U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Photo: U.S. Department of State, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

When Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu spoke with international media on October 30, he ostensibly sought to clarify Israel's objectives in its ongoing military assault in Gaza. In doing so, he revealed yet again how language grounded in colonial denial serves to clear the way for the most extreme, even genocidal forms of violence.

He also revealed, however, that Israel's brutal bombardment of Gaza may be providing an opening for us to revive a different, more liberating kind of language, one that survives the propagandistic weapons of colonial discourse as embers in the rubble of generational trauma.

Collateral language and the "war on terror"

Shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, we edited Collateral Language, a volume of essays exploring how language was being used to frame the U.S. response to the attacks and to build public support for what would ultimately become an open-ended, global "war on terror." This U.S.-led war has resulted in an estimated 4.5 to 4.7 million deaths worldwide. A follow-up volume in 2021 showed how subsequent events, such as the creation of the term "homeland security," paved the way for an expansion of this language into areas stretching well beyond the "war on terror" itself.

We coined the phrase "collateral language" to specify "the language war as a practice adds to our ongoing lexicon as well as the additional meaning certain terms acquire during wartime." Following the work of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky on the process of "manufacturing consent," we emphasized that a government that is adept at weaponizing this kind of language "can convince its people to commit the most atrocious acts."

The book highlighted many of the terms that played fundamental roles in the "war on terror." For example, the word "evil" functioned to place the enemy beyond the pale of rational political discussion, whereas the rhetoric of "civilization vs. barbarism" served to promote a binary worldview that ruled out any recognition of more complex realities. We also broke the phrase "war on terror" itself into two parts, analyzing how "terrorism" is always defined from the view of powerful Western states, while "the war on _____" serves to turn vulnerable populations into objects of capitalist exploitation and state violence.

In recent years, public discourse surrounding movements such as Black Lives Matter and the Palestinian liberation struggle provides evidence of how this language can be mobilized for purposes of racist dehumanization. The same goes for the issue of immigration, where policy discussions are increasingly framed with military terms such as "invasion."

When "civilization" means genocide

Deleted Twitter/X post from the account of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Netanyahu's recent remarks can be situated squarely within this process. On October 17, in a now-deleted post on X (formerly Twitter), Netanyahu framed Israel's actions as part of "a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle." Many observers noted that the statement, with its binary logic and openly racist metaphors, could be viewed as prima facie evidence of genocidal motivation.

Protesters around the world responded to Israel's actions with massive demonstrations, and many argued that U.S. and European leaders were complicit in the crime of genocide through their unconditional backing of Israel. Notably, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell had been forced to apologize a year earlier for remarks in which he described Europe as a "garden" and added, "Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden."

By the time Netanyahu met the international media on October 30, the "children" mentioned in his deleted Tweet had disappeared from his discourse altogether. Perhaps this is because Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza has been especially lethal for children. Just a day before Netaynahu's press conference, Save the Children reported that the number of children killed in three weeks of bombing had already risen to more than 3,000 - surpassing "the annual number of children killed across the world's conflict zones since 2019."

Instead, Netanyahu leaned heavily on language that directly recalled the George W. Bush administration's post-9/11 rhetoric. He accused Iran of having created an "axis of evil" including Hamas, and he repeatedly invoked the idea of "civilization" to frame his message. "Today we draw a line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism," he said. "It is a time for everyone to decide where they stand."

Damage in Gaza from the 2023 Israeli bombardment. (Photo: Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract with APAimages, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Largely absent from mainstream news coverage of these remarks was any recognition of the racist foundation of the entire "civilization vs. barbarism" rhetoric and its historical use in colonial contexts. Such rhetoric enacts an aggressive form of dehumanization that often serves to prepare the ground for mass killing and other crimes against humanity. Avigdor Lieberman, the former Israeli Defense Minister, illustrated this process when he stated in 2018, "There are no civilians in Gaza," a sentiment apparently backed by the United States. With such statements, the Israeli and U.S. governments linguistically expunged all humanity from the geographical field of Gaza in order to justify the erasure of the Palestinian people.

Reporters seeking to highlight this aspect of the story would not have had any shortage of material, from the Israeli Defense Minister's description of Palestinians as "human animals" to the Likud lawmaker and former public diplomacy minister who called for "erasing all of Gaza from the face of the earth" to the high-level U.S.-Israeli conversations that reportedly included references to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the carpet bombing of Dresden as models for Israeli actions in Gaza.

The Gaza Effect

In 2009, the same year that Israel concluded another massacre in Gaza, Fiona Broome coined the term "Mandela Effect" to describe the collective mis-remembering of somewhat significant historical realities. Its name came from the fact that Broome had a significant memory of the death of Nelson Mandela in the late 90's, only to realize he was still alive.

From the position of an individual colonizer, mis-remembering the demise of a liberation hero, a towering figure of the global struggles against apartheid, racism, and colonialism might just be another Tuesday, but the specific memory of Mandela's late 90's funeral exists as part of a collective mis-remembering for a significant number of Americans.

As Collateral Language turns twenty-one years old, we, the editors of the first volume, realize that among other things, the book's title gestured toward that which is "unintentionally" destroyed in war. Today, this recognition calls us to ask: which languages have been foreclosed by the thrust of the colonial terminology deployed to justify Israel's response to the Hamas attacks? That is, what kinds of mis-remembering have been exposed by these ongoing events?

Destroyed and damaged buildings in Gaza City during Israel’s 2008-2009 assault on Gaza. (Photo: Al Jazeera English, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

In case the West collectively mis-remembers this fact, the so-called "Gaza War" (known in Israel as Operation Cast Lead) in 2008-2009 resulted in a massive and disproportionate death toll, with Palestinian deaths outnumbering Israeli deaths by a ratio of one hundred to one. In fact, the description of this event as a "war" at all might be called the Gaza Effect.

For nearly two years prior to this massacre, Gaza had been under a strict Israeli and Egyptian blockade, making it impossible for Palestinians to leave. For 75 years, the roughly 70 percent of Palestinians in Gaza who are refugees have been denied the right to return to their ancestral homes and lands. When Gazans rose up in 2018 in a "Great March of Return," Israel responded with heavy force to punish Palestinians for daring to demand their rights.

Without collective or individual sovereignty or freedom of movement, Palestinians in Gaza cannot be killed in a war. They can only be slaughtered or massacred. The current Israeli administration has made it clear that is willing to do just that.

Authorities in Israel and the U.S. have also made it clear that they are committed to the institutionalized policing of language. We see this, for example, whenever people are required to pledge that they won't advocate for a boycott of Israeli institutions as part of the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. We also see this in an even more extreme form in Israel's targeting of journalists such as Al Jazeera's Shireen Abu Akleh or the more than 30 journalists who have been killed in Israel's recent bombing of Gaza. These attacks on journalists represent efforts literally to eliminate those whose language might awaken people to the reality of what is happening on the ground.

Perhaps the Gaza Effect will finally disillusion enough of the world and remove the U.S. and Israel from their positions as linguistic arbiters and global wardens.

Petro's intervention

While the Mandela Effect describes a cultural mis-recognition, the phenomenon also speaks to a process of disillusionment. Broome did not just remember an alternative history; she also realized that her memory of Mandela was incorrect. Here, at the peak of yet another Gaza Massacre, we might find hope.

More than a decade passed with Gaza under blockade before Human Rights Watch in 2021 discovered that Israel, like South Africa before it, was not only a brutal state but also an apartheid state. Even for those ostensibly dedicated to the protection of humanity, the term "apartheid" had escaped their lexicon for decades, vanished by the Gaza Effect.

Fortunately for the global south, the backbone of collateral language, the destruction of the language of liberation, seems much less stable than it once was.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro meets with the Palestinian Ambassador on October 19, 2023. (Photo: Fotografía oficial de la Presidencia de Colombia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro's October 15 response to Israel's genocidal actions symbolize how the space for the language of liberation is growing. His words are especially significant as Colombia (which Hugo Chavez once called "the Israel of South America") is a place where the language of resistance was smothered for decades under a right-wing regime supported by racist and fascistic Israeli-trained death squads. Petro's election in 2022 was a major triumph for the Latin American Left, and his selection of Afro-Colombian environmental activist Francia Márquez as his running mate signaled a determined opposition to white supremacy in the country and beyond.

The three primary terms that Petro utilizes to help contextualize the genocide in Gaza are "climate," "economy," and "fascism." Linking the global processes of capitalism to the increasingly right-wing and fascistic West, Petro demonstrates how the dehumanization of immigrants represents a process by which the climate crisis gets mismanaged in service to wealth accumulation through the destruction of humans, humanity, and humanitarian principles.

Interventions such as Petro's oxygenate the fires of anti-colonial resistance.

Recovering and expanding the language of liberation

The language of liberation seeks to expose and overturn the structures of racist dehumanization that fuel state violence against Palestinians and other victims of colonization. This is what protesters in Spain, for example, are seeking to accomplish when they shout, "No es una guerra, es un genocídio! (It's not a war, it's a genocide!)" at marches organized to express solidarity with Palestinians.

It is also why many scholars and activists insist that the issue of settler colonialism must be made visible in news media coverage of struggles for justice in places such as Palestine, Australia, Canada, and the U.S. Doing so reveals not only the colonial projects that continue to be carried out in these territories, but also the transnational alliances that link them.

Aimé Césaire, *Discourse on Colonialism* (Monthly Review Press, 2015 [1950]).

The work of Aimé Césaire, the great Martinican poet and politician, provides a powerful roadmap to what an uncompromising language of liberation could look like. Césaire takes European claims about defending "civilization" against "barbarism" and turns them on their head, exposing the projection and denial that lie at the center of the entire colonial enterprise. In his 1950 essay Discourse on Colonialism, he argues that colonization "works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism."

Nowhere can the barbarism of the garden be seen more clearly than inside the United Nations, where the U.S. voted multiple times against a humanitarian ceasefire; where the only two countries to vote against making food a human right were the United States and Israel; and where only the U.S. and Israel consistently vote against lifting the generations-old U.S. blockade on Cuba. In vote after vote, the U.S. and much of the West demonstrate just how barbaric so-called civilization can become. Unwilling to respect others' sovereignty, the U.S. and many of its allies prefer to speak of the "rules-based international order" rather than support the fair application of international law.

What we call "collateral language" is a contemporary manifestation of this process of "decivilization." Recovering the rich array of linguistic terms associated with the long traditions of anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-apartheid action, and enlarging the space for these terms to be circulated, is a primary task for anyone seeking to promote Palestinian freedom. As the late American Indian Movement activist and poet John Trudell once said in an imaginary dialogue with the Christian god of his people's "civilized" colonizers, "It's time for you to decide what life is worth. We already remember - but maybe you forgot."