We Need a New Word for What This Is

If not Genocide, What is It?

In the battle of semantics taking place to define the war in Gaza, the pro-Israeli side takes great umbrage at the use of the word “genocide” and doubly so, “Holocaust.” I have tended to use the adjectival form of the first word, ergo, “genocidal” – because the utter indifference on Israel’s part as to how many Palestinian human beings they kill warrants that descriptive. But both “genocide” and “Holocaust” are so associated with the gargantuan scale of killing specifically committed by the Nazis that the objection to their use is at least arguable. The Israelis have killed at least 60,000 Gazans, an appalling figure, but from 1941 to the end of the war, the Nazis killed that many Jews every two weeks. So I get it.

However, there is another way to view the deadly math of Gaza and the death camps in comparison, and that is not by counting the dead, but those who did not die. Estimates vary, but at the high end, the number of survivors of the huge network of concentration, extermination and labor camps run by the Nazi industrial death machine is estimated to have been around 400,000. If, in Gaza, the final death toll is 100,000, that will leave 2,000,000 people alive, all of whom will have experienced the complete destruction of their pre-war lives, and post-war lives that will be sharply diminished by every measure. Every Gazan left standing will have lost scores of family members, friends, and neighbors, not to mention their homes. There will be tens of thousands of widows and widowers, and tens of thousands of partial and full orphans. The final number of amputees remains to be seen, but preliminary figures already surpass all records for any conflict anywhere. When the famine is finally over, the effects of so much acute malnutrition will be lifelong for most who suffered it. An entire generation will have had its childhood stolen, with memories of deprivation, violence and displacement instead of family life, school and play.

The survivors of death camps likewise witnessed an unspeakable amount of cruelty, suffered grievous physical deprivation, and universally emerged with immeasurable grief. Their trauma was such that it fueled the establishment of the state of Israel, for those who suffered so much could easily justify doing anything to make sure they would never suffer so terribly again. In 1948, that meant participating in the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their land and homes. The level of suffering that displacement caused among Palestinians over the next 80 years is incalculable, if largely denied by the Zionists who perpetrated it, and by the population of Israel as a whole.

400,000 death camp survivors reported lifelong symptoms of P.T.S.D. Likewise, there can be no doubt that 2,000,000 Gazans will also forever live with nightmares, flashbacks, and the debilitating effects of profound grief, particularly the loss of so many children. We don’t have a word similar to “genocide” for the mass infliction of trauma just short of death by one people on another. But this “-cide” is quite real, leaving us with a strange but true paradox; the crimes of the war in Gaza, though producing a much lower death toll than the Holocaust, will leave behind psychic and physical wounds every bit as grievous and long-lasting on five times as many survivors.

MCO 2025