“Conflict”

Published on Mar 29, 2026, filed under politics. (Share this post, e.g. on Mastodon or on Bluesky.)

Every time I read or hear anyone call Israel’s colonizing, segregating, and murdering Palestinians a “conflict,” I wonder:

Do the people writing or speaking like this downplay other genocides as well?

For example, do they call it “the Cambodian conflict”? “The Turkish–Armenian conflict”? “The European–African slavery conflict”? (“The Nazi–Jews conflict”!?)

When Verbal Caution Shields Physical Attack

While there is such a thing as a conflict, the term can do grave injustice when used “cautiously”:

Whenever a people is being systematically exploited, segregated, and murdered, that’s not a conflict—it’s exploitation, segregation, murder, and, in the case of Cambodia, Armenia, and Palestine, genocide.

Labeling genocides “conflicts” seems to be sold as an application of intellectual standards, as the cautious waiting for additional data.

It’s not:

It’s moral cowardice—it’s intellectual whitewashing that sides with the genocidal party.

It adds insult to injury when in the case of the colonization and occupation of Palestine, the oppressed are asked for disarmament when they have a right to self-defense. (It makes you wonder if people who ask for Palestinian disarmament would ask early 20th century Jews to disarm, too.)

The Language Game, Heinous Edition

The language used today, well started before serial liar Trump and his labeling of facts as lies (“fake news”) and lies as facts (“Truth Social”), is one of Orwellian dishonesty, where we change the meaning of the most fundamental things.

Just as much as Trump and his government are good at this, Israel is, too: The “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” alone is responsible for more than 2,600 deaths. That is the opposite of what “humanitarian” means.

Call Things What They Are

Language is not neutral.

When we call a genocide a “conflict,” we do not achieve balance—we manufacture it, artificially, at the expense of those being killed. We grant moral equivalence where there is none. We make the murderer and the murdered into parties in a dispute.

This is not caution. This is not nuance. It is collaboration—with the language, and therefore with the act.

The remedy is simple, even when it is uncomfortable: Call things what they are. Colonization. Occupation. Apartheid. Genocide. Not because these words are inflammatory, but because they are accurate—and accuracy, in the face of atrocity, is the minimum requirement of intellectual honesty.

Orwell wrote that political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” He was right then. The same machinery runs today, and those who operate it count on the rest of us to be too polite, too cautious, or too complicit to say otherwise.

We can choose not to be.

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m an engineering lead, guerrilla philosopher, and indie publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies you use every day (like Google) and companies you’ve never heard of, I’m an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also with respect to politics and philosophy. Here on meiert.com I talk about some of my experiences and perspectives. (Please share feedback: Interpret charitably, but do be critical.)