The war of words just grew deadlier. The Palestinians have not just coined a new word; they’ve created an entirely new narrative.
As noted by Mathilda Heller in this paper last week, the Arab League’s Permanent Arab Committee for Human Rights has “called for the adoption of a new word – ‘wholocide’ – to describe Israel’s actions against Palestinians.
“The committee argued that Israel’s actions are so extreme that the word ‘genocide’ is no longer strong enough.”
If you missed the similar sound of the word “wholocide” and “Holocaust,” you have missed the point. As Itamar Marcus, founder and director of Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), pointed out: “The new term also includes the Arabic word ‘ahwal,’ meaning ‘horrors.’”
PMW noted the attempt is to create an internationally recognized historical concept parallel to the Holocaust, with its own terminology, commemorative events, academic literature, and annual Remembrance Day.
The message is: Israelis are not the new Nazis; they’re worse than the Nazis. Neither the message nor the method are subtle, but they’re pervasive and increasingly persuasive.
"Wholocide" lies are killing Jews everywhere
“The Big Lie” was Hitler’s preferred propaganda technique of repeating an outrageous falsehood against the Jews enough times for it to become accepted. It has morphed into “libelocide,” an attempt to erase the Jewish state’s right to exist through repetition of the “genocide” blood libel. And make no mistake, Jewish blood is already being spilled worldwide because of these lies and falsehoods.
There has been a progression of inversions – perversions of the truth. The Palestinians and their supporters claim that there wasn’t a Holocaust and yet use Holocaust-evocative imagery against the Jews. In their telling, there was no invasion by five Arab armies of the nascent Jewish state in 1948, just the Nakba (the “Catastrophe” of Israel’s creation). No Jews were murdered or displaced in the 1948 war launched by the Arab world; only “Palestinians” became refugees (although the term “Palestinian” at that point referred to the Jews; that’s another semantic twist).
In the Palestinian narrative, sorry is definitely the hardest word. There was no October 7, 2023, when Iranian-sponsored terrorists from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other movements invaded southern Israel, murdering, raping, and mutilating victims, and burning down entire communities. Thirty children were among the 1,200 murdered that day; 251 people were abducted to Gaza. Apparently, they don’t count.
For the Palestinians, there is only October 17, 2023, which “Palestine’s Permanent Representative to the League of Arab States,” Muhannad al-Aklouk, declared should be designated annual “Wholocide” Memorial Day. Maybe there should be a new word for it: “Hollowcaust,” to reflect the obscene trivialization.
Marcus points out that the date is based on another blood libel, marking the explosion of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket in the parking lot of Gaza City’s al-Ahli Baptist Hospital. Hamas immediately created a hugely inflated death toll and blamed Israel. The world media swallowed the lie whole.
In a world under constant threat of global jihad, blaming the Jews remains reliable and familiar. The real genocide – the Hamas-led assault on Israel; Iran’s missiles, drones, and terrorist proxies; the Houthis with their flag declaring “Death to America, Death to Israel” – has been either ignored or accepted.
Palestine Square in central Tehran sported a countdown clock, ticking away the days to Israel’s predicted demise in 2040. Last June, Israeli pilots reportedly knocked out the clock and set the ayatollahs’ plans back. Central Tel Aviv features graffiti calling for peace and many gay pride flags. Which city flaunts its genocidal intent, and which celebrates human rights and freedom?
In a particularly pertinent example of how perverted the libeling of Israel has become, there was an effort by 63 anti-Israel groups to block the Israeli ambassador from attending this week’s Holocaust memorial in the Dutch city of Rotterdam – because, you know, the Holocaust isn’t about Jews who perished (often with the cooperation of locals); Holocaust remembrance is about the Palestinians.
In many places, local politics focus far from home. Forget garbage collection in Birmingham or public safety in New York; it’s Israel’s perceived crimes in Gaza that matter.
As Heller noted, “The linguistic progression is not merely semantic. Each successive term carries a stronger moral and legal charge, moving from a description of territorial control (‘occupation’) to allegations of discriminatory governance (‘apartheid’), forced demographic shifts (‘ethnic cleansing’), the most severe crime under international law (‘genocide’), and now a newly coined term (‘wholocide’) intended to signify a crime exceeding even genocide.”
Delegitimization has turned into demonization and efforts to turn Israel into a pariah state. Attempts to erase Jewish ties to Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria are part of this endeavor. On Tisha B’Av, the date when Jews commemorate the destruction of the First and Second Temples, news stories referred to “thousands of Jewish extremists who stormed Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site on Thursday,” to quote The Guardian.
To be clear: Thousands of Jews (who are not automatically extremist) peacefully ascended Judaism’s holiest site to commemorate the devastating events that occurred there in 586 BCE and 70 CE. It might be extraordinary for an indigenous people to have a collective memory that stretches back across the millennia, but it’s not a crime.
Then there are the soft sob stories like the one in The Guardian titled: “Reclaiming stolen childhoods: swimming classes resume in Gaza after three years of war.” Similar stories appear in other news outlets, the vast majority of them focusing on the children of Gaza – as if Israeli children haven’t also been through three years of war, rocket attacks, disrupted schooling, uncertainty at home (and in thousands of cases, displacement). Israeli children have also suffered bereavement and trauma. Israeli children also feel fear.
The childhoods of millions, in Israel and in Gaza, have been stolen – by Hamas and other terrorist organizations. News coverage rarely mentions that Gaza shares a border with Egypt, but authorities in Cairo keep it closed, afraid of the impact of Hamas, an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. It is the jihadists, not Jews, who threaten world peace.
There are still some Righteous Gentiles (to use an appropriate Holocaust-related term) who, mercifully, haven’t fallen for the Palestinian narrative – who see the lies and blood libels, and are willing, often at considerable personal and professional risk, to call them out.
This week, British singer Boy George refused to be silenced, releasing a reggae-style song called “We Will Dance Again” (a reference to the slogan of the October 7 Supernova music festival massacre survivors). It opens with the lyrics: “You say genocide, I say war / When you’re attacked, that’s what the army’s for.”
How are jihadist myths killing Israel's credibility abroad?
When new British Defense Secretary Wes Streeting declared last week, without evidence, that Israel has “fallen short” of the UK’s military standards during its war in Gaza, retired British Army veteran Col. Richard Kemp leaped to Israel’s defense, writing: “If he is talking about minimizing harm to non-combatants, they… exceeded all other armies’ precautions.”
I recommend reading the essay on Substack by another retired British officer, Andrew Fox, titled: “Collapse of the blood libels: Every pillar of the genocide accusation against Israel has crumbled. The institutions that built it have suddenly lost their voices.”
He notes the inflated casualty rates produced by Hamas (including the thousands supposedly buried under rubble, who never emerged). Even UNRWA admitted that some staff members were involved in the October 7 attack and abductions; Hamas has acknowledged some of the dead “journalists” as members of the terrorist organization; ditto, some healthcare workers.
Meanwhile, the famine that never was continues to feed blood libels and wholocide claims. Just last week, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification analysis admitted the improvement in food supplies to Gaza – but warned of a “possible famine” later this year. It was reminiscent of the dire warnings by UN official Tom Fletcher on the BBC last year that “14,000 babies could die in Gaza in the next 48 hours.” They didn’t.
Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories actually facilitated the administration of more than 1 million polio vaccinations to children across the Gaza Strip, and by November 2024, at the height of the war, had provided enough polio vaccine vials for more than 4,800,000 civilians, even though Gaza’s population remains about 2 million.
It just doesn’t add up: Israelis are genocidal failures. But instead of the whole truth, we have the wholocide lie and libelocide.