The Paradox of Witness

How Language Shapes the Context for Hate

This is not just another analysis you can read, absorb, and file away. This is a confrontation with how the very words we use to discuss hatred and injustice have become weapons that perpetuate the violence we claim to oppose. If you find yourself nodding along with this critique while remaining fundamentally unchanged by it, you've missed the point entirely. Understanding these dynamics without transformation becomes its own form of complicity.

I did not fully appreciate the extent to which this statement was true until confronted by my own worst fears yesterday. My recent writings about the unfolding crisis in the Middle East has won me new friends and lost me old ones. I've been criticised, blacklisted, scolded, called antisemitic and ignorant, even though I only use trusted sources on the ground both to check my facts and test new thinking. An unexpected, albeit brief, conversation yesterday, traumatic to the extent that I was physically shaking and in tears, reaffirmed the need to speak out against evil, but also to try and explain why the circumstances are not helping to heal the physical and emotional carnage.

A Jewish friend, a pediatrician who has worked at the largest hospital in Tel Aviv for around 12 years, and who reads everything I write, called me asking me to listen to the "testimony" of three young IDF soldiers who had just fled their posts near the city of Jenin on the West Bank. Three friends who could no longer continue to slaughter innocent women and children. I listened almost in disbelief as one of the three detailed atrocities far worse than I had ever imagined; far worse than that reported by the few journalists left in Israel.

And then, this morning, I read an article by the eminent lawyer Mark Liebler in The Australian about the recent attacks on a synagogue and a Jewish restaurant in Melbourne. Mark's outrage was palpable. I felt myself agreeing with every word. Such blatant acts of antisemitism are a stain on our country and must not be tolerated. At the same time I was troubled by the obduracy of expression that fuels further hate, and still shaking from listening to the confession of that young IDF deserter and what he and his friends are now going through.

After much reflection I decided to write the following article. Not to accuse or condemn as I might have in the past, but to consider how we can all learn from what's going on in Israel and take steps to modify our own beliefs as a result. I dedicate this piece to those three young men who have been brave enough to quit the system of indoctrination underpinning what they were ordered to do and the ghastly manner in which they carried out those instructions. They must now come to terms with their own living hell which will haunt them forever.

What those three young men witnessed—and what they could no longer participate in—reveals something profound about how language shapes our capacity for both violence and resistance. Their transformation from soldiers to witnesses required breaking through a carefully constructed linguistic framework that had made the unthinkable seem necessary. To understand how they found the courage to flee, we must first examine how language itself has been weaponized to make such atrocities possible.

---

We live at a time where language has been weaponized so thoroughly that witnessing becomes impossible. Nowhere is this more evident than in how we discuss and relate to antisemitism today--a conversation so corrupted by competing agendas that it now serves to obscure rather than illuminate the very real suffering happening before our eyes. We cannot engage with this reality passively. We must examine our own role in perpetuating the linguistic systems that enable injustice to endure.

Just take a moment to consider what happens when we "witness" the systematic destruction of the Palestinian people--the deliberate targeting of hospitals, schools, and refugee camps, the methodical starvation of children, the erasure of entire family lines. International legal scholars increasingly recognize these actions as meeting the legal definition of genocide. Yet when we attempt to name this reality, we're told that our very act of witnessing constitutes antisemitism. Ask yourself: How did the language meant to protect Jewish people from hatred become weaponized to shield a state apparatus from accountability?

This represents a profound corruption of both language and memory that demands our direct confrontation. Judaism--a rich spiritual and cultural tradition spanning millennia, encompassing diverse communities across continents--has been forcibly conflated with Zionism, a political project born from 19th-century European nationalism. This conflation violates both concepts, and if we participate in this merger without questioning it, we become complicit in that violence.

The conflation reduces thousands of years of Jewish wisdom, ethics, and culture to support for or opposition to specific government policies. Simultaneously, it transforms legitimate political criticism into religious hatred through linguistic manipulation. Question Israel's policies toward Palestinians, and you're branded an antisemite. Defend Palestinian rights, and you're accused of Jewish hatred. Support Palestinian liberation, and you're told you want to destroy the Jewish people.

But here's what we must understand: this is not accidental confusion. This systematic linguistic architecture is designed to prevent clear thinking. Every time we accept these false equivalencies without challenge, we participate in making genuine dialogue impossible.

I understand the fear that underlies much of this linguistic confusion. For many Jews, the conflation of Judaism with Zionism feels protective—a necessary shield in a world where antisemitism remains devastatingly real. The memory of being told "go back to Palestine" before Israel existed, of having no safe haven during the Holocaust, of facing persecution across centuries and continents—these traumas are not abstract. They live in bodies and communities today.

Similarly, many supporters of Israel genuinely believe that distinguishing between Jews and Israeli policies opens the door to the kind of selective targeting that has preceded violence throughout history. "We criticize only Israeli policies, not Jews" can sound eerily similar to "We oppose only Jewish economic practices, not Jews themselves"—rhetoric that has preceded pogroms and persecution.

These fears deserve acknowledgment. But here's what we must understand: weaponizing these legitimate concerns to shield a state from accountability for its actions doesn't protect Jewish communities—it endangers them. When Palestinian children watch their families destroyed by weapons deployed in the name of Jewish safety, when their suffering is dismissed as necessary for Jewish survival, we are creating the precise conditions for future antisemitism to flourish. True security cannot be built on the suffering of others.

Let's be precise about what's happening, because precision matters when children are dying. When Israeli officials openly declare their intention to make Gaza "uninhabitable," when they systematically target civilian infrastructure, when they use starvation as a weapon of war--these are not defensive actions against antisemitism. These are the hallmarks of what Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide," specifically identified as genocidal practice. The invocation of Holocaust memory to justify such actions represents perhaps the most obscene distortion of all--transforming the lessons of past suffering into a license for present barbarism.

History teaches us how language becomes complicit in genocide. In Rwanda, radio broadcasts transformed neighbors into "cockroaches" and "snakes"—dehumanizing language that made killing feel like cleansing. The Hutu Ten Commandments redefined social relations through ethnic absolutes, making previous coexistence unthinkable. In Bosnia, the term "ethnic cleansing" itself became a euphemism that obscured the reality of systematic rape, murder, and displacement. Ottoman Armenians were labeled "tumors" and "microbes" threatening the body politic. In each case, linguistic manipulation preceded and enabled physical violence.

What we're witnessing today follows this pattern: the transformation of "Palestinian" into "terrorist," the reduction of Gaza's children to "future Hamas," the reframing of occupation as "disputed territories." When Israeli officials speak of "mowing the grass" or "putting Palestinians on a diet," they're using the same linguistic strategies that have preceded atrocities throughout history.

We cannot claim ignorance of this distortion. None of us can pretend that understanding the difference between critiquing policies and hating people is too complex for our comprehension. When we allow this confusion to persist in our own thinking and speaking, we become part of the machinery that enables atrocity.

We are living within decades of carefully constructed messaging designed to merge religious identity with political ideology. We've all absorbed these conflations to some degree—the question is whether we can recognize and resist them. We've witnessed the systematic expansion of antisemitism definitions to include political positions, the deployment of Holocaust memory as a shield for contemporary policies, the transformation of solidarity with Palestinian liberation into Jewish hatred. Each of these innovations makes it harder to think clearly about what we're actually witnessing--and that difficulty is intentional.

Here's the uncomfortable truth we must confront: this system creates what we can call "selective empathy" within our own consciousness. We may find ourselves able to recognize historical persecution while remaining blind to contemporary genocide when it's perpetrated by those we consider part of our community or political alignment. The language becomes a filter that renders certain suffering invisible while amplifying other fears.

Consider the moral contortions this requires of us. When Palestinian students organize solidarity protests on university campuses, are we quick to worry about "unsafe spaces" for Jewish students--as if witnessing Palestinian suffering somehow threatens Jewish safety? When activists call for boycotts of Israeli products, do we immediately think of Nazi boycotts of Jewish businesses--as if choosing not to purchase goods produced through occupation equals systematic persecution? When people use the phrase "from the river to the sea," do we hear calls for Jewish genocide--as if demanding Palestinian freedom necessarily requires Jewish destruction?

Each of these responses serves the same function: to make Palestinian suffering invisible while positioning any expression of solidarity as hatred. If we find ourselves making these moves, we must ask: What are we protecting by refusing to see clearly?

But here's what we must understand about the risks: this corruption of language doesn't protect Jewish people from hatred. If anything, it generates and amplifies the very resentment it claims to combat. When people witness obvious injustice but are told their perception itself constitutes bigotry, when they see babies being killed but are informed that expressing concern makes them antisemites, and when IDF soldiers, who've been brainwashed into believing they are one of the most moral armies in the world, are ordered to spray bullets into a crowd of children, the cognitive dissonance produces exactly the kind of anger that gets misdirected toward Jewish communities.

The children of Gaza who survive this genocide--those watching their siblings buried under rubble, their parents obliterated by bombs justified through Holocaust memory--they too will carry forward memories that may, without proper understanding and healing, transform into future hatred. Our participation in the linguistic manipulation that prevents clear witnessing of their suffering today becomes the seed of tomorrow's antisemitism.

This is the ultimate travesty and demands our immediate attention: actions taken in the name of protecting Jewish people from hatred are creating the conditions for more hatred to take root. Every Palestinian child killed by bombs paid for with our tax dollars and justified through references to Jewish safety becomes a walking refutation of everything we claim to believe about human dignity and universal rights.

We cannot remain neutral in the face of this dynamic. We cannot intellectually appreciate these insights while continuing to engage with the world as we did before. The very act of seeing clearly demands action--it demands that we examine our own use of language, our own selective empathy, our own participation in the systems that enable injustice.

Breaking free from these linguistic prisons requires developing what I call "contextual intelligence"—the capacity to hold multiple truths without false equivalencies, to see through deliberate distortions while honoring legitimate fears and traumas. This is not merely an intellectual exercise but a survival skill for our fractured world. So how do we acquire or develop this capacity? How do we learn to see through these distortions while honoring the legitimate fears and traumas of all peoples? This is not an academic exercise. This has to become the spiritual and ethical practice of our time.

First, we must learn to distinguish between Judaism and Zionism, between Jewish people and Israeli policies, between antisemitism and political criticism. This requires examining our own automatic responses and questioning the sources of our information. When we hear criticism of Israeli policies, are we immediately defensive? When we hear about Palestinian suffering, do we find ourselves thinking "but what about antisemitism?" These reflexes didn't develop naturally--they were cultivated. We must trace them back to their sources and decide whether they serve justice or enable injustice.

Second, we must develop the courage to face difficult truths about how our own communities and identities may have become implicated in systems of oppression. This means recognizing that victimhood never confers moral immunity, that past suffering doesn't justify present cruelty, that historical trauma cannot sanctify contemporary violence. If you are Jewish or identify with Jewish communities, you must grapple with how support for Israel may implicate you in genocide. If you identify as progressive, you must examine how your fear of being labeled antisemitic may silence your response to Palestinian suffering.

Third, we must insist on seeing suffering wherever it occurs, regardless of who perpetrates or experiences it. The same moral clarity that allows us to recognize the horror of the Holocaust must extend to recognizing the horror of what's happening in Gaza today. Selective empathy is not empathy at all--it's tribalism disguised as ethics. We cannot claim to care about human rights while applying different standards based on the ethnicity of victims or perpetrators.

Fourth, we must learn to speak in ways that respect the humanity of all peoples. This means refusing simplistic binaries that reduce complex situations to good versus evil narratives. It means developing language that can hold multiple truths simultaneously: that Jewish people have faced horrific persecution throughout history and that Palestinians are facing systematic destruction today, that concerns about antisemitism can be legitimate and that they can also be weaponized to shield policies from criticism.

But understanding these principles is not enough. We must actively practice them. We must change how we respond when others deploy the linguistic distortions described here. When someone conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism, we must clearly distinguish between them. When someone uses Holocaust memory to justify contemporary violence, we must name that distortion. When someone dismisses Palestinian suffering as irrelevant to discussions of antisemitism, we must insist on the connection.

Most importantly, we must recognize that language doesn't just describe reality--it constructs and shapes it. The words we choose, the distinctions we make, the stories we tell become the building blocks of the world we inhabit. When we speak with precision and compassion, when we refuse to let linguistic manipulation blind us to suffering, when we insist on seeing the full humanity of all peoples regardless of their ethnic identities or political affiliations, we begin to construct new realities where hatred finds no fertile ground.

This is not comfortable work. It requires us to abandon the safety of tribal thinking and embrace the vulnerability of genuine moral reasoning. It demands that we risk being misunderstood, labeled, attacked for refusing to accept convenient falsehoods. But this discomfort is precisely the point. Our comfort has been purchased through the suffering of others. Our linguistic certainties have been built on the silencing of Palestinian voices.

The emergence of a more just world depends on our capacity to transcend the linguistic limitations that currently constrain our imagination. We must learn to witness clearly, speak truthfully, and act with the kind of moral courage that refuses to let yesterday's trauma justify today's cruelty. Every day we delay this transformation, more children die while we debate semantics. Every moment we spend protecting our comfort zones instead of confronting these distortions, we participate in the systems we claim to oppose.

In the end, combating antisemitism requires us to combat all forms of hatred, including the hatred that manifests as genocide against Palestinians. We cannot protect one people by destroying another. We cannot honour the memory of Holocaust victims by creating new victims. Most critically, we cannot build Jewish security on the back of Palestinian suffering.

Those three young soldiers who fled their posts near Jenin have begun a journey that we all must take. They've moved from perpetrators to witnesses, from certainty to moral anguish, from linguistic prison to devastating clarity. Their courage to see what they were doing—to name it honestly despite everything they'd been taught—offers a path forward.

But their transformation came too late for the children they'd already killed, the families they'd already destroyed. How many more must die while the rest of us complete this same journey? How many more soldiers must carry this unbearable knowledge before we change the language and systems that create them?

The children of Gaza cannot wait for our comfortable pace of awakening. Every day we delay this linguistic and moral reckoning, more beds empty in the morning, more names join the lists of the dead. Your transformation—our transformation—is not an intellectual luxury. It is the difference between more soldiers fleeing in horror tomorrow and preventing them from being sent at all.