Israeli Press
Holocaust historian tells Israelis their news language launders the Gaza war
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The Israeli historian of the Holocaust and genocide Daniel Blatman argues in the liberal daily Haaretz on Sunday that Israel's security establishment and media have rebuilt the Hebrew vocabulary so that the crimes in Gaza can continue without disturbing anyone's conscience.
Blatman opens with Victor Klemperer, the Jewish philologist who catalogued how Nazi German normalised murder through terms like "special treatment" and "resettlement", and walks through Armenia's "transfer", Argentina's "disappeared", Rwanda's "work", and America's "collateral damage" and "enhanced interrogation".
Israel's press, in his telling, now runs the same machinery: massacres filed as "military operations", flattened neighbourhoods as "mowing the grass", the bombed al-Mawasi strip as a "humanitarian zone", and a defence ministry directorate for "voluntary migration" that he says should carry its real name — the transfer administration.
His sharpest passage concerns the village of Tell, where four members of the Ramadan family were killed. Armed men who came from around the Havat Gilad outpost were reported as "hikers", he writes, while the Palestinians who confronted them became "terrorists" — a label that precedes and replaces explanation.
Blatman faults the opposition too: Yair Golan was punished for plain speech and moderated himself, and Gadi Eisenkot demands an October 7 inquiry while barely mentioning settler violence. A commission phrased in the government's own language, he warns, will never name the event it investigates.
The only role left to readers, Blatman concludes, is to ask of every report: who did what to whom.
