Israel: What’s in a name?

Evanesco! For those hopeful muggles awaiting the call to Hogwarts delivered by owl-post, this word might be familiar. It’s the vanishing spell. Once uttered it can cause the subject to simply disappear. Unlike the more well-known invisibility cloak worn by Harry Potter rendering him unseen but still there, Evanesco vanquishes the subject entirely. These days it seems that this is the actual motive of the anti-Israel movement, a movement that is morphing into a global cult. To completely disappear Israel, physically, culturally and linguistically. Yes, linguistically. It is this, the disappearing of Israel through language, that really slapped me in the face this past week.

Reported in The Free Press, the new book “Israel Alone”, written by world renowned author, scholar and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy would not be advertised in a US magazine for the publishing industry. Why? The word “Israel” might upset staff at the magazine, as well clients and readers of it. The word “Israel” is too charged, too toxic to even appear on the printed page in case it offends the eyes of those who simply cannot endure its existence. So the magazine cancelled the planned advertisement of the book “Israel Alone” – Evanesco! Gone. The word erased. And like a modern day prophet, Bernard-Henri Lévy’s book title manifests reality, Israel [is] Alone.

This is where we are at. Not only do we have mobs of indoctrinated zombies parroting their professors calling for the destruction of the only Jewish state and spiritual homeland of the Jewish people, by any means necessary. Not only do we have cultural leaders fighting to make cultural spaces unsafe for Zionists (aka unsafe for most of world Jewry). We now have the battleground of language, where the strategy is to erase the very word “Israel” from the lexicon of polite society. Imagine any other group of people having to grapple with the fight to stop a word so central to their identity from simply disappearing. Imagine the word “black” or “gay” or “woman” being too problematic to print for fear of offending the genteel sensibilities of racists, homophobes or misogynists. That is where we are at.

Israel.

A word.

For the unaware, this word may refer only to a tiny strip of land nestled between river and sea in the Middle East. For us, it is who we are. We are B’nei Israel, the children of Jacob, the people of Israel (Jacob’s alternative name), the nation of Israel. This word is not just a word. It is our family name. For we are a family. A family made up of the tribes of Israel. Before we were called Jews, we were Israelites. To disappear the word Israel is not only the erasure of our ancestral homeland, it is the erasure of our name, of our family name. And here, I will get a little more provocative. To erase a family’s name, a people’s name, is a step towards erasure of that people themselves. Evanesco! We don’t need to look so far back through history to see similar steps taken by totalitarian regimes who sought to erase names, with the goal of erasing a people, replacing them with numbers indelibly marked on the arms of many of our family members. This comparison might sound hyperbolic to some, but I see connecting the dots through time as essential. History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes and if Never Again means anything then we must be alert to the rhymes swirling around us today.

The scandal of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s book advertisement cancellation occurred in the same week that another attempted Evanesco happened, closer to home for me, here in Australia. It has come to light that one of our highly reputable and tax-payer funded media organisations, SBS, renowned for its multicultural inclusivity, has censored and not aired several interviews conducted by journalist Amit Rehak, including an interview with the family of one of the hostages held in Gaza. The explanation offered by SBS for such erasure was that it compromised its commitment to impartiality and balance. How on earth is there any balance to their coverage if certain perspectives are completely disappeared?

Evanesco!

Our words, our perspectives, are made invisible, like they were never there. Any recognition of Israel, of voices from Israel, of views that defend the existence of Israel in its fight against an existential threat militarily in the Middle East and culturally across the world, is deemed verboten. It seems that Israel, much like Voldemort, is “he who must not be named”. The monsterisation of our homeland, of our peoplehood, of our family is in full swing. And the fact that this is so casually accepted by the cultural eilte is disgusting.

This is an assault on language. For us, Jews, Israelites, this is particularly harmful as we are a people of words. So many words. Some human and some divine. We are often called, People of The Book. And within our most sacred and foundational book, the Torah, we find the origin story of Creation. Not only is this story told through the written word, but God Godself creates the world, humanity and all that exists through the uttering of the divine word, “and God said…” For us, words are of deep significance. Our name, Israel, was given to us, via Jacob, by God. Thus, to erase this word not only removes the voices, stories and perspective of our people, but, knowingly or not, removes the very origins of our being. This, of course, is not new. Around two thousand years ago the Roman Empire renamed our homeland Palestina/Palestine in order to break the connection between a people and her home. The Romans too knew the power of language and how it can be manipulated to twist the course of history. We are still seeing the fruits of the Roman’s strategy play out today, with the denial of any Jewish connection to the land of Israel, because it was renamed Palestine by a colonial empire two thousand years ago.

Maybe we should reclaim some language. Maybe we should call ourselves Israelites. Maybe the world needs a reminder of who we are and where we came from. For we are a people of words, of books. We are Israelites and our name will not be vanished.

You can read The Free Press report on the cancelling of the advertisement of  “Israel Alone” here: Ad for Israel Book Canceled Because ‘Customers Might Complain’ | The Free Press

You can watch a news segment reporting on the SBS censorship of Amit Rehak’s work here: https://youtu.be/kQQy3msmCLo?si=DbJtY5UCWPd2-kNu