Last week, the Permanent Arab Committee for Human Rights (PACHR) called for the adoption of a new word – “Wholocide” – to describe Israel’s actions against Palestinians.
The committee argued that Israel’s actions are so extreme that the word ‘genocide’ is no longer strong enough.
The committee emphasized that adopting this terminology forms part of “broader Arab efforts to establish a shared collective memory, document the crime, safeguard victims’ rights to justice, redress, and remembrance, support legal efforts to prosecute those responsible, and prevent them from escaping accountability.”
Palestine’s Permanent Representative to the League of Arab States, Ambassador Muhannad al-Aklouk, explained that adopting the new terminology is linked to the initiative to designate October 17 each year as a day to commemorate the victims of the genocide in the Gaza Strip.
Ambassador Aklouk said the neologism “Wholocide” was inspired by the “genocide victims themselves, who described what they endured as being like “the horrors of the Day of Judgment.”
He called on human rights organizations, educational institutions, universities, research and cultural centers, and media outlets to adopt the new term in their activities.
The attempt at pushing this new word points to a wider phenomenon: the escalating effort to redefine the conflict through increasingly expansive moral and historical language, culminating in attempts to institutionalize those narratives internationally.
Genocide relatively new word in Palestinian narrative
The word “genocide,” until now, has been considered the crime among crimes – higher than war crimes, ethnic cleansing, or persecution.
Coined by Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in the aftermath of the Holocaust, genocide was originally designed to mean “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such.”
The word “genocide” was not used by the Palestinian narrative until relatively recently.
If we take a look back at escalating legal language used in Palestinian, Arab, or international discourse about Israel, the first word prominently used was actually “occupation.”
“Occupation” became the standard term in this discourse in 1967, after Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip, east Jerusalem, Sinai, and the Golan Heights in the Six Day War.
The term was used in UN Security Council Resolution 242 and subsequent international diplomacy.
This was followed by “ethnic cleansing” in the 1990s and 2000s. This term entered the discourse area around the time that the UN Security Council created a definition of the term in 1993.
It was specifically coined to describe the atrocities carried out during the Yugoslav Wars and is described as “...rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.”
The term “ethnic cleansing” subsequently became widely used by Palestinians to retroactively describe Israel’s actions since 1948.
It thus became interconnected with the use of the word “Nakba” to describe Palestinian displacement from the West Bank, Jerusalem residency policies, settlements, and demolitions.
The term then gained more traction during the Second Intifada and the collapse of the Oslo Accords, with the accusation moving beyond control of territory to alleging deliberate demographic engineering.
Ethnic cleansing then morphed into “apartheid” in the early 2000s.
The word had been floated around prior to this but gained global prominence after the 2001 Durban Conference. Palestinian officials began to use the word increasingly in diplomatic spaces, and activists absorbed it into protest spaces.
The term “apartheid” gained major international prominence after reports by Human Rights Watch (2021) and Amnesty International (2022).
Genocide, the most extreme accusation until now, did not gain major prominence until October 7 and the subsequent war.
After Israel began its military actions in Gaza, Palestinian officials, activists, NGOs, and foreign governments increasingly adopted the term “genocide” or “genocidal intent.”
The usage then escalated stratospherically after South Africa brought a genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
It has since become mainstream, in both Arabic-language and other language discourse, despite being widely contested and despite the fact that the ICJ did not rule that Israel was committing this crime.
As of July 15, 2026, Wholocide has now formally entered the arena.
The linguistic progression is not merely semantic.
Each successive term carries a stronger moral and legal charge, moving from a description of territorial control (“occupation”) to allegations of discriminatory governance (“apartheid”), forced demographic shifts (“ethnic cleansing”), the most severe crime under international law (“genocide”), and now a newly coined term (“Wholocide”) intended to signify a crime exceeding even genocide.
Why invent a new word?
The Palestinian attempt to manufacture vocabulary is not just political messaging. It is not simply rhetorical. It explicitly asks universities, academics, and journalists to normalize the term.
As Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) noted, this is an attempt to manufacture a Palestinian analog to Holocaust remembrance.
This can be seen in the term “Wholocide” with “Wholo” deliberately echoing the “Holo” in “Holocaust.” This reinforces the Palestinian narrative’s accusation that Israel is committing crimes even worse than those of Nazi Germany.
PMW noted that the PACHR is seeking to create an internationally recognized historical concept parallel to the Holocaust, complete with its own terminology, commemorative events, academic literature, and annual remembrance day.
And not only is the proposal asking people to condemn Israel; it’s asking institutions to preserve this framing for future generations.
This is about shaping collective memory. Once terminology becomes normalized, it warps how later events are interpreted.
The escalation in language by the Palestinian narrative represents a new and pressing danger, one that works to further shift public empathy away from Jewish identity and Jewish suffering.
Wholocide is not just a new word. It is an attempt to establish a new moral hierarchy in which the crimes Israel is accused of surpass even genocide, thus creating an implicit parallel with the Holocaust itself.
The PA is attempting to expand the moral and historical framework through which the conflict is understood and strengthen international identification with the Palestinian cause.
Whether this neologism successfully enters public discourse remains to be seen.
But the ambition behind it is audacious and unmistakable: the Palestinians wish not only to prove victorious in today’s discourse battle but also to actually define how future generations will remember and learn about this conflict.