Naming a genocide the world refuses to see

Sinar Daily

14 hours ago

'Gazacaust is not just a word. It is a J'accuse! — a cry of indictment and resistance against euphemism, complicity and colonial amnesia. To name the unspeakable is to affirm life.' — Aladdin Assaiqeli
Atrocities must not be aestheticised. We must not allow genocidal acts to be hidden behind linguistic camouflage. Language shapes perception and perception shapes policy.
Protestors rally against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayhu ahead of his meeting with US President Donald Trump in front of the White House in Washington, DC on July 7, 2025. Prime Minister Netanyahu is meeting President Trump, who expressed hope for a "deal this week" between Israel and Hamas that sees hostages released from the Gaza Strip. Indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas began on July 6 in Doha, aiming to broker a ceasefire and reach an agreement on the release of hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP)
In Palestine, language is not merely a means of communication, it is a weapon of war. The ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza, with its catastrophic death toll, has yet again revealed how linguistic framing shapes what the world sees and refuses to see. The moment we start using the enemy's terms is the moment we begin to lose the narrative and with it, the moral imagination needed to demand justice.
There is no neutral vocabulary for genocide. There is only complicity or resistance. And resistance begins by naming the crime. I have coined the term Gazacaust to name what is, in essence, a systematic campaign of erasure, elimination and ethnonational expansion — what the world refuses to acknowledge as genocide.
Naming determines what can be seen, what can be said and what can be saved. And what cannot. When we say Gazacaust, we are not simply coining a term, we are refusing the erasure. We are asserting a linguistic and moral counter-power against a global discourse that continues to frame Israel as victim, Gaza as threat and Palestinians as disposable.
The truth must not be softened with euphemism. It demands that we call this atrocity by its rightful name. And that name is Gazacaust, a term that shatters the illusion of ambiguity and forces us to confront the unspeakable with moral clarity.
Around the world, students are doing what many leaders refuse to: speaking truth, occupying space and naming the violence. Jewish and Palestinian voices are rising together, reclaiming the ethical ground eroded by decades of propaganda, misrepresentation, and fear. From Columbia to Cambridge, Kuala Lumpur to Cape Town, the cry is the same: Gaza is not alone. Free Palestine!
But moral outrage must translate into material pressure. Ceasefires are not enough. This is not a time for balance or diplomacy — it is a time for liberation and accountability. A time to end more than a century of colonial subjugation — since 1917. The world did not wait for all Jews to die before calling the Holocaust by its name. We must not wait for Gaza — and her sister, the West Bank, the 20 per cent left of historic Palestine — to be wiped from the map before we speak with honesty.
To understand Gazacaust, we must situate it within a broader history of settler-colonial violence and systematic de-Palestinisation:
1948 — The Nakba: Over 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled; more than 500 villages were razed. Roughly 80 per cent of historic Palestine was expropriated. This was not a 'catastrophe' in abstract terms — it was a coordinated campaign of ethnic cleansing, meticulously planned and executed for territory. 'Territoriality is settler colonialism's specific, irreducible element' (Wolfe, 2006:388).
1967 — The Naksa: Israel captured the remaining 20 per cent of historic Palestine — Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem — triggering another wave of military occupation and mass displacement, deepening the colonial entrenchment and encroachment.
2007–Present — The Siege of Gaza: Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza, controlling land crossings, airspace and maritime access. The blockade restricts food, medicine, electricity and water — turning Gaza into an open-air prison, surveilled by drones and starved by design.
2023–2025 — The Gazacaust: A systematic campaign of extermination through bombardment, infrastructure annihilation, forced starvation and mass displacement. The vast majority of Gazans are refugees — descendants of Nakba survivors — now displaced yet again, trapped within a geography of annihilation.
Each of these moments inflicted not only physical, but also epistemic and semiotic violence — against memory, language and truth.
Gazacaust exemplifies not only the regime's ongoing structural elimination of the native — the sine qua non for settler colonialism — but also exposes — without ambiguity — the machinery of disposability in full operation. It is a paradigmatic case of the logic of elimination and necropower, where an entire geography is deliberately rendered unliveable. Gaza, as an an isolated and disposable enclave, has long become a laboratory of annihilation: subjected to what Sara Roy (2007) terms de-development — a systemic undoing of the conditions necessary for life. This is compounded by infrastructural obliteration, ecological ruin and the collapse of vital systems — water, agriculture, electricity, sanitation, and air itself — alongside psychological terror. What is occurring is not just violence, but the engineered erosion of futurity.
In this context, Gazacaust is not simply a word. It is a J'accuse! against the moral cost of euphemism and media sanitisation. It is a political intervention, a demand for moral clarity and a reminder that the right to name is the right to exist. In the face of extermination, silence is complicity. And euphemism is a crime.
To name the Gazacaust is to refuse amnesia. It is to affirm Palestinian humanity in a world determined to erase it. It is to insist that justice is not reserved for some and denied to others — that some lives are not more disposable than others.
Gazacaust is not merely a provocative neologism — it is a moral and discursive intervention. It seeks to name the unspeakable, to resist euphemism and lexical sanitisation and to reframe a narrative long dominated by colonial erasure, media complicity, and Zionist mythology. Like the term Holocaust, to which it alludes, it marks the sheer scale, intentionality, and moral outrage of what is happening. It is a J'accuse! — a cry of accusation and resistance against the sanitising language of geopolitical diplomacy. Just as the Holocaust entered global consciousness not only through documentation but through naming, Gazacaust emerges to rupture silence, demand recognition, and catalyse justice.
For decades, the world has witnessed the slow-motion annihilation of Palestine, framed by terms like 'conflict,' 'clashes,' 'complex situation,' or 'security operation.' We continue to speak of 'war' — as though this were a symmetrical conflict between two sovereign powers, rather than what it is: a settler-colonial assault on an occupied and besieged people living in an extermination camp. We continue to speak of 'Israel and Hamas' as if they were equals — placing a grassroots decolonisation movement under siege and occupation on the same footing as a nuclear-armed colonial power. These terms serve not only to obfuscate and sanitise, but also to legitimise and justify. They disfigure the reality on the ground and anesthetise global conscience.
For too long, Western governments and media outlets have served not as neutral observers, but as co-authors of the narrative of erasure. By adopting Israel's terminology, 'targeted strikes,' 'human shields,' 'Israel and Hamas,' 'conflict,' 'war,' and 'self-defence,' they become complicit in legitimising and sanitising brutality. The role of language here is not descriptive, but performative: it renders the horror acceptable and murder respectable. It converts mass death into policy and apartheid into 'security.'
To those who recoil at the designation Gazacaust, I ask: what word would you use for the deliberate killing of tens of thousands, the mass starvation of civilians, the displacement of nearly two million people and the systematic targeting of children, medics, and aid workers?
When hospitals are bombed, journalists are killed, mass graves are uncovered, babies die in incubators as electricity is cut, students, poets and surgeons — all reduced to corpses beneath the rubble, and entire families are erased from civil registries — what do we call it? If it were happening elsewhere, would we hesitate? Would we negotiate semantics, or would we act?
This is why we must reclaim the power of language. Our ability to become effective agents of change or changemakers in our societies and the world depends on our effectiveness with language and our critical consciousness of it.
As a linguist and educator, I argue that naming is an act of resistance. It is not merely descriptive; it is moral. Gazacaust is not coined to appropriate historical pain, but to draw necessary attention to present horror. We do not compare suffering to compete. We compare to recognise patterns, so that 'Never Again' becomes a principle, not a slogan. We must reject the deceptive vocabulary of 'clashes,' 'crossfire,' and 'terror tunnels.' We must name things for what they are. A genocide is a genocide. An apartheid regime is an apartheid regime. A freedom-fighting movement is not a terrorist organisation. Gaza is not a battlefield — it is a graveyard, a prison and a symbol of resistance.
Palestinians are not waiting for international tribunals to validate their pain. They are not waiting for history books to catch up. They are naming the horror now, as it unfolds, because they know from experience that the world's delay is the enemy's license.
And so we must speak. We must write. We must march. And we must name.
For in the end, history will judge not only those who dropped the bombs, but also those who watched in silence.
Born in Gaza, Aladdin Assaiqeli is a Palestinian academic, poet and political activist. His writings are driven by the anguish of colonialism and the role of language in ending such colonialism.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Sinar Daily.