The Absence of a Word
Companion to “The Meaning of a Word”
Haven’t read part one? Start here → The Meaning of a Word.
When a word is misused, it loses its meaning.
But what about when there’s no word at all?
We know the weight of antisemitism—what it means, what it evokes, what it protects.
But what do you call it when an entire people are bombed, starved, and displaced…
and there’s no word that stops the world?
What do you call the silence?
What do you call the erasure?
Because if antisemitism can end a conversation,
Palestinian suffering often can’t even start one.
There’s a silence that doesn’t come from lack of caring.
It comes from lack of language.
From knowing what you’re seeing,
but not knowing what you’re allowed to call it.
Because we have a word for hating Jews.
But not for erasing Palestinians.
Not for calling them “human shields” when they die.
Not for blaming them for their own suffering.
Not for flattening their identity into “terrorist-adjacent” and leaving it there.
There’s no single word that stops the room,
no term that carries the full weight of their dehumanization.
And maybe that’s the point.
Maybe the absence of a word makes it easier to look away.
To flatten a 75-year history of displacement, checkpoints, and blockade into “a complicated conflict.”
To turn bombed hospitals into military targets.
To call mass suffering “regrettable” instead of unjust.
Because when you don’t have a name for something,
you don’t have to face it.
You don’t have to grieve for it.
You don’t have to sit with it.
You don’t have to ask whether your silence is complicity.
Or whether your tax dollars are funding the very thing you can’t find the words to name.
So the silence continues.
Not just from those who don’t know better—
but from those who do… and look away anyway.
There is power in a word.
There certainly is power in antisemite.
Say it, and people recoil.
Conversations end.
Lines are drawn.
It’s a word that protects—because it means something.
But there’s no equivalent word for Palestinians.
No term that forces reflection.
No label that carries moral weight.
So when they are silenced, displaced, or killed…
the world searches for context instead of conscience.
Because without a word, there is no pause.
No collective intake of breath.
No instinct to ask: What have we done?
Only a reflex to explain it away.
Let’s be clear:
You can name the suffering of Palestinians
without denying the history of Jewish trauma.
You can oppose Hamas
without excusing collective punishment, displacement, or the killing of civilians.
You can acknowledge Israel’s right to exist
while questioning the violence carried out in its name.
You can grieve for October 7
and still believe that thousands of bombed children is not justice—it’s horror.
You can hold more than one truth at once.
And if we want to stay human, we have to.
Because when a people are suffering
and we have no word to name it,
their pain becomes easier to ignore.
Their deaths become easier to justify.
And our own silence becomes easier to live with.
That’s the real danger.
Not just bombs or blockades,
but the erasure that happens when language fails—
or when it is never given in the first place.
Palestinians are not voiceless.
They are unheard.
They are misnamed.
They are blamed.
And they are dying without the moral vocabulary the world has always reserved for someone else.
We owe them more.
We owe them a language that can carry their grief.
We owe them space in the moral imagination.
We owe them the dignity of being seen not as collateral, not as complication—
but as human.
Because when we have no word for suffering,
we forget how to care.
And when we forget how to care,
we begin to lose what makes us worth saving.
Postscript:
This reflection is the second in a pair.
If you haven’t read “The Meaning of a Word,” I hope you will.
It explores what happens when a word like antisemitism is misused—not to protect the vulnerable, but to silence dissent.
Together, these pieces ask what language protects… and what it erases.