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

 Richard David Hames

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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 my critique while remaining essentially unmoved 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 but lost me old ones. I've been criticised, blacklisted, scolded, called ignorant and antisemitic, in spite of the fact that I only use trusted sources on the ground both to check my facts and test novel thinking. A 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. So I duly listened. I listened almost in disbelief as one of the three detailed atrocities far worse than I had ever imagined; far more shocking 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 his every word. Such acts of blatant antisemitism are a stain on our country and cannot be tolerated. At the same time I was troubled by the obduracy of expression that fuels further hate, still shaking from listening to the confession of that young IDF deserter and what he and his friends are 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've 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 their instructions. They must now come to terms with their own fate: a living hell which will haunt them forever.

What those three young men witnessed—and what they could no longer be a part of—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 in a moment where language has been weaponized so thoroughly that neutral "witnessing" has become an impossibility. Nowhere is this more evident than in how we feel and talk about antisemitism—a conversation so corrupted that it now obscures rather than illuminates the suffering happening before our eyes.

Just imagine what happens to us when we observe the live-streamed obliteration of Palestinians—the deliberate targeting of hospitals and schools, the methodical starvation of children, the erasure of entire family lines. International legal scholars increasingly recognize these actions as genocide. Yet when we attempt to name this reality, we're told that our very act of witnessing constitutes antisemitism.

This is a profound distortion of both language and memory. Judaism—a rich spiritual tradition spanning millennia—has been forcibly fused with Zionism, a political project born from 19th-century European nationalism. This conflation reduces thousands of years of Jewish wisdom to unquestioning support for specific government policies, while transforming legitimate political criticism into religious hatred. Question Israeli policies, and you're branded antisemitic. Support Palestinian liberation, and you're told you want to destroy the Jewish people.

This is not accidental confusion but systematic linguistic architecture designed to obfuscate and prevent clear thinking.

I understand the fear underlying this confusion. For many Jews, conflating Judaism with Zionism feels protective in a world where antisemitism remains devastatingly real. The memory of having no safe haven during and after the Holocaust, of facing persecution across centuries—these traumas live on in bodies and communities today. Many of my Jewish friends genuinely believe that distinguishing between Jews and Israeli policies opens the door to violence.

These fears deserve acknowledgment. But weaponizing them to shield a state from accountability doesn't protect Jewish communities—indeed it endangers them. When Palestinian children watch their families destroyed by weapons deployed in the name of Jewish safety, we create the precise conditions for future antisemitism to flourish. When Israeli officials declare their intention to make Gaza "uninhabitable," when they use starvation as a weapon of war—these are what Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide," specifically identified as genocidal practice. Invoking memories of the Holocaust to justify such actions transforms the lessons of past suffering into a license for present-day barbarism.

History teaches us how language enables genocide. In Rwanda, radio broadcasts transformed neighbours into "cockroaches." In Bosnia, "ethnic cleansing" euphemised systematic murder. Ottoman Armenians were labeled "tumours" threatening the body politic. Today we witness the same pattern: "Palestinian" becomes "terrorist," Gaza's children become "future Hamas," occupation becomes "disputed territories." No less a person than Yoav Gallant, during his tenure as Israel's Defense Minister, said "We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly."

This system creates "selective empathy." This means that we recognize historical persecution but remain blind to contemporary genocide when perpetrated by members of our own community. When Palestinian students organize solidarity protests, we worry about "unsafe spaces" for Jewish students—as if witnessing Palestinian suffering threatens Jewish safety. When activists call for boycotts, we think of Nazi boycotts—as if refusing to purchase products of occupation equals systematic persecution.

But this corruption of language doesn't protect anyone. When people witness obvious injustice but are told their awareness constitutes bigotry, when they see babies killed but expressing concern makes them antisemites, the cognitive dissonance produces exactly the outrage that gets misdirected toward Jewish communities.

The children of Gaza who survive today's atrocities—watching siblings buried under rubble, parents blown to bits by bombs justified through Holocaust memory—will carry memories likely to metastasize into pure hatred. Our linguistic manipulation that thwarts the witnessing of their suffering today will undoubtedly become tomorrow's antisemitism. This is the ultimate tragedy: actions taken to protect Jewish people from hatred create conditions for more hatred to take root.

Breaking free requires "contextual intelligence"—the capacity to hold multiple truths concurrently without false equivalencies. We must distinguish between Judaism and Zionism, between Jewish people and Israeli policies, between antisemitism and political criticism. Above all we must recognize that victimhood never confers moral immunity, and that past suffering doesn't justify present cruelty.

We must see suffering wherever it occurs. The same moral clarity that recognizes the horros of the Holocaust must extend to Gaza today. Selective empathy is tribalism disguised as ethics. Most critically, we must recognize that the language we choose doesn't just describe reality—it constructs it, shapes it, amplifies it. When we speak with precision and compassion, when we refuse linguistic manipulation, we begin constructing realities where hatred finds no fertile ground to grow.

This is uncomfortable but essential work. It requires abandoning tribal thinking and embracing genuine moral reasoning. But our comfort has been purchased through others' suffering. Our linguistic certainties have been built on silencing Palestinian voices.

Those three soldiers who fled their posts near Jenin have begun the journey we all must take. They've moved from perpetrators to witnesses, from their linguistic prison to the devastating clarity of truth. Sadly their conversion came too late for the children they'd already mutilated, tortured and slaughtered.

How many more must die while we complete this journey? How many more soldiers must carry with them such unbearable knowledge of our inhumanity before we change the systems that create them?

The children of Gaza cannot wait for our comfortable awakening. Every day we delay this reckoning, more names join the lists of the dead. Our personal transformation is no intellectual luxury—it's the difference between more soldiers fleeing in revulsion tomorrow and preventing them from being sent at all.