Not Saying It Doesn't Mean It's Not True

I’m a writer. Language is serious business. (So are grammatical symbols and I’m confused as to how the quotation marks landed around indiscriminate bombing above.)

Ever since sending that letter, while Biden was mid-presidency, I’ve carried regret over not using the word genocide. I defined it — but I didn’t use it. There was a debate raging about the term which somehow identified usage with anti-semitism. Jews who uttered it were called self-hating. I consciously decided not to go down that ridiculous road.

I should have.

As a Jewish American who hates every form of racist bigotry, I watched in unmitigated horror as the images from Hamas’s October 7 terror attack on Israel appeared on television. The innocent victims were attending a joyful music festival, taking care of their kids — just going about their lives for God’s sake — when fanatical evil darkened their worlds.

But right away I knew that mass killing by a government would follow mass killing by the terrorists. I intuited how this devastating war of revenge was going to go. There and here. (What I lack in orthodox religious piety/understanding I make up for in the ability to foresee political events. Seriously. Future events roll out in my head like new carpet of sequela. My last novel was about true fascism in America. It came out before the election.)

I was right. Rather than undertaking a surgical strike against the heinous terrorists, Netanyahu chose to commit brutality against innocent Palestinians, indiscriminately bombing civilians who had nothing to do with the attacks.

I called him a stupid motherfucker on Facebook. With some ramifications. (Use of that word maybe should have been reconsidered but it’s a noun that carries clout. And I possibly would do it again.) One virtual acquaintance, who suffered personal losses during Hamas’s atrocities, lectured me on the history of the Middle East. I tried to convey that historical events couldn’t erase images of Palestinian parents clawing their way through rubble trying to reach their buried children.

My husband and I attended organizing meetings against American support for Netanyahu’s escalating military action. I carried a Jews for Peace sign at the Charlottesville City Council meeting asking for a resolution calling for a ceasefire. There, a woman in a Hijab came over and thanked me for attending.

We both cried.

There are 60,000 dead Palestinians. Hostages are still being held. Starvation has been weaponized.

And our fascist-loving president plays footsie with Christian Nationalists who — for theological reasons related to the Rapture (!) align with messianic Zionists. Trump says things like ‘finish the job’ to his pal Bibi and salivates over the potential for Gazan real estate he can spray paint gold. He is also riding his ‘concern’ about antisemitism on college campuses to blackmail universities into getting in line for full-on authoritarianism.

Thanks, Prime Minister Netanyahu.

And while language is important, the noise over the word “genocide” is just that. The mass killing of innocent civilians—whether Israeli or Palestinian—should never be minimized or trivialized, and the time to try to stop it is the moment you see it unfolding.