June 5, 2025: As a writer and English professor, I’m interested in words, their meaning, and their usage. Language is always changing, which is a lovely thing. But it can also congeal around certain usages as older meanings become lost to passing time. Queer, for example, used to mean uncanny, strange but now has pretty much a gendered connotation.
One hundred years ago, the word holocaust simply meant a large conflagration. In “The Philadelphia Story,” one of the best films of all time, imo, the character of Jimmy Stewart, falling for that of Katherine Hepburn, declares she has hearth fires and holocausts burning within. It’s a moment of joy, exaltation, amazement, awe, and, of course, love when his eyes light up as if staring in fascination at the holocaust of Hepburn’s burning spirit. This was 1940, when the world was not yet wholly aware of the mass exterminations being conducted by the Nazis.
The term Holocaust, now capitalized and referring solely to what Jews sometimes call the Sho-ah, the extermination of the Jews, signifies just that and exclusively that. In our day we can’t use the term without a general recognition that it refers to the Nazi’s mid-twentieth century collective murder, of systematically cleansing the so-called Aryan race of even the smallest drop of Jewish blood.
But move over, Jews, and specifically Israelis: we are living through a Holocaust, the Israeli—as distinct from Jewish—ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza. Netanyahu has declared that if there is even one drop of Hamas blood left in Gaza, then an entire people will be wiped out to cleanse the land of the Hamas infection.
Why is the world standing by and letting this happen?
Netanyahu and his cronies have discovered what the Nazis had not yet fully mastered: that it’s not what you do, it’s how it’s perceived. In other words, propaganda—or in today’s terms, marketing. Netanyahu presents Israelis as victims of Palestinians who would try to destroy them from the river to the sea. This justifies whatever you have to do, just as humans generally morally accept the right of survival for all humans. The difference is that while the Nazis had the gall to simply state they were engaged in wiping out the Jews, the IDF insists they mean well. Every time reports come in of the IDF killing children, aid workers, or anyone clearly not a combatant, the IDF insists it was a mistake or wasn’t their fault—or didn’t happen. They reject even the slightest insinuation that what they are engaged in is the typical revenge the bully engages in: ethnic cleansing, genocide.
I’ve often said there are two types of people: those who suffer—and those who suffer. The first type suffers some injury, realizes it hurts, and concludes the best thing to do is to try to minimize suffering in the world for everyone, because suffering belongs to the human condition. The second type resents ever having to suffer and thus resolves to take revenge as soon as possible, against anyone anywhere. This is what the US did after 9-11: while the world rushed to sympathize with the US, the US misunderstood that collective sympathy as the world implying that because the US is the exceptional nation, 9-11 ought never to have happened.
I always understood the world’s expression of sympathy as saying welcome to adult life; it hurts; we can empathize. Let’s all work together to minimize suffering.
The US, of course, reacted like a bully, and so it seems that Trump being elected twice is an expression of the fact that we have become a bully nation, out to avenge the suffering we have had to endure and which we believe we ought not to have experienced. So the US invaded Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9-11.
This explains, at least psychologically, why the US is supporting the Holocaust in Gaza; one people and one nation, having suffered, have decided they are so special that they cannot be criticized for defending themselves.
It is said that history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. Whereas the world looked on in horror at the first Holocaust, swearing never again, we now go about our business as the new Holocaust goes on apace, never again this time meaning simply never again to us, but for sure to someone else, again and again and again.