Israelspeak: A guide to the Zionist dictionary

In Israelspeak, occupiers are victims, apartheid is democracy, killing children is self-defence, and black is white. And you must swallow this grotesque whole.

One of the many tricks that the settler colonial apartheid state of Israel has played is to give entirely new meanings to words to suit its narratives. The Leaders of the Free World™ mass media unflinchingly parrot the Israeli script, imploring the public to deny the evidence of their own eyes and ears and believe the narrative spin forced down their throats. The unsuspecting masses are expected to digest this grotesque whole.

But the narrative is easy to counter. After all, there’s nothing more powerful than truth, which no amount of narrative spin can alter. The challenge is for us to not take our eyes off reality and stay vigilant against the propaganda peddlers of the naked self-proclaimed Leaders of the Free World™ and their mockingbirds in mass media.

Here’s a brief guide to the Zionist dictionary, breaking down the words and phrases the settler colonial apartheid state of Israel employs against their actual meaning.

(Format: What Israel says: What it actually means)

• A land without a people for a people without land: Settling European Jews in a Palestine full of Arabs.

  
  This is one of the most pernicious lies of Zionism. The lie that Palestine was a land with no inhabitants, which became the perfect place for the European Jews suffering from antisemitism to settle in. However, this propaganda is so fake that it’s risible.

  
  Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, in his book Ten Myths About Israel, quotes from a work of Yonatan Mendel: “The exact percentage of Jews [in Palestine] prior to the rise of Zionism is unknown. However, it probably ranged from 2 to 5 percent. According to Ottoman records, a total population of 462,465 resided in 1878 in what is today Israel/Palestine. Of this number, 403,795 (87 percent) were Muslim, 43,659 (10 percent) were Christians and 15,011 (3 percent) were Jewish.”

  
  Those numbers were from 50 years before the creation of Israel; the Arab population in Palestine had gone above 1.9 million by the end of 1947.

  
  Turns out “the land without a people” was actually a land full of people!

• Making the desert bloom: Ethnically cleansing the land of Palestine, murdering 15,000 and displacing a further 800,000 of its indigenous population.

  
  Following closely from the “land without a people…” absurdity is the propaganda about the Zionists making the desert that was Palestine bloom. The implication is that the Zionist settlers populated the empty land and made it into a blossoming modern state. But like most things Zionism, it’s a lie. The Zionists ethnically cleansed Palestine of its people before renaming all its towns and villages.

  
  Here’s Pappe again: “Palestine was not an empty land. It was part of a rich and fertile eastern Mediterranean world that in the nineteenth century underwent processes of modernisation and nationalisation. It was not a desert waiting to come into bloom; it was a pastoral country on the verge of entering the twentieth century as a modern society, with all the benefits and ills of such a transformation. Its colonisation by the Zionist movement turned this process into a disaster for the majority of the native people living there.” [Italics added]

• The only democracy in the Middle East: The only apartheid regime in the Middle East.

  
  Israel is as much a democracy as Joe Biden is the President of Venezuela.

  
  An April 2021 Human Rights Watch report labelled Israel as an apartheid state. The report said: “Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”

  
  A February 2022 Amnesty International report reached the same conclusion. It said: “Amnesty International’s new investigation shows that Israel imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians across all areas under its control: in Israel and the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territories], and against Palestinian refugees, in order to benefit Jewish Israelis. This amounts to apartheid as prohibited in international law.”

  
  Every media report that addresses Israel as a normal country deserves not to be taken seriously. The only acceptable way of referring to Israel should be to call it the settler colonial apartheid state of Israel.
  

• Israel has the right to defend itself: Israel has the right to indiscriminately kill as many civilians, including women and children, as it wants. And no one can stop it from doing so.

  
  The Israelis repeat the well-worn line about self-defence every time they go on a murder spree against the natives of Palestine. The orgy of violence that the Israelis have perpetrated since October 7 — which has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians, over half of the children — has been done with the settler colonial apartheid state and its cheerleaders in the West doing their self-defence routine ad infinitum.

  
  On the other hand, the Palestinians — who have a legitimate and internationally-recognised right to resist their occupiers in every way possible — are routinely denied that right.

  
  In the given circumstances, Israel’s right to defend itself has been a cloak for the Zionist regime to drape itself in when they commit their genocidal crimes. Only their Western partners buy this shtick. The rest of the world sees it for the evil that that propaganda is.

  

• Human shields: Palestinian civilians, including children.

  
  It’s a favourite of the Zionists and has been widely debunked by international humanitarian agencies. In fact, the Israel-based human rights organisation, B’Tselem, has documented numerous instances of the Israelis using Palestinian civilians, including children, as human shields.
  

• Human animals: Palestinian civilians, including children.

  
  It’s another staple of Zionists that they began deploying before the inception of the settler colonial apartheid state of Israel.

  
  Sample these exhibits:

  
  Exhibit A: “Palestinians are beasts walking on two legs.” — Menachem Begin, former Prime Minister of Israel

  
  Exhibit B: “We are fighting against human animals.” — Yoav Gallant, Israel’s Defence Minister

  
  Exhibit C: “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle.” — Rafael Eitan, former Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army

  
  The list is long, but you get the drift.
  

• Israel Defence Forces (IDF): Israel Occupation Forces (IOF).

  
  Countries have defence forces. Occupying forces cannot have defensive troops. It’s that simple. The Israelis are illegally occupying the West Bank and have illegally blockaded the Gaza Strip for the past 16 years on the strength of their occupation forces that routinely harass, beat, and kill the population they occupy.
  

• The Most Moral Army in the World™: Ravenous, bloodthirsty terrorists in uniform, i.e., the IOF.

  
  Here’s a 40-point laundry list that details the astoundingly tone-deaf claim of the Israeli occupation forces that it has no moral equivalent anywhere in the world.

  

• Terrorists: The routinely humiliated occupied Palestinian population fighting for liberation.

  
  The label remains in place irrespective of whether the resistance is violent or peaceful.
  

• Terrorist nests/Terrorist headquarters: Hospitals in Gaza.

  
  Here’s is an actual statement from what the West perceives as a legitimate army and signed publicly by dozens of Israeli doctors: “The residents of Gaza, who saw fit to turn the hospitals into terrorist nests in an attempt to take advantage of Western morality, are the ones who brought their destruction upon themselves — terrorism must be eliminated everywhere and in any way. Attacking terrorist headquarters located inside a hospital is the right, and even the duty of the IDF [Israel Defence Forces].” Josef Mengele would have been proud of these doctors.

  
  Of course, the Israelis have produced exactly zero evidence of hospitals being used by Hamas as bases, let alone its headquarters.

  
  And Israeli mouthpieces in the Western media are doing propaganda on their behalf. Sample this bit from a New York Times article: “Senior Israeli intelligence officials allowed The Times to review photographs that purported to show secret entrances to the compound from inside the hospital. Signs identifying the location as Al Shifa were clearly visible in the photographs, though their authenticity could not be independently verified.” [Italics added.]

  
  Notice the part “though their authenticity could not be independently verified.” Why publish unverified facts, then, NYT? Isn’t this a textbook case of journalistic malpractice?

  
  But then, it would be foolish to expect any better from a newspaper that (in)famously spread the Iraq WMDs propaganda and has willfully cheered on every American war.

• Self-hating Jew: A Jewish person opposed to Zionism, such as Miko Peled and Norman Finkelstein.
  

• Antisemite: Any person opposed to the Zionist project in Palestine and policies of the Israeli government.

  
  This could be virtually anyone in the world except the most rabid Zionists. The term has been variously applied to peaceful protestors against Israeli war crimes — even Jewish organisations, people opposed to the excesses of the state of Israel, and politicians not willing to tow the Israeli lobby (for example Jeremy Corbyn), among a wide variety of others.

  
  Anyone can be labelled an antisemite, and everything could be termed antisemitic, including waving Palestinian flags, wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh, and chanting of Palestinian liberation.

  
  Antisemite is probably the most open-ended word in the Zionist vocabulary.
  

• Hate speech/Antisemitic speech: Any speech that the Israelis don’t like.

  
  Just like the word antisemite, this has an extremely wide brushstroke.

  
  This, too, could be applied to virtually any speech/slogan/song/poem/word/utterance in the world. Even the liberationist chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which speaks of the Palestinian aspirations of liberating their homeland from the clutches of Zionism, is categorised as hate speech or antisemitic speech by the Israelis.

  
  Moreover, according to the Israelis, Palestinians can’t even boycott companies that uphold the Israeli apartheid because that would be antisemitic. The Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which promotes boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions against Israel, has been vilified and labelled antisemitic by the Israeli government. And the Western governments are completely on board with the Israeli framing of even this non-violent and peaceful form of Palestinian resistance, designating it antisemitic.

• Hamas bases: Anything that the Israelis wish to bomb is a Hamas base. If they have bombed it already, it’s because it was a Hamas base.

  
  This is another phrase with a massive brushstroke. It can mean anything and everything in Gaza, including, but not limited to, civilian homes, churches, mosques, schools, refugee camps, UN shelters, hospitals, bakeries, grocery stores, you name it.
  

• Mowing the grass: Routine and periodic bombing of residential complexes and other civilian infrastructure in Gaza by the Israeli occupation forces.

  
  The Israeli regime has made this mantra into a virtual state policy that it implements with impunity, downing entire housing complexes with precision-guided missiles whenever it feels like.

  

• Wave of antisemitism/Rise in antisemitism: The Israelis are committing war crimes, and people in the West are protesting against it.

  
  This is an interesting one and would have made the Nazi propaganda maestro Joseph Goebbels proud.

  
  The Israelis trot this out every time they commit excesses in Gaza or the West Bank — like they are doing right now — because they know that their indiscriminate violence against the indigenous Palestinian population will ultimately see protests from the conscientious masses that will be inconvenient to the Israeli state propaganda machinery. Therefore, they preemptively — and through strategic employment of their attack dogs in the West like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the mass media — start spouting “wave of antisemitism” and “rising antisemitism in the West” like a mantra to shut down, defame, or dismiss protesting voices.

  
  You can see this in action right now as protesters across US and European campuses and the streets have been labelled antisemites, threatened with dire consequences, like loss of employment, and even arrest.

• Gaza hospitals caught in a deadly crossfire: Genocidal Israelis attacking hospitals.

  

  Take a bow, New York Times.

  The stories about Israeli attacks on Gaza hospitals full of patients are spun by the Zionist apologists in Western media — led by the New York Times, in all kinds of ways to suit the Zionist narrative. This particular headline in particular is cartoonishly inane. It paints a picture of Palestinian resistance fighters taking up positions on the roof and behind the windows of Gaza hospitals fighting the Israeli Occupation Forces, which is patently false.

  
  But NYT, the mouthpiece of the American security establishment that has cheerfully applauded every single American intervention abroad, just can’t help itself.
  

• Palestinians died: Palestinians killed by the genocidal Israelis.

  
  “Died” is how the Western press refers to the Palestinians whom the Israelis butcher. This framing makes it sound like the death was due to some natural cause or a disease, like, say, tuberculosis or pneumonia. It conveniently hides the fact that the settler colonial apartheid state murdered the Palestinians.
  

• Israel’s right to exist: Israel has the right to continue exterminating the natives of Palestine, and no one should object or intervene as it does so.

  
  “Israel’s right to exist” is a convenient euphemism for the settler colonial apartheid state, which has never defined its borders and is nothing more than a Western military outpost in the Middle East — as was made abundantly clear by Joe Biden over 30 years ago and has been recently reaffirmed by US presidential hopeful, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — to continue its land grabbing, ethnic cleansing, and genocidal rampage in Palestine and its neighbouring countries.

  
  Those who parrot this Israeli propaganda line — either deliberately or out of ignorance of facts — never talk about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that brought Israel into existence in 1948. And the routine humiliation, imprisonment, torture, segregation, terrorism, and dehumanisation that the Palestinians have endured for the past 75 years — and still continue to endure.

  
  As Jewish linguist Noam Chomsky has pointed out, no state other than Israel demands a “right to exist.” Yet, in the Israeli context, that statement is supposed to be accepted with a straight face.

  
  Chomsky: “No state demands a ‘right to exist,’ nor is any such right accorded to any state, nor should it be. Mexico recognises the US, but not its ‘right to exist’ sitting on half of Mexico, acquired by aggression. The same generalises.”

  
  He continues: “To my knowledge, the concept ‘right to exist’ was invented by US-Israeli propaganda in the 1970s, when the Arab states (with the support of the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organisation]) formally recognised Israel’s right to exist within secure and recognised borders (citing the wording of UN 242). It was therefore necessary to raise the bars to prevent the negotiations that the US and Israel alone (among significant actors) were blocking, as they still are.  They understood, of course, that there is no reason why Palestinians should recognise the legitimacy of their dispossession — and the point generalises, as noted, to just about every state; maybe not Andorra.”
  

• Israel is a victim: Israel is the aggressor.

  
  The very existence of a settler colonial apartheid state is a crime against the people it colonises, Palestinians in this instance. Israel is a criminal enterprise that masquerades as a country.

  
  Created as an ethnostate exclusively for Jews, Israel refuses to acknowledge its Arab population as equal citizens and denies them the rights of citizenship that the Jews enjoy. Moreover, when not ethnically cleansing Palestinian villages and towns, Israel continues to visit upon its colonised population with all kinds of inhuman indignities in a bid to push them out and usurp all the land of historic Palestine — and beyond — for itself.

  
  Talking of a dystopian future, George Orwell, in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four, wrote, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” This imagined dystopian future has been the Palestinian reality for the past 75 years, and it continues to get worse.

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