When the rape of language takes place

(JNS) — The phenomenon of playing with terminology—altering the original meanings of words, replacing intentions of expressions, mistranslating and reversing narratives—has become the weapon of choice of the anti-Zionists. Whereas in previous decades their propaganda was one of simply misleading, misquoting, misrepresenting and outright lying, today’s pro-Palestine cadres create a new vocabulary and fill terms with their preferred new definitions.

Not only has a new glossary of terms been fashioned, but those terms and words do not just describe a presumed political and sociological landscape. Rather, they act as armaments in a war of rhetoric with the ethos of pseudoscientific genuineness.

In Canada, a Cree Nation member Meghan Scribe wrote: “This is not to suggest that the matter of ethnic fraud is not important. Race-shifting belongs to an ecosystem of settler colonial violence present in both the Canadian and Israeli context.”

Max Blumenthal provides another example of phraseology founded on the distortion of the truth: “Israel’s Final Solution for Gaza was always clear to those of us who understood the essentially genocidal logic of Zionism … the expulsion of residents of the north at gunpoint and replacement of their refugee camps with Jews-only settlements.”

Israeli-born (sorry, British Mandate Palestine-born) professor Ronit Lentin is a prime example of what I would refer to as the crime of language rape. Her latest article, “Racial Regimes and White European Jewish Supremacy as Property,” includes the following language: Zionism is a racial regime; Israel is engaged in a permanent war against the Palestinians, which is a war of racialization; it dehumanizes colonized Palestinians; and it acquires territory from native ownership through the mobilization of technologies of violence.

This language is not meant to explain or even argue a point. It’s meant to whip up a frenzied public response based on a twist—that irrationality is truth. It lends a veneer of intellectualism whereas it is but supercharged agitprop.

Back in 2019, an issue of Israel Studies appeared devoted to the theme of “Word Crimes: Reclaiming the Language of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” Its essays dealt with key terms in current critical scholarship on the conflict that anti-Zionists use on behalf of Palestine. Its editors sought to “restore academic integrity.” The use of “word crimes” was promoted as well as “linguistic transgressions.” It drew, of course, a harsh response. Since then, the situation has only worsened with academics, pundits and activists seeking even more negative imagery particularly the charge of “genocide,” despite its irrationality.

Writing in the New Left Review on Oct. 13, for example, Sai Englert was positive that: “In Gaza, Israel is gearing up to commit genocide.” After all, he claimed, there had already been “18 years of siege by land, air and water during which Israel’s stated policy was to ‘put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger’ by severely restricting food access.”

Englert, a Socialist activist and a lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, employs also yet another language rape crime weapon that is the usage of “racist.” In an academic paper, he introduces “racial capitalism” to the Arab-Israel conflict, a theory first promoted in 1983 as a framework of black Marxism. To his intersectional Marxist mind, the “genocide” in Gaza should be understood “as an extreme expression of the continuous violence necessary to maintain not only local settler colonial rule but the global capitalist system as a whole.”

At the center of his thesis, Englert wishes that we understand Zionism’s role in “maintaining Western imperialism at a crucial nodal point of the world economy.” For him, there are connections between “settler colonialism and racial capitalism.” Racial capitalism, he explains, is a “set of techniques, whereby the ruling class stabilises or undermines points of tension within the reproduction of capitalism.” In relation to the idea of a “Palestine,” Zionism acts imperialistically and employs “processes of racialisation, dispossession and conquest.”

In this bandying about of “racism,” there is a bit of historical irony.

In a recent article devoted to Israel Zangwill in European Judaism, Laura Almagor investigates Zangwill’s understanding of “race,” a term also employed by other Zionist thinkers such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who penned an anti-Marxist article on “Race and Nationality” in 1913 rejecting the idea of racial purity, preferring “racial recipe,” as well as one criticizing America’s racism against blacks, which he deplored.

In fact, as noted by the reviewer of a recent book—Jews, Race, and the Politics of Difference: The Case of Vladimir Jabotinsky against the Russian Empire—Jabotinsky’s Zionism and his usage of “race” included “an outcry against the systemic oppression of people who did not fit into the established positions of sanctioned differences … within the prevailing scientific premises, [Jabotinsky’s] consolidation around the principles of racial groupness served as a tool for decolonization and the acquisition of political subjectivity.”

She explains that Zangwill believed that differences between races were non-existent in the “civilized” world, that “every people is a hotch-pot of races. … An individual’s colour is not an ‘unbridgeable and elemental distinction,’ and even Jews appeared in all shades: ‘No race is supposed to be purer than my own, yet … none is more mixed, varying as it does from negroid to blonde.’ ”Moreover, at that pre-World War I period, as she notes, the Jews were those considered non-white and faced racial discrimination in denying them their national rights.

There is a rational to all this language rape, and it is to intellectualize the vision of the radical Marxist left. It is not so much the media that has globalized anti-Zionism as much as it is the academics who educated the journalists to view Israel as a colonialist-settler enterprise. It is their anti-Zionism itself that is essentially genocidal in its seeking to deny Jews their national identity, their historical, religion and cultural heritage.

And thus, they bring about the justification of Arab terror and Islamist-Jihadist ideology that desires the deaths of Jews, not as Zionists but as Jews—the Jews of the Quran and its Hadith writings, the Jews they are commanded to do away with.