Genocide,complicity,and the debasement of political discourse: The case of Gaza

Abstract

Israel is perpetrating a genocide in Gaza, and most Western governments have so far remained complicit or complacent. This article addresses one particular aspect of the structure of complicity and justification of Israeli war crimes – the debasement of political discourse, particularly with regard to claims of self-defence and certain cases of allegations of antisemitism. In the first case, the article argues that selective application of the labels “self-defence” and “terrorism” has perpetuated an epistemic duality in which violence is either condemned or legitimised depending on the identity of the perpetrators and their alignment with geopolitical interests. Concerning accusations of antisemitism, the article turns to the notion of metadiscourse, namely, discourse that “breaks the frame” by responding to direct speech not with equally direct speech but with speech that takes the original argument as an object of discussion from the position of an outside interpreter. The proliferation of allegations of antisemitism as metadiscursive responses to criticism of Israeli policy and action has made meaningful conversation impossible outside of an infinite cycle of metadiscursive moves. This, we argue, has rendered critique effectively meaningless. The article concludes with a reflection on the value of critical analysis at a time of genocide when a sense of helplessness is widespread and meaningful action is hard to envisage.

Genocide and complicity

At the onset of writing this article, in January 2025, a ceasefire deal had recently been achieved to halt the genocide that had been ongoing in Gaza for 471 days. During these 15 months, the world watched – live – as Israeli warplanes dropped bombs all over besieged Gaza, killing what is reported to be around 47,306 Palestinians who were either unable or unwilling to leave. In reality, this figure is estimated to be more than 40% higher than reported (Khatib et al., 2024). Within a week after the attack on 7 October 2023, more than 2383 Palestinians were reported killed in Gaza (Makary, 2023). Recognising that Israel was committing retaliatory collective punishment, communities all over the globe mobilised and organised marches, events, and demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine. In December 2023, South Africa filed a complaint before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide; at least 21,507 Palestinians were reported killed in Gaza (Al Jazeera, 2023). On 26 January 2024, the court ordered Israel to adopt six provisional measures to prevent itself from committing any further acts of genocide and urbicide ¹ (International Court of Justice (ICJ), 2024); at least 26,083 Palestinians were reported killed in Gaza (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 2024a). Student encampments sprouted on countless university campuses in April 2024 – predominantly in the United States and the United Kingdom – to pressure their universities to divest from Israel; 33,843 Palestinians were reported killed in Gaza (Al Jazeera, 2024). In late May 2024, Spain, Ireland, and Norway officially recognised a Palestinian State (Jeong et al., 2024), hoping to accelerate the achievement of a ceasefire; at least 36,171 Palestinians were reported killed in Gaza (OCHA, 2024b). In June 2024, the United Nations Security Council adopted a multi-phased ceasefire resolution to end the war on Gaza (United Nations, 2024); at least 37,124 Palestinians were reported killed in Gaza (OCHA, 2024c). In September 2024, Israel waged a full-scale war on Lebanon following nearly a year of escalating cross-border strikes after Hezbollah entered the war in support of Gaza; more than 1800 Lebanese (International Organization for Migration, 2024) and 41,455 Palestinians were reported killed (Rowlands et al., 2024). On 21 November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) (2024) issued an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, charging him with “alleged” war crimes, including the use of “starvation as a method of warfare” and the deliberate targeting of civilian populations, as well as “crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”; 3583 Lebanese (OCHA, 2024d) and 44,056 Palestinians were reported killed (Shurafa and Khaled, 2024). In January 2025, a ceasefire deal was reached in Gaza, coinciding with the end of the 60-day ceasefire in Lebanon. Displaced civilians marched back to their predominantly demolished neighbourhoods on the Southern Lebanese border and in Northern Gaza. In Gaza, thousands of displaced Palestinians were left waiting for hours as Netanyahu refused to allow them passage to put pressure on the ceasefire talks, whereas in Lebanon, unarmed civilians stood face-to-face with Merkava tanks blocking their way to their homes as Israeli forces refused to withdraw; 22 Lebanese were reported killed trying to return to their villages (Bassam and Cornwell, 2025).

Unfortunately, the genocide recommenced shortly after the January ceasefire. To this day, in addition to the indiscriminate bombardment of schools, hospitals and mere tents, Israel has continued to utilise starvation and displacement as deliberate war strategies with impunity. After destroying all possible means of food production in the strip, Israel has increased its doctrine of calorie restriction in Gaza by controlling aid entry (Graham-Harrison, 2025b). When food entry is allowed, Israel deliberately sends minimal amounts, effectively manufacturing a system of starvation in Gaza: Hundreds of Gazans are killed by malnutrition and other starvation-related conditions (Nichols et al., 2025), while thousands are being shot dead by Israeli soldiers in “humanitarian convoys,” often while queuing for flour (or scraping it off the ground), canned goods, or other basic necessities (United Nations (UN), 2025). It is now reported that more than 61,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including more than 18,000 children, with tens of thousands more injured, imprisoned (alive or dead), or missing under the rubble (The Palestine Chronicle, 2025).

Amidst the genocide, Israel expanded its military aggressions far beyond the Gaza Strip, prompting the emergence of the discussion around what is dubbed the “New Middle East” (Israel’s version). This new configuration is enforced through direct bombardment, occupation, and a definition of sovereignty that aligns with Israel’s interests. In Syria, Israel seized extensive areas within the UNDOF “buffer zone” and established permanent positions after the fall of Assad’s Regime (Ebrahim, 2024). In Lebanon, Israel continues to occupy the five villages it grabbed in the 2024 war in South Lebanon, also establishing permanent military infrastructures there, months after the ceasefire. In both countries, this de facto Israeli militaristic occupation is accompanied by almost daily airstrikes, demands of the demilitarisation of non-governmental groups, and increased talks of normalisation with both governments. In the West Bank, operation “Iron Wall” displaced more than 38,000 Palestinians in Jenin and Tulkarm – the largest displacement since 1967 (Oxfam, 2025). Israel has also bombed Yemen and instigated a war with Iran with full support from the West; the United States even took part by bombing Iranian nuclear facilities. That is to say, the “New Middle East” is one in which Israeli violence and legal exceptionalism are governing principles.

The fact that Israel was allowed to commit atrocities with complete impunity has shattered any remaining legitimacy that Western liberal democracies held as supposed bastions of justice and the rule of law. The stark juxtaposition between the gut-wrenching reality of annihilation, on the one hand – generational familial erasure, neighbourhoods reduced to rubble, hospitals besieged and bombed, new-born babies decomposing in hospital beds, displaced refugees burned in tents or in food queues, people dying of starvation – and the ineffectual resolutions of the “international community,” on the other hand, has raised serious questions about the willingness of Western “democracies” wielding economic and military power to take international law seriously. Prior to the genocide in Gaza, many of us held the assumption or, at the very least, the hope, that when atrocities of this magnitude are perpetrated, Western democratic powers would be compelled to stop or at least challenge them. We assumed, or hoped, that when the said atrocities are overwhelmingly well-documented by extensive evidence and footage, and when the suffering mobilises millions of individuals, groups, organisations, and nations into action, then something would be done. It was expected that public pressure, or dare we say, a sense of minimal moral conviction, might impel the liberal democratic regimes of Western countries to intervene in response to the atrocities – Never Again, we used to be told. How things unfolded, however, was completely detached from that imagination: the atrocities continued month after month, even when the supposed wheels of justice started turning in international courts and councils.

Historically, the inefficiency and complicity of Western democracies have long been evident in the Palestinian struggle. Palestinians have long pursued various avenues to preserve their existence (Turner, 2012), at least in the “Occupied Palestinian Territories”: reporting transgressions with international bodies and human rights organisations, signing peace treaties, such as the Oslo Accords (1993–1995), organising nonviolent demonstrations like the Great March of Return in 2018, etc. Regardless, Al-Nakba ² remains ongoing, marked by the apartheid, displacement, confiscation, fragmentation, expansion over, and erasure of Palestinian (and Lebanese?) land, bodies, and minds (Dana and Jarbawi, 2017; Eghbariah, 2024). The Israeli war crimes, and crimes against humanity, against Palestinians that we are witnessing today are a continuation of this history of violence and structure of genocide (Abdo, 2024; Ayyash, 2024), and the fact that they are allowed to continue is an indictment of the inability and/or unwillingness of the international community – especially Western states – to take serious action.

But what do these states and publics want? What conditions do the politicians, policymakers, institutions, and members of the public who refuse to take a stand for the lives and freedom of Palestinians require to take such a stand? And what tangible tools and practical pathways do they expect the oppressed to follow to reclaim their freedoms, rights, and dignity? Palestinians today are living under what Hashem Abushama (2024) has referred to as the “post-Oslo conjuncture” – a set of economic, social and political conditions characterised by increased economic privatisation (since 1985) and integration of Palestine’s economy into Israel’s (since 1994), as well as increased self-governance for the West Bank and Gaza, and territorial and political fragmentation (p. 25). As Raef Zreik (2024) argues, Palestinians have been put in an impossible predicament when it comes to the available means of legitimate resistance. While some advocates of Israel might argue that Palestinians are self-governing and that Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the reality remains that Israel controls the strip’s electricity and water supplies, communications systems, air space, territorial waters, and the entry of food and other basic commodities into Gaza (Roy, 2024) – which is why it was able to effectively starve the population. This amounts to an occupation that makes the Gaza Strip an open-air prison, despite the fact that the prisoners have some control over their internal affairs (Zreik, 2024: 197). Adding to this, Zreik points out that in Gaza and the West Bank alike, demonstrations and protests – like the first and second Intifada – have been violently suppressed and equated with terrorism; active human rights organisations have been shut down; and UN resolutions have not led to any tangible changes. In the meantime, Israel’s withdrawal from everyday civic affairs such as taxation and education has meant that everyday acts of resistance – such as the refusal to pay taxes, for example – have become impossible. ³ What happens to the possibility of resistance under such conditions? As Zreik (2024) explains,

Under these circumstances there was no possible avenue for the Palestinians to resist the occupation. They were faced with very difficult options: either simply to surrender and accept the occupation and the continuation of the expansion of settlements and land grabs by Israel and settlers, or to resort to forms of armed struggle that might go beyond what is allowed under international law. (p. 200)

This is all part of a long history of occupation and perpetual violence that is omitted from the standard framing of attacks and retaliations through which the Israel-Palestine “conflict” is usually presented and communicated in the media and political discourse. History in this framing is fragmented into a series of individual and highly sensationalised flashpoints of violence that fail to convey the backdrop of the original instance of violence that is the establishment of the Zionist project in Palestine, and the prolonged Israeli settler colonial occupation that followed. Understood through this ahistorical lens, the conflict becomes a matter of flat characterisations of Palestinians and Israelis as moral or immoral subjects in the here and now. In media reporting and political discourse, reductionist stereotypes of “perpetrators” and “victims” are selectively applied, often – though not always – based on the attitudes and intentions of each group towards the other. As we show in subsequent sections in this article, this has led to the debasement of language for the purposes of portraying Israel as a victim acting in self-defence in the face of constant attacks from antisemitic critics.

We argue, however, that even from an ahistorical and fragmented perspective, the fact that a genocide is perpetrated against a besieged and starved population is wrong unconditionally, regardless of any other considerations. This does not seem to be recognised by Western states, and if recognised, then the recognition certainly isn’t leading to any meaningful response. Yet, the necessity of taking a stance against Israel’s actions does not stem from the intent or ideology of either side in the conflict, but from the military capacity to execute a genocide and the active execution of genocide against an occupied and besieged people, with impunity. What concerns us the most, in other words, is not intentions and attitudes but the concrete actions; what we find unbearable and unjustifiable in the present moment is first and foremost the carrying out, and continuation of, extremely disproportionate destruction and killing by one of the most well-funded militaries in the world against one of the most vulnerable occupied and besieged populations. It is in this context of extreme imbalances in power and vulnerability, as well as extremely disproportionate use of military power, that we put into question what it is that Western states expect Palestinians and those who support them to do in order to make a meaningful intervention against this genocide. That is, do they see any scenario where they take action to stop the genocide perpetrated against Palestinians, or are they of the view that the only acceptable colonised subject is one that obediently accepts their death and erasure?

When all means of resistance failed, Palestinians in Gaza resorted to documentation to assert their humanity and plead for help. They had to upload photographs and videos of their massacred kin for the world as a testament to the genocide. They had to write and speak in English as a cry for help for the “Western community” to acknowledge the genocide and intervene. In turn, publics across the world mobilised to call for freedom and justice for Gaza and Palestine in a global solidarity movement in which millions took to the streets, groups sent letters and petitions to different decision-makers, academics organised conferences, artists curated exhibitions, students organised encampments and protests on their campuses, activists and unions disrupted arms manufacturing and transfer to Israel through direct transfer obstructions, and individuals took it upon themselves to fight hasbara ⁴ by spreading historical facts, debunking propaganda online, and so on. Despite these monumental collective efforts, governmental and institutional responses remained, at best, rhetorical and subpar. They failed to take tangible, effective actions to halt the crimes against humanity, let alone to hold their perpetrators accountable. While Palestinians in Gaza were able to generate public moral outrage by documenting the genocide perpetrated against them, the inaction on behalf of so many states vividly revealed the limitations of solidarity movements when operating against the impetus of geopolitical interests.

Genocide as “Self-defence”?

In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell (2000) argued that the political language of his time was designed to conceal or distort the truth and ensure that reality is not accurately represented in its full brutality:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. [. . .] Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. (p. 356)

Today, this discursive strategy is in full use, and we see it vividly when both Israeli and Western leaders repeat one sentence tirelessly: “Israel has the right to defend itself” (e.g. Donnelly, 2024; Jones, 2023; LeMonde and AFP, 2025; Shalom, 2024). There is much to say about this slogan, but let us begin with the legal aspect. This discourse is repeatedly invoked – and the stance it represents is affirmed – despite various regulations that counter its validity as a justification for exercising military force, especially over occupied territories. For instance, under the Regulations concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land, in the case of occupation – such as the case of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which have been recognised as militarily occupied territories since 1967 ⁵ (United Nations Security Council, 1967) – the occupying state, in this case Israel, is not allowed to use disproportionate militarised force in response to armed attacks but must instead protect itself while taking all measures to restore “public order and safety” and ensuring the well-being of the occupied population. In addition, the Fourth Geneva Convention calls explicitly for the humanitarian protection of civilians in war zones and territories under military occupation. Hence, as human rights attorney and legal scholar Noura Erakat (2012) puts it, “Israel’s ability to frame its assault against territory it occupies as a right of self-defence turns international law on its head.” Similarly, when Western governments adopt and repeat this narrative to justify Israel’s assault on Gaza and the tens of thousands of civilians, including children, who are killed, the effects extend beyond diplomatic support and into the domain of effectively encouraging unaccountability and undermining the very legal frameworks they claim to uphold.

As the language used by liberal democracies becomes loose and abstracted from the reality it claims to describe – when bombing, arson and displacement are called “pacification” (as in Orwell’s text) and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians is called “self-defence” (as it is called by Israel and its liberal democratic allies) – then the moral frameworks of these democracies and the human rights law they claim to uphold collapse under the weight of their contradictions. Repeating the assertion that “Israel has the right to defend itself” is not only an effort to justify Israel’s actions, but also a strategic manipulation of language that perpetuates an epistemic duality in which violence is either condemned as terrorism or legitimised as self-defence, depending on the identity of the perpetrators and where they stand in relation to the geopolitical interests of different world powers. The language used to address the same actions is radically different depending on who is carrying them out, and this shapes public perceptions of morality, the right to violence, and, as in the case of Israel, the ability to kill tens of thousands of people and starve millions with impunity. As a result, the very notions of terrorism and self-defence, respectively, defined and enriched by international law in concrete ways that are intended to be applied consistently, have become merely contingent on the political agendas of the politicians who evoke them. As Edward Said (1984) wrote in his “Permission to Narrate,”

terrorism is the vaguest and yet for that reason the most precise of concepts. This is not at all to say that terrorism does not exist, but rather to suggest that its existence has occasioned a whole new signifying system as well. Terrorism signifies first, in relation to “us,” the alien and gratuitously hostile force. [. . .] Most of all, terrorism has come to signify “our” view of everything in the world that seems inimical to our interests, army, policy or values. (p. 36)

Consider also that Israel’s use and abuse of the notion of terrorism is applied in several domains of action. Not only is any kind of Palestinian resistance or protest categorised as terrorism, but even the Palestinian Authority’s attempt to bring Israel in front of the ICJ and the call to boycott Israeli products have been presented as diplomatic terrorism and cultural terrorism, respectively (Zreik, 2024: 200).

Said’s observation applies almost word for word to the concept of self-defence, save for the replacement of a few words with their antonyms: self-defence is vague and at the same time precise (in the sense that, like the concept of terrorism, its vagueness allows a group to project into it whatever meanings fit its political agendas). This is not to say that acts of self-defence are not possible and do not exist, but that their existence is the edifice of a system of representations of the familiar, the safe and the just, as well as representations of everyone who understands “us” and is willing to protect “our” interests and values against the enemy “other.” The possibilities for perverting the notion of self-defence into something far worse that disguises itself as safety and justice become ample. Similarly, the point is not to dispute whether terrorism exists or not, but rather to highlight that signifying practices of the discourse on terrorism produce effects that go beyond the indication of what and who qualifies (or does not qualify) as a terrorist based on specific criteria (and the same argument applies to self-defence). The label, regardless of whether it is applied correctly or not, functions not only as a representation of a reality (accurate or inaccurate), but also as a means of defending the indefensible and legitimating the illegitimate. In the present war, we have seen the bombing of churches, mosques, schools, and hospitals, all in the name of fighting terrorism; the bombing of innocent civilians, including children and elderly people, all in the name of fighting terrorism. Once the labels of terrorism and self-defence are applied – regardless of whether they are applied accurately or inaccurately – they are capable of negating the value that is otherwise attributed to the sanctity of sanctuaries, as well as the sanctity of life.

Crucially, the discourses of dehumanisation can only materialise on a meaningful scale because of the economic and political resources invested in disseminating them and the media infrastructures that afford them circulation into the computers, tablets, and phones of people across the globe, but especially in Western countries. Anyone can create a system of images and narratives that dehumanise people, but not everyone has the resources, capabilities, and political leverage to deliver their messages to hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis.

After October 7, the media coverage of the war on Gaza and Lebanon played a crucial role in framing events and shaping public narratives (Ajour, 2025: 11–12; Alaqad et al., 2025; Khamis and Dogbatse, 2024). At one point or another, any conscious reader and/or listener could have recognised the unapologetic bias in Western media coverage of the unfolding events. For example, when 6-year-old Hind Rajab’s call for help to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society was cut by Israeli soldiers firing 335 bullets from a tank at her family’s car, killing them all and later the two paramedics dispatched to save them, it was reported that she was “found dead” after “appear[ing] to have come under fire from Israeli tanks” (Williamson, 2024). When babies died from hypothermia in tents that their families had to use after they were forcefully displaced from their homes, they were reportedly killed simply from temperature drops (The New York Times, 2024). This skewed coverage is further evidenced by Johnson and Ali’s (2024) analysis of 1100 articles from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times during the first 6 weeks of the assault on Gaza, which uncovered a consistent bias that simultaneously dehumanises Palestinians and delegitimises their struggle while mourning Israeli lives and justifying their bombing campaigns. The study further uncovered that Israeli deaths were reported 16 times more frequently than Palestinian deaths, with the former described in emotionally arousing language like “slaughtered,” “massacred,” and “horrific,” while the latter were reduced to passive language with little to no mention of Israeli military responsibility (Johnson and Ali, 2024). This continued throughout the genocide on Gaza and was replicated in the war on Lebanon.

Later, when the number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli occupation in Gaza became so high that those who were able to ignore it could not anymore, news pieces like “Number of civilians killed in Gaza [is being] inflated to vilify Israel” (Sawer, 2024) started circulating. When public discourse became increasingly pro-Palestinian on the streets and on social media, articles started surfacing implying that decolonisation narratives are dangerous and false (Sebag Montefiore, 2023), that it is wrong to use the term coloniser (Cohen, 2023), and even that it is time to retire the term “genocide” itself (Kirsch, 2023). The selective reporting, disinformation, and language debasement employed by media outlets are emblematic of a historical pattern in which the media operates as a tool of epistemic violence that consequently sustains physical violence. Although Edward Said’s analysis of the media’s role during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon was at a time when the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was at the forefront of the Palestinian struggle, his insights could easily be projected to the 2023–2025 invasion of Lebanon and Gaza, once again highlighting that what we are witnessing is just another episode of an ongoing systemic Nakba:

No television watcher could have had any doubts that the Israelis were savage and ruthless during the siege of Beirut. Yet a campaign has been waged in the media attacking the media for a pro-PLO slant. Well before the Israeli invasion it got started in pro-Zionist publications like the New Republic, and it continues long after in Encounter, Commentary and Policy Studies, as well as on college campuses where lectures entitled “NBC in Lebanon: A Study in Misrepresentation” are regularly given. The basic line is that the media have taken liberties with language, that analogies between Warsaw and Beirut are wrong, that any images showing Israeli troops engaged in bombing plainly civilian targets are anti-Semitic, that the millions of feet of newsreel are less trustworthy than the impressions of a supporter of Israel who spent a day in Lebanon touring the place as a guest of the Israeli Army. (Said, 1984: 34–35)

The long history of poor Western journalistic ethics and objectivity has carried the potential – and frequently succeeded in realising this potential – to corrupt the receiver’s ethical and moral compass. In the present war of images and narratives, the ahistorical articulation of Israel’s actions as self-defence occupies a hegemonic position in the structure of representations. The selective use of language to report deaths in different ways depending on the identity of killers and victims, the choices to report some deaths more frequently than others, the efforts to deny and discredit the validity of concepts such as colonialism and genocide that serve a legal, moral, and analytical function as a challenge to Israel’s actions – all of these practices support a narrative in which Israel is presented as the victim, its actions allegedly both necessary and justified, despite the widely disproportionate destruction and killing that it has inflicted on a besieged, starved, and effectively defenceless population.

Metadiscourse and allegations of antisemitism

Arguments on contentious matters of identity politics are easy to “win.” There is one very easy, very banal, and very reliable tactic that one can use to dismiss or delegitimate any argument, no matter how reasonable, sound, or robust. All one has to do is assert that the argument made against them is a trope that expresses one moral transgression or another: “Your point is invalid, you see, because what you’re saying is a well-known [insert type of transgression] trope.” This is a move that has been widely utilised across the political spectrum, both on the “left” and “right” (the use of quotation marks is deliberate, given the current state of each side). In linguistics and communication studies, this is referred to as “going meta” (Craig, 2016; Hutchby, 2024; Simons, 1994). To go meta means to respond to an argument made in direct speech not by continuing to use direct speech on the same level/in the same frame, but by taking the argument as an object of discussion and discussing it from the position of an outside observer and interpreter. That is, going meta involves “breaking frame” and moving to a framing that “ascends” from the initial direct speech:

If the expectation is that one should reply to questions directly in a given situation, then respondents will have gone meta (and broken the frame of direct address) if they elect to step back from the immediacy of a question to question the questioner’s motives, or tone, or premises, or right to ask certain questions, or right to ask any questions at all. Going meta also will have occurred should the respondent comment favorably on the question or on the questioner’s mode of delivery. [. . .] A communication is reflexive when it makes prior communications the subject of communication, attending to them as communications rather than to their manifest meaning or truth content. (Simons, 1994: 470)

In the context of the war on Gaza, nothing exemplifies the practice of going meta more clearly than responding to criticisms of Israeli policy and action with an accusation of antisemitism.

There is something deeply unsettling in thinking about metadiscourse as a form of argumentation. All critique of discourse as such – namely, when taken as discourse – takes the form of metadiscourse; whenever one talks about something that somebody said, they inevitably, in effect, engage in metadiscursive practice. Hence, the critique of metadiscourse is itself metadiscursive as it takes metadiscourse as an object of critique and interpretation. Several complications emerge as a result. The first is that criticising a mechanism of argumentation by using that very same mechanism is self-undermining at the pragmatic level, despite being intellectually honest at the descriptive level (because it describes the mechanism accurately, in our view). The second is that the practice of going meta can easily spiral into infinite regress, whereby every utterance can be potentially criticised and dismissed by an utterance at a higher level, only to be met with an utterance about that utterance, and so forth ad infinitum (Coupland and Jaworski, 2004: 39). Critique melts into air as a result; it becomes a series of deflections from the previous frame with no solid grounding that can guarantee its survival in the face of the next meta-move. Sophistication in argument becomes about anticipating an opponent’s meta-move, and preemptively undermining it with a meta-move about that meta-move. A third complication is that recourse to metadiscursive critique is often not only legitimate but necessary. Since any argument that points out the causes or consequences of discourse qualifies as a metadiscursive argument, abandoning the use of metadiscourse would make it impossible to critique or praise anything said as an expression of political interest, an example of vice or virtue, or a statement that reproduces injustice or tries to resist it. And if we only respond to direct speech with other direct speech without assessing its motivation or legitimacy, then we would become vulnerable to exhaustion from being continuously baited with a deliberately targeted overload of bullshit.

The challenge is that there is no set of criteria for objectively establishing and confirming what counts as a legitimate metadiscursive critique and what doesn’t. When is an accusation of racism or antisemitism legitimate? When is it not? What are the criteria for deciding, and how are these criteria determined? And when is a critique of the critique legitimate? Imagine that somebody makes an allegation of antisemitism or racism that is perfectly legitimate and, by criticising it, another person who misrecognises this legitimacy becomes complicit with the antisemitic or racist transgression that the first critique initially addressed. In an alternative scenario, imagine that an allegation of antisemitism or racism is not legitimate and somebody criticises it as such, only for them to be criticised for being complicit in reproducing racism and antisemitism. How could we judge if one scenario is taking place as opposed to the other? The difficulty here is that what counts as racism or antisemitism, on the one hand, and as legitimate critique, on the other, is always a political question subject to contestation, and potential doubling down. One can infinitely deny the charges as well as affirm them at will (“this is not racism, it is legitimate critique!”; “yes, it is racism!”; “no, it’s not!”; . . .) and the grounds on which they do so can never be guaranteed or fixed, not least because they shift depending on culture, context, and political orientation (Mintchev, 2021). The fact that the charges of racism and antisemitism are deniable and affirmable is unsettling on both counts: whenever there is a case of racism or antisemitism that we see as genuine, it is always possible for the allegation to be denied to avoid accountability (Lentin, 2016; Titley, 2016); at the same time, whenever there is an allegation of racism or antisemitism that we do not see as legitimate, we know that it is always possible for the allegation to be reaffirmed in the face of critique.

It has been proposed that legitimate criticism differs from antisemitism on the basis of its truth-value. Criticism of Israel, as long as it is based on verified facts, is legitimate according to this view. If the criticism is based on false claims or stereotypes that have no factual basis, then it is not legitimate and qualifies as antisemitism:

Antisemitism is based in fantasy, either lacking a factual basis or magnifying and distorting that basis into something unreal. Non-antisemitic hostility is grounded in unvarnished and recognizable reality. It is not antisemitic to denounce the violence Israel perpetrates upon West Bank Palestinians. It is, however, antisemitic to claim that because Israeli soldiers shoot unarmed Palestinians, they plot to harvest Palestinian organs, or that American support for Israel stems from Jewish control of the media. (Penslar, 2022: 139)

Telling the truth is essential, of course, as is rejecting conspiracy theories and stereotypes. Where this proposal runs into difficulty, however, is with regard to using descriptions of reality as the basis for making moral claims. What one person calls “denouncing the violence,” another might call “denying the right to self-defence” and attribute this alleged denial to antisemitism. These are moral statements which simply cannot be considered objective or verified by applying objective truth-conditions. This problem becomes all the more difficult when we add the layers of distortion, denials, and cover-ups that aim to prevent the widespread public knowledge about the atrocities and their scale (Ageel, 2025; Confino and Hamdouna, 2025; Graham-Harrison and Abraham, 2025; Jones, 2025; Sayigh, 2018). What one person considers a distortion of reality, another might consider telling the undistorted truth, and both of these positions can be denied and affirmed in political discourse in ways that spiral away from any shared understanding of history, truth, or ethics.

In the context of Israel and Palestine, the charge of antisemitism has been frequently invoked to dismiss Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices. Rather than engaging with their discourse and what it substantively entails, the speaker making the allegation positions himself or herself as an interpreter of the discourse and targets it from that position. The accusation of antisemitism has come to be used in response to condemning Israel’s actions in the war, challenging its occupation of Palestine, highlighting the death and suffering of Palestinians, and standing in solidarity with Palestine, irrespective of how carefully articulated and well-documented the discourse is. The allegation of racism or antisemitism often interrupts the conversation, rather than participating in it, by switching to a different frame. This process of going meta has a dual function: first, it discredits the speaker by casting doubt on their moral integrity and political intent; second, it shifts the focus away from the material realities of genocide in Gaza and the colonial occupation of Palestine, and redirects attention to the alleged impropriety of the discourse itself. As Mohammed El-Kurd (2025) ironically puts it, “A drone is one thing, but a trope – a trope is unacceptable” (p. 101).

This discrediting of pro-Palestinian voices has been criticised on account of two contradictions that emerge in the Zionist discourse on antisemitism and its application. The first contradiction is that many of Israel’s most vocal critics have been Jewish, leading to a conflict between Jews with different political views, as well as a challenge to the notion that opposition to Israel’s actions is inherently antisemitic. A common response to this challenge has been not only for Zionists to accuse pro-Palestinian Jews of antisemitism but also to question their Jewishness (e.g. Goodman, 2025; Lentin, 2025: chapter 5; Shabi, 2024: chapter 4). Simon Goodman (2025), for example, has described how members of Na’amod – a UK-based Jewish organisation campaigning for the end of Israel’s occupation of Palestine – have been insulted online as irrational, self-hating, and lacking Jewish ethics. This suggests, according to Goodman, that “Accusations of antisemitism, which in this discussion are solely directed towards Jewish people, therefore need to be understood as a strategy for supporting Israel’s actions rather than as a concern about racism towards Jews” (p. 10). Rachel Shabi has pointed to similar attacks faced by American Jews who have spoken up for Palestinian rights – including members of campaign groups such as IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace – where activists have had their Jewishness denied because of their politics. The scenario this has created is extremely bleak. As Shabi (2024) puts it, “We are witnessing a willingness to cancel a person’s Jewishness as a means of preserving a definition of antisemitism that simply refuses to fit reality” (p. 179).

The second contradiction is that many of Israel’s supporters in the West stand on the political hard right and have a history of propagating antisemitic views. The reason that Zionist and Western far-right actors are both willing to establish a political alliance with one another is that they both share the view that Muslims stand on the other side of a clash of civilisations that they and their countries are fighting (see Lentin, 2020: chapter 4; Shroufi, 2025). Antisemitism and Islamophobia exist side by side in European and American far-right circles and, in some cases, they are intricately connected – Alana Lentin (2025: 140), for example, cites an instance from Hungary where the arrival of refugees in 2018 was presented in terms of “Muslim invaders” supported by Jewish “meddling.” The connection between antisemitism and Islamophobia, however, is conveniently left out of pro-Zionist discourses, leading to stark inconsistencies when it comes to criticising antisemitism: “antisemitism is excused if opposition to Muslims and support for Israel are present. Pro-Zionist politics are not consistent with a rejection of antisemitism, even if the defence of Israel generally presupposes unequivocal support for the Jewish people” (Lentin, 2020: 145).

More than that, the accusation of antisemitism has also been applied internally to Israelis who have voiced concerns about the excesses of the genocide. In July 2025, it was reported that the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert criticised the current government’s plans to construct a “humanitarian city” (an Orwellian term, if one ever existed) in the south of Gaza. The plan for the “city” was that it would be initially inhabited by 600,000 Palestinians, and eventually, by all of Gaza’s Palestinian inhabitants. None of the inhabitants would be allowed to leave the “city” unless they were leaving for another country. Olmert’s criticism, which claimed that the project resembles a concentration camp and moving Palestinians there would amount to ethnic cleansing, was met with a fierce backlash from government officials that also included an accusation of spreading antisemitism. According to the report by the Guardian,

[Olmert]’s comments evoking comparisons with Nazi-era Germany were fiercely attacked inside Israel. The heritage minister, Amichai Eliyahu, in effect called for Olmert to be jailed over the comments, with a barely veiled reference to time he served for corruption offences after leaving office. “[Olmert] already knows prison very well,” Eliyahu said. “There is no other way to shut him down from the hatred and antisemitism he spreads around the world.” (Graham-Harrison, 2025a)

The lesson of the story: nobody is immune from the charge, not even a former Israeli Prime Minister who was responsible, among other things, for Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon.

Such instances underscore a much deeper struggle over definitions and their use as a tool to regulate discourse and frame illegitimacy. The practice of creating definitions plays a crucial role in reinforcing the metadiscursive politics of critique. Definitions have the magical power to present the political as objectively neutral and natural. They can be explicative – in other words, they can explicate or describe a pre-existing objective reality – but they can also be stipulative, meaning that they can propose a set of features that constitute the identifying markers of the concept or thing defined. Any time we say “let us define X as . . .” we engage in the stipulation of a definition (Watson, 1985). However, the copula “is,” which usually signifies the identity of the two sides of a definition, makes definitions appear as descriptions of an objective reality, subsequently concealing the stipulative dimension involved in prioritising one definition over another. When it comes to defining antisemitism or racism, or any historically and culturally contested concept, for that matter, it is impossible to ground the definitions in objective reality in a way that resolves the dispute between people holding diverging views. Who is to say what the right definition is if there is no consensus? And in virtue of what should one definition be upheld while others are excluded? The radical contingency of definitions tends to disappear from view because the “is” that structures definitions makes stipulation appear as explication/description. Take as an example the United States House of Representatives’ (2023) resolution declaring that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism”. In appearance, the equation presents itself as a description of a pre-existing reality of what anti-Zionism and antisemitism are as objective forms that allegedly justify the indictment of critics of Israel’s policies as antisemitic. In reality, however, the equation is an effect of a contingent political and performative manoeuvre that institutes and consolidates the equation between the two concepts by proclaiming it and making it the subject of subsequent reiterations. What appears as the description of a fixed reality is in fact a contingent construction that is consolidated through discursive reiterations, and the ability of some definitions to be institutionalised at the expense of others is the outcome of political power struggles and contestations (for an account of how articulations of the relationship between Zionism and antisemitism have changed since the 1970s, see Shabi, 2024: chapter 5). This performative fixing or stabilising is a counterpart of the radical instability that the use of metadiscourse inevitably creates. As the proliferation of vulgarised metadiscourse leaves the intellectual value of critique in ruins, the effort to fix the meaning of antisemitism through new definitions becomes an effort of the Zionist discourse to save itself – or at least to save face – amid the ubiquitous nihilism that it has itself created. Whether this can work in convincing anyone outside of a small minority is seriously questionable; whether it is sustainable in the long run, even more so. The problem that remains for us is to understand if and how language can sustain (or perhaps reclaim) its value as a form of expression. When discourse has become so thoroughly debased and so completely helpless in the face of moral nihilism, genocide and complicity, what place is there left for it in the exercise of political agency, and human agency more broadly?

In place of conclusion

We began this article with a timeline depicting how the genocide in Gaza progressed while most of the world’s governments and organisations remained complacent or complicit. We subsequently turned to the use of language in media and political discourses – particularly the discourses on self-defence and antisemitism – and argued that language has become debased in a way that has rendered critique meaningless and truth irrelevant in politics. Writing a conventional conclusion to such an article is challenging and perhaps even somewhat inappropriate. The customary function of conclusions is to consolidate the arguments presented throughout the text, highlight the significance of the arguments for contemporary debates or problems, and, in some cases, propose ways forward for future research or further action. After nearly 2 years of genocide, this is difficult to do, both intellectually and emotionally. Regardless of UN resolutions, an ICJ court ruling, extensive documentation of Israeli war crimes, and worldwide outrage that has mobilised millions of people to take to the streets, the genocide in Gaza continued to be perpetrated by Israel with impunity. How can we talk about the significance of research and academic writing in this context? What future direction could there be for academic writing? And for whom? To talk about the significance of arguments or future directions in research seems misguided, if not dishonest, in the context of what feels like total helplessness in the face of genocide and complicity.

Nevertheless, staying silent is not an option either. We do not have the luxury of quitting when Palestinians are still fighting for their rights to self-determination and liberation from the epicentre of violence. The critiques we have presented in this article are our response to a tension that we – and many of our friends and colleagues – experience between the necessity to do something and the impossibility of making a difference. The complicity and complacency are enraging; the debasement of language is ridiculous in its shamelessness. The value of critique has been so thoroughly degraded by reflexive recourse to meta moves that dialogue and listening have become for the most part impossible. Even the critique of critique that we present in this article seems to fall victim to the vulgar cycle of metadiscourse that politicians, writers, and commentators who support Israeli policy and action are upholding so successfully. The only thing that we think can justify critical analysis in these bleak times is its honesty and sincerity. Sincere intellectual critique must surely have some intrinsic value, regardless of whether it manages to persuade anyone or not. As experience has shown us, critique will not end complicity and complacency, and it will not restore discourse to a dialogical mode based on a minimal level of receptiveness. But even when this is the case, it is still worthwhile to try to tell the truth. Millions of people around the globe are doing it through whatever channels are available to us. Regardless of whether any of the people in power listen or not, we remain steadfast in telling the truth and recognising the humanity and rights of the people of Palestine.