The War of Words over Gaza

My new essay on The Hill explains how distortions of language have been used to discredit Israel in its war against Hamas. Here is the gist, with a graf of particular journalistic (and in my case, quite local) interest.

Here is the gist (I did not write the headline):

The war of words over Gaza makes the entire world less safe 

The war between Israel and Hamas will be decided on the tragically blood-soaked ground of Gaza. In the meantime, there has been an ongoing war of words in the U. S., in which distortions of language, from simple to profound, have been manipulated to discredit Israel. 

The award for feckless journalism, however, probably goes to the Chicago Tribune. In a story on the release of two of Hamas’s 240 hostages — a mother and teenage daughter from Evanston, Illinois — the Tribune wrote that they had been taken hostage “by Hamas operatives.” 

If Israelis and Palestinians are ever to have the peace and security that both desperately need and deserve, it will only come through mutual recognition and understanding. A good way to begin, or at least envision, the challenging negotiations ahead would be to use more honest language. 

The Palestinians have been dispossessed and brutalized for far too long, but Hamas is a terrorist organization, Israelis are not colonialists and there has been no genocide. 

The entire piece is at The Hill.