbia University’s campus protests.
University administrators, however, did not need any encouragement in that regard as they willingly invited the police to violently dismantle student encampments and end campus protests.
By submitting to these repressive demands, US and European universities will go on to impose the government and media’s specialized dictionary and thesaurus on academics.
Once they are enforced, the last bastion of knowledge production in the West that could at least partially escape this ideological programming will be brought in line with the reigning ideology.
It remains to be seen whether professors and students will accept this lexicon without resistance.
Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York; he is the author of among others Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan; Desiring Arabs; The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism
