An article on March 5 for Global Voices stresses the importance of language in the Gaza conflict. The authors say:
Israel and its supporters wield language, crafting a narrative that strips us Palestinians of our humanity, portraying our resistance as illegitimate, and branding it as either antisemitism or terrorism, labeling all our resistance, even peaceful actions like economic boycotts, as terrorism.
They stress how long the linguistic battle has been going on:
With 75 years marked by ethnic cleansing, 56 years of military occupation, and 17 years of siege on Gaza, we find our people ensnared in an ongoing genocide. The toll is unbearable: more than 30,000 people killed, 70,000 injured, and many more trapped beneath the rubble.
The article focuses on three pairs of words:
1) evacuation and the Nakbah (catastrophe)
2) hostages and prisoners
3) collateral damage and shaheed (witness or martyr)
1) The first section — evacuation and Nakbah — begins with these poignant sentences from a story by a Palestinian writer:
“Don’t take all the stuff, Um Ahmed. Just grab the essentials. Come on, my dear, walk ahead of me.
It’s just two days, and we’ll be back.”
The article explains:
These words resonate with every Palestinian family in the diaspora and in the refugee camps. Echoed by grandparents and parents, they linger in the air, and yet, here we are, 76 years later, and those two days have not yet found their end.
The term evacuation was used last year “when Israel ordered 1.1 million people in northern Gaza and 22 hospitals to leave before a ground offensive on besieged Gaza.” The article says “evacuation typically means moving individuals from danger to safety.”
In Gaza, some were compelled to comply with the evacuation order, while others refused, recognizing the harsh reality that there is no safe place in Gaza.
Commenting further on evacuation and the Nakbah, the article says:
For Palestinians, evacuation resurfaces haunting memories of the Nakbah in 1948 that violently displaced 700,000 of our kin from their homes and native lands to pave the way for the creation of Israel.
This involved the destruction of our society, culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations. Since then, we have been denied the right to return home. The resonance of the term extends to the ongoing persecution of Palestinians in the West Bank.
For Gazans, evacuation means forced displacement, this time to the Sinai Desert — with no prospects of returning home.
2) Hostages and Prisoners
The article points out that the terms hostages and prisoners are used to describe both Palestinian and Israeli captives. In the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israeli settlements near Gaza, 250 people were captured, which led to a focus on the Israeli hostages.
The article provides information on Palestinian prisoners according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem:
as of November 2023, 4,764 Palestinians were held on “security” grounds, with the majority never having been convicted of a crime. Human Rights Watch reported 2,000 in administrative detention, where the Israeli military detains a person without a trial, presuming they might commit an offense in the future.
The article quotes the Associated Press: “over 750,000 Palestinians have passed through Israeli prisons since Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza, and east Jerusalem in 1967, including children.” The article also quotes an estimate by Defense for Children International–Palestine that “around 460 children have been detained in the last five months alone.”
In addition, the article describes violations of international law in Israeli prisons.
Conditions within the prisons, the torture, and the degrading treatment of the detainees are highly dehumanizing, constituting a violation of international law.
Concluding the subject of prisoners and hostages, the article says
The 2.4 million people in Gaza and the 7,200 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons are, unequivocally, hostages just like the 250 Israelis, and they deserve the same attention.
3) Collateral damage and Palestinian shaheed (witness and martyr)
The article says shaheed is often “mistranslated, misunderstood, and misused by Western audiences.”
The word shaheed is commonly translated as “martyr” [one killed in battle] despite its literal meaning in Qur’anic Arabic being “witness.” It appears 35 times in the Qur’an, primarily as “witness” and only once as “martyr.” The term holds a deeper significance as witnesses who stand before God to attest to the crimes committed against them.
The article says that “in the Palestinian context” the term shaheed includes individuals and communities killed by Israeli violence during the 75 years of occupation. “It includes resistance fighters, but also
grandparents, parents, sons, daughters, siblings, cousins, family members, friends, workers, doctors, teachers, journalists, children, and all innocent civilians impacted by the injustice, irrespective of their religion. People who were loved, who had lives, dreams, and hopes.
These people who were killed are typically dismissed as “collateral damage” if the military advantage achieved from a target justifies the loss of civilian lives. The article says calling victims of today’s conflict shaheed (witness) rather than collateral damage emphasizes they are “witnesses to the profound injustices endured.”
In conclusion, the authors state that the “power of language in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be overstated.”
The battle extends beyond the physical realm to the words we choose, emphasizing the profound consequences of linguistic choices in the quest for a just and balanced narrative.
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Global Voices is an international community of writers, bloggers and digital activists that aim to translate and report on what is being said in citizen media worldwide. A non-profit, it is incorporated in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. globalvoices.org