What Is Said and What Is Done

I’ve spent my life working with words, and I believe words mean things. I also believe certain things mean certain words. When people say what’s happening in Gaza is genocide, they mean that moral people should react in a certain way against this genocide. But even in the face of widespread, well-documented, forthright mass industrialized killing of certain people in a certain place, it turns out there are many, many more ways to deny genocide than I ever thought possible.

I’m not going to link to the Wikipedia entry for genocide or the United Nations definition of what constitutes genocide. Definitions of the term are not the issue. What’s at stake is the moral dimension of who can be killed, who can do the killing, and who deserves to die, and how those calculations are expressed in language.

But the moral calculus of atrocity and responsibility cannot be “solved.” It cannot be reduced and it cannot be reconciled with more blood and death. The historic worldwide oppression and persecution of Jews cannot be forgotten. The Israeli domination of the Palestinian people is brutally unjust. The savage annihilationist violence of Hamas on October 7 is unforgivable. The Israeli response to exterminate thousands more people in Gaza with no pretense of discrimination between combatants and civilians cannot be called anything other than genocide, but it actually has proven very easy to not call it genocide simply by refusing to call it genocide, or refusing to call it anything, or to insist that “genocide” doesn’t mean anything anymore. But genocide does mean something.

I personally cannot imagine how Hamas could be permitted to continue holding overt power in Gaza after what they have done. So I understand why Israel wants to destroy Hamas even as I also believe Hamas cannot be destroyed, even if every current member of Hamas is killed, because the conditions that created Hamas remain, and those conditions are now arguably much more favorable to the continued existence of Hamas or whatever succeeds Hamas. I also believe Israel knows they can’t actually destroy Hamas.

Unless of course Israel intends to destroy Gaza. From my distant perspective it’s hard to separate some people’s enthusiasm for destroying Hamas from their enthusiasm for destroying Gaza and the people who live there. Some are not even bothering to separate their enthusiasm for both. Or even if they don’t seem enthusiastic about destroying Gaza precisely, they seem to implicitly accept that it must be done. Sometimes it seems like the destruction of Gaza was initially presented as collateral damage when destroying Hamas, but lately it’s more like the destruction of Hamas is a consequential benefit of destroying Gaza.

Hamas is an impossible moral problem because they not only weave their infrastructure amongst the civilian infrastructure, but also their beliefs justify and glorify deaths suffered by civilians as a result of enemy action against them. Israel’s response is to mirror this belief in the sense that any number of Palestinian deaths are justifiable in their actions against Hamas. This stance would have sounded unthinkably cruel and impossible to defend until recently, and until recently it might have been conceived as the dark underlying motive that required a more palatable cover story. But now this is the cover story, now this is the rationalization, for something even worse—the idea that everyone in Gaza, Hamas or not, deserves to be killed.

When not openly calling for the slaughter of Palestinians, government and military officials in Israel and the West speak of Gaza in the terse denatured media sensitive jargon of defense policy and national imperatives and sterile bureaucracy, talking about killing and death and atrocity the way executives talk about layoffs—lives and futures reduced not even to numbers but something less than numbers, like the dead are merely variables to be promptly factored out. Their language is technical, absolutist, atomized, and inhuman. They sound like the algorithms they have become.