When States Rewrite the Headline

In recent weeks, Orwell’s 1984 has been everywhere in political commentary, as if a novel had turned into a field manual: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

It still lands because it describes a temptation that never goes out of style. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four” isn’t arithmetic—it’s the right to call things by their names, without waiting for power to approve the nouns.

That is why two seemingly “domestic” stories from Israel this week matter far beyond Israel.

The first came from a Knesset discussion about a bill to commemorate October 7. A representative of the Prime Minister’s Office asked to remove the word “massacre” from the bill’s title, arguing that “besides the massacre there was also fighting” and proposing softer phrasing—“events,” “incidents,” “riots”—like the way 1929 is remembered as “the events of 1929,” not “the massacre of 1929.” The word “massacre,” he suggested, could appear later inside the law; it just shouldn’t sit in the headline.

The families in the room understood the logic immediately, and not in the charitable way. If you can change the label, you can eventually change the lesson. One lawmaker warned that dropping “massacre” would damage commemoration in the long run—because the title is what children and grandchildren inherit. A bereaved father said plainly: October 7 will always be “the day of the massacre,” and renaming it is an attempt to reshape the narrative and evade responsibility.

The second story involved a very different kind of pressure: President Donald Trump publicly scolding Israel’s President Isaac Herzog for not granting Benjamin Netanyahu a pardon, claiming Herzog had promised it “five times,” and urging Israelis to “shame” him into doing it. Herzog’s office responded that no decision has been made and that the request is undergoing the legal review process.

Taken separately, each episode can be framed as political theater: wordsmithing around a commemorative law, and a foreign leader meddling in a local legal process. But together they reveal something deeper—a method that is becoming a governing style among leaders closest to Trump: the state is increasingly treated as a tool to manage narrative, and “truth” as a material to be molded for personal and political advantage.

Start with the word “massacre.” This isn’t a debate about vocabulary; it’s a battle over institutional memory. The name of a law is not a footnote—it is a public monument. It’s what gets repeated in classrooms, printed on programs, embedded in bureaucratic habit. Demoting a moral description into the body text is a way of saying: we acknowledge what happened, but we refuse to let it define us in public. And when that decision is driven by political calculation—when it’s entangled with the question of accountability—it becomes a form of narrative governance.

Now consider the pardon pressure. Pardons can exist in democracies; mercy can be lawful. What corrodes the system is the message that legal institutions must serve the leader’s needs, on command, under public intimidation. The insistence isn’t just “pardon Netanyahu.” The insistence is: the legitimacy of law is conditional on its usefulness to the ruler.

This method flourishes in the current information ecosystem. People no longer encounter facts primarily through shared institutions; they encounter them through feeds—where influence can be bought, outrage can be engineered, and “communicators” can be rewarded for repeating whatever narrative is required. In that environment, controlling the label (“massacre” vs. “events”) is not cosmetic. It is strategic. It decides what the algorithm serves, what the crowd repeats, what future generations are told was “controversial.”

And this is not only Israel’s problem. Look at the international mood. At the Munich Security Conference, Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, warned that under Trump’s second term America’s claim to global leadership “has been challenged, and possibly squandered,” and said the “culture war” of the MAGA movement is “not ours”, urging a renewed transatlantic partnership because even the United States is “not powerful enough to go it alone.”

That speech reads like a diagnostic: the rules-based order is not collapsing solely because adversaries violate it, but because democracies are teaching their own citizens to treat norms—truth, due process, equal dignity—as optional. You cannot credibly accuse Iran of human-rights abuses while simultaneously weakening the very architecture that gives “human rights” meaning: the idea that law is higher than leaders, that procedures constrain power, that facts are not partisan property.

This is where Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points from 1918 still matter—not as a museum piece, but as a blueprint for why “rights” ever became enforceable in the first place. Open diplomacy, reduced armaments, fair dealing, self-determination, collective security: a world in which principles have scaffolding. His first point — “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at”— was not poetry. It was an argument that secrecy and propaganda are not side-effects of war, but its accelerants—and that public truth is a strategic asset.

We cannot live in two worlds at once: a world where hatred is normalized, immigrants are demonized, due process is treated as weakness, protests are met with force, and law is bent around leaders—and a world where we pretend to be the guardians of universal rights. The contradiction doesn’t produce “order.” It produces a stage-managed reality where truth is relevant only when it’s convenient.

Orwell’s warning was never that lies would win every argument. It was that, once people are trained to doubt what their eyes and ears tell them, power becomes limitless.

Because if “two plus two make four” is negotiable, then everything else—memory, justice, and peace—becomes negotiable too.