Genocide is never only physical. It is carried out with bombs and blockades, but also with pens, articles, and press releases. The machinery of genocide runs on two engines: one destroys lives, the other destroys the record of those lives.
The second engine is quieter. It works in meeting rooms, on “quick alignment calls,” in email chains full of red lines and tracked changes. It is the slow, deliberate stripping of words until reality becomes unrecognizable.
This is not sloppy wording or accidental bias. It is a systematic campaign to deform the historical record before it is even written. By removing context, diluting language, and imposing “neutral and balanced” terms that serve the powerful, they make violence look like tragedy without an agent.
While bodies are still being pulled from rubble, we’re told:
Don’t mention the name. It’s a terrorist group.
My mind says: But silence over the name lets propaganda fill the gap.
While parents cradle their children for the last time, a voice on the line says:
Let’s call it Israel/Gaza war, or better yet, conflict.
My mind says: But a conflict suggests equal power. It was never equal.
While children dig with their bare hands for their parents, another insists:
Frame it as starting because of them, so we don’t upset the wrong audience.
My mind says: But that rewrites the timeline to legitimize decades of illegal occupation.
While mass graves are dug under the open sky, a colleague warns:
The court hasn’t ruled it genocide yet. Say “atrocities” or “war crimes” instead. Genocide is a high legal bar.
My mind says: But the law is catching up to what we already see.
While journalists are being systematically murdered, the edit comes back:
Say “assassination” instead of “murder.” Murder can only be used in the context of journalists who were not labeled terrorists.
My mind says: But a label does not change the act. It is still murder.
Each time, the word “but…” rises in our throats. But every word we have is one they refuse to hear.
These are the daily conversations. They are exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with the work itself, and everything to do with the quiet violence of erasure. Every term is a battlefield. Every sentence has to survive negotiations before it can breathe in public.
I still remember the first week. We came armed with evidence, legal frameworks, and historical context. But as soon as we began, our arguments dissolved into sobs and grief. We told them history didn’t begin last week. We told them about our forcibly displaced grandparents. We told them about the people under siege for 18 years. We told them about illegal occupation. We told them about entire families erased in a single night. In that professional meeting, we were crying, not negotiating or strategizing; pleading, not persuading.
Every day since, we’ve been “gently asked” to soften, dilute, and rearrange, to reformulate truth into something safe enough for the comfortable to read without looking away. And that is its own violence.
This is one of the oldest tools of genocide: to ensure that by the time the archives are opened, the story is already edited into a version the perpetrators can live with.
We have seen it before. The Armenian genocide rebranded as “relocations.” Apartheid sold as “separate development.” Indigenous massacres reduced to “frontier conflicts.” These were not neutral terms; they were accomplices, granting legal and cultural immunity to crimes that should have been undeniable.
Neutrality in the face of oppression is not virtue. It is complicity. Euphemisms do not shield the oppressed; they shield the oppressor. They shape a history in which no one is guilty, and suffering appears inevitable rather than engineered.
The killing of bodies and the killing of truth are not separate acts. They are parts of the same project: to erase a people so completely that even memory cannot resurrect them.
But the flaw in this strategy is that every silenced word survives in the mouth of someone who refuses to forget. Every truth they censor now will resurface, unsoftened, untranslatable, and undeniable. And when it does, the question will not be why we said it. It will be why they wouldn’t.
One day, when the comfortable can finally bear to look, the words they forbade us to use will be the only ones that fit. History will need no euphemisms. And then the full measure of accountability will begin.
"Every day since, we’ve been “gently asked” to soften, dilute, and rearrange, to reformulate truth into something safe enough for the comfortable to read without looking away. And that is its own violence."
So very true! Violence comes in many forms.