They say that in war truth is the first casualty – and the language of truth is certainly being butchered in comments made about the Hamas-Israel conflict. After initial horror at the savage assault by Hamas on the civilians of Israel on 7 October, the supporters of Hamas in Australia (and other Western nations) have begun twisting the language.

Here are some examples:

Apartheid – Israel is not an apartheid state. The word is of Afrikaans origin and means ‘separateness’. It applied in South Africa when a white minority ruled over the black majority. That is not happening in Israel – 20 per cent of the population of Israel is Arab, they have full citizenship rights, they vote, they have members in the Israeli parliament. That doesn’t happen (and certainly never happened in South Africa) under apartheid.

Occupation – Israel is accused of ‘occupying’ Gaza and of being a ‘colonial occupier.’ The last Israeli soldiers left Gaza in 2005, when Israel handed Gaza over to the Palestinians. The only authoritarian power ‘occupying’ Gaza is Hamas.

Detained – The Washington Post has claimed that Hamas is ‘detaining’ 200-plus Israelis. That suggests the sort of thing the police do to suspects during an investigation.  When someone is ‘detained’ it usually means they have been temporarily prevented from going anywhere by a legitimate authority. Nothing of the sort has happened to these poor Israeli souls who were instead kidnapped, tortured and forcibly dragged into Gaza to be hostages.

Pogrom – the President of the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network, Nasser Mashn, has claimed that Israel has conducted ‘pogrom-like’ attacks on Palestinians. ‘Pogrom’ is a Yiddish word mean (literally) ‘destruction’. It came into English in the late 1880s meaning organised massacres aimed at the destruction (or complete annihilation) of Jewish people in Russia, Poland and other Eastern European countries. The current ‘pogrom’ (if there is one) is coming from Hamas or other antisemitic mobs such as we have just seen disgustingly in Dagestan and is once again aimed solely against Jews.

Steal – Australian supporters of Hamas accuse Jews of ‘stealing’ Arab land in what was the old British protectorate of Palestine. But it was the United Nations (in 1947) who divided the land between the two populations living there: the Arabs, and the original indigenous inhabitants of the area, the Jews. The Arabs then launched the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (the first of many such assaults on Israel, all of which the surrounding Arab nations have lost). But the allocation of land for a Jewish homeland was done by the UN.

From the river to the sea – this slogan embodies the official Hamas policy of completely destroying the Jewish homeland. ‘The river’ refers to the Jordan River and the ‘sea’ in the slogan is the Mediterranean. What lies between them is the tiny, liberal-democratic nation of Israel – the Jewish homeland. Which is what the slogan wants to see totally destroyed.

Words matter. When language is distorted truth is lost. So, beware of the language being used by the Western friends of Hamas – view it with a deeply sceptical eye.