Naming Without Permission
Why Palestinians Refuse to Call Their Genocide a “Holocaust”
“The Holocaust is not the universal unit of measurement for human suffering.”
— Not in Translation, Story leGaïe
What does it mean to grieve in a language not your own? To name your annihilation in terms approved by your colonizer? This isn’t just a semantic question—it’s a battlefield.
Today, I’m sharing my newest research paper:
“Not in Translation: Linguistic Colonialism and the Erasure of Palestinian Genocide in Western Discourse.”
Download the full PDF here
This paper is not just about words. It is about narrative sovereignty—about who gets to define genocide, whose suffering is recognized, and which frameworks are imposed to flatten or filter Palestinian pain into something palatable for the West.
What’s in the Paper?
1. Linguistic Colonialism:
The imposition of settler vocabularies—especially Holocaust-centric trauma grammar—erases the Palestinian right to name their own genocide. Western media, legal bodies, and academic spaces often demand Palestinians describe their destruction in terms rooted in European history. This is not solidarity—it’s subjugation.
2. Indigenous Lexicon of Resistance:
Palestinians name their reality with words that carry centuries of struggle:
Ibāda jamāʿiyya (إبادة جماعية): genocide
Nakba (النكبة): catastrophe
Istʾiṣāl (استئصال): uprooting
Tanfiyya (تنفية): expulsion
Muqāwama (مقاومة): resistance
These terms aren’t metaphors. They’re memory encoded in grammar—refusals to be misnamed.
3. Maḥraqa (محرقة) and the Politics of Translation:
While maḥraqa is often used to translate “Holocaust” in Arabic, the paper reveals it is not a native term in Palestinian discourse. It was imported through institutional translation regimes and normalized under diplomatic pressure—not chosen by Palestinians themselves.
4. Empirical Data from 2006–2025:
An extensive AI-assisted analysis of Arabic-language media, social media posts, and legal reports shows:
Ibāda is used widely, consistently, and with legal specificity.
Maḥraqa is rare, metaphorical, and often rejected.
Even human rights bodies like Amnesty International and OHCHR use the term genocide—not Holocaust—to describe what’s happening in Gaza.
5. Refusing Settler Grammar Is Resistance:
This paper argues that translation can be a tool of erasure. When Palestinians insist on naming their genocide as ibāda—not Holocaust—they are reclaiming their epistemic agency, asserting their history, and resisting being folded into someone else’s memory scaffolding.
Why It Matters
This genocide is not metaphor. It is not a moral lesson, a historical analogy, or a symbolic echo. It is real, it is unfolding, and it is being silenced—especially when Palestinians refuse to speak in colonizer-approved terms.
To stand with Palestine is not just to condemn bombs and sieges—it is to defend the right of a people to name their destruction, and their liberation, in their own language.
Read and share the full paper:
Download “Not in Translation” (PDF)
Citation:
leGaïe, Story. Not in Translation: Linguistic Colonialism and the Erasure of Palestinian Genocide in Western Discourse.The Genospectra Institute. May 2025.
I'll give the paper a read to see if it illuminates my misunderstanding, but perhaps you could help me understand where you think my reasoning is faulty because I seem to have lost the point you're makong.
As a native English speaker, I would use the word holocaust to describe the genocide in Gaza, but certainly wouldn't expect any non English speaker to do the same (even more so to just transcribe the word), and I can't understand the leap that the former would imply the latter. In fact that sounds as absurd as expecting me to use Arabic words that I cannot pronounce or indeed really understand the meaning of. It's like trying to translate "hygge" into English, it's meaning is lost outside of cultural context. My reason for having called it a holocaust and a genocide is semantic, the two words have different meanings - I have read of genocides committed by colonial powers over the last few hundred years being referred to as holocausts - from India, to Congo, to Greece, to Armenia, to the USA. And this fits with the pattern of colonial ethnosupremacist mass killing. So it's a word that has meaning within the context of the culture and history schooling that I have had, that seems to accurately describe the situation.
I certainly believe that genocide is a better descriptive and more powerful word because of, as you rightly say, its legal accuracy, historical clarity, and moral precision.
I guess the part I don't understand is, why if I am accurately using my language, that has any relevance or bearing on what words are being used in another language? What am I missing?
Forgive me if that sounds confrontational, not meant at all, just trying to understand better.