Gaslighting Israel: How the Word Genocide Lost Its Meaning

Last week, during our weekly coffee date, another friend and I found ourselves, as we often do, circling back to the realities of war and loss. The conversation turned to a podcast about the historian Dirk Moses, and suddenly something clicked. Every time we hear the word genocide thrown at Israel, we feel not only frustration but disorientation.

It feels like the very words we have used to name our people’s deepest wounds are being twisted and hurled back at us. That reversal is not just painful. It is disorienting, a true masterclass in gaslighting.

As just one example, I saw the same inversion in yesterday’s headlines. The media reported the attack yesterday in Jerusalem as a “shooting attack,” as if it just happened. Civilians mowed down, not by men who chose to act, but by some faceless structural force, like a freak storm or a sudden gust of wind.

Our coffee conversation gave me some clarity. Our problems today are not only strategic and political but also deeply conceptual. We would be remiss to ignore or deny the power of conceptual frameworks because that is where language is formed, incubated, and disseminated to the world.

In activist and academic circles, the meaning of the word genocide has shifted. Understanding where this inversion came from and how it is used helped me locate the source of some of my frustration. Historian Dirk Moses challenged the way genocide is understood. In his book The Problems of Genocide, he argued that it is not only about extermination campaigns like the Holocaust. He introduced the idea of “permanent security.”

When a state views another group as a danger, it can shift from managing conflict to eliminating the future possibility of conflict. Its policies are thus no longer about reducing ad hoc tensions. They are about removing the chance that the group could ever threaten them again. Displacement, blockades, and even destruction can and are framed as necessary for survival. He views this process as somewhat inevitable, as an essential function of the power dynamics of state power.

This conceptual shift opened the way for critics to recast Israel’s very existence as genocidal, dismantling the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty at its root. In this framing, Palestinian resistance is no longer about negotiating borders, policies, or specific grievances. It is cast as a zero-sum struggle for survival itself, since Israel is defined not as a state with contested policies but as an illegitimate entity whose very existence is the threat.

Moses’s framework could be applied to many modern states. But in practice, it is Israel that bears the weight of his intellectual influence, as his theory has been seized on to provide cover for those who say Jewish sovereignty itself is a crime.

Once Moses’s idea entered politics, the message was simple. Palestinians live under “permanent security.” Therefore, their resistance must never end.

Naturally, that framing makes peace not only not a goal, but impossible. It turns violence against civilians into acts of justice, while Israel’s defense is rebranded as proof of genocidal intent.

Faced with these arguments, supporters of Israel often respond with statistics. Casualty numbers are not on the scale of genocide, they argue. Other wars have been far deadlier. Israel provides humanitarian aid even during conflict.

But none of these answers is ever adequate, and there’s a reason. Once sovereignty itself is defined as illegitimate, no logical argument can undo the accusation. And the disorientation deepens: the words Jews once used to describe the shattering of their own people have been turned inside out. The inversion itself becomes part of the assault.

We are finally a people in our homeland, and with that comes the work of freely reengaging with our language in our land. To watch words like genocide inverted against us is not just an academic barb. It is an attack on our ability to name ourselves and to speak truth about our history.

Forever resistance also mirrors and popularizes jihadist ideology, where groups like Hamas declare endless war on Israel’s existence. For them, resistance is not about policies or borders but a sacred duty, written into their charters as an obligation “until the Day of Judgment.” This ideology ensures that the struggle cannot end, no matter what compromises are offered. When intellectuals describe resistance as permanent, they echo this logic. They may not share its religious roots, but they provide it with intellectual cover. (Moses is not a jihadist. But when intellectuals normalize the idea that resistance must be permanent, they echo the very movements that act it out with righteous violence.)

When violence is spoken of as the natural product of structures — occupation, resistance, “security” — it stops being the result of human will. But Jews know otherwise. Jihadist violence is not a force of nature. It is the result of choices, of ideology, of men who act. These are people who are sublimating their autonomy to an ideology, the truest definition of “avodah zara” if there ever was one. The abnegation of the self to power, and not to the infinite G-d, is to Jews, whether self-identified as secular or religious, truly anathema.

For Jews, sovereignty is not just political theory. It is the safety of all of us. We have suffered as a collective. A wound felt to one is felt by all. That is why abstract frameworks that erase human agency land so harshly on us — we feel the blows not as concepts but as pain on shared flesh.

As someone who ventured into intellectual spaces and bandied about similar ideas as an undergrad, I cringed. Back then, I didn’t take these discussions seriously. They seemed abstract, tucked away in graduate seminars, and I didn’t imagine how they could ever shape “real” life. But I see now how deeply these ideas have seeped into popular culture and activism. They’ve migrated into slogans, protests, and accusations that carry real-world consequences for Jews and the country of Israel.

I thank my luck that I never went all the way down the road to academic anointment and completed my dissertation. But I also carry a strange sense of guilt for not seeing the danger of intellectual radicalism sooner. I know I’m not being rational — this was more than thirty years ago — but it feels like a kind of responsibility. Writing pieces like this is, in a way, my tikkun. A quiet repentance, a form of teshuva, for not recognizing earlier how language could be bent against us, and for underestimating the danger of letting others set the terms of our story.

So, if you feel frustrated when you hear the word genocide applied to Israel, you are not alone. There is a kind of gaslighting at work when words Jews have long used to describe their own shattered history are turned upside down and hurled back as accusations.

The one thing that rooted us, even in exile, was and remains our fixation on language, on meaning through words. The Torah has been our home. Now that we are again a people with a homeland, the work is doubled: to live securely in our land, and to guard the integrity of our words.

And we guard them together, as one body. When a Jew is struck, all of us feel it. When our words are hollowed out or twisted, all of us are diminished. To defend Israel is also to gird the loins of language itself — because both our sovereignty and our story depend on it.