Daily Life while Committing Genocide: the Lexicon of Brutality in Israel

Occupied Thoughts

In this episode of Occupied Thoughts, FMEP Fellow Ahmed Moor speaks with sociologist Assaf Bondy and human rights researcher and historian Adam Raz about what they call the "lexicon of brutality," drawing from a recent book the pair published in Hebrew on the language that Israelis use to discuss Palestinians and, specifically, the Israeli war on Gaza. The trio also talk about whether Israel has ever been a democracy and what people in Israel who oppose the genocide can do to resist it. Ha'aretz newspaper published this interview with Bondy in Raz in May 2025: "'Depopulation,' 'Kill Zone,' and 'Second Nakba': The Lexicon of Brutality Exposes How Israelis Talk About the War." Ahmed Moor is a Palestinian-American writer born in Gaza and a 2025 Fellow at FMEP. He is an advisory board member of the US Campaign for Palestinian rights, co-editor of After Zionism (Saqi Books) and is currently writing a book about Palestine. He also currently serves on the board of the Independence Media Foundation. His work has been published in The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The Nation, and elsewhere. He earned a BA at the University of Pennsylvania and an MPP at Harvard University. Dr. Assaf Bondy is a Labour Sociologist at the University of Bristol who studies the political-economy of employment relations in advanced economies. Bondy’s work has been so far dedicated to the study of changing conditions for collective actions and its changing forms and effects – on workers’ rights, on inequality, on the structure of employment relations and on the political economy. Adam Raz is a human rights researcher and historian whose field of research is the political history of the twentieth century and Marxist thought. In recent years Raz has written several books on the history of nuclear weapons in Israel and the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Among his books in Hebrew are: The Struggle for the Bomb (2015), Herzl: The Conflicts of Zionism’s Founder with Supporters and Opponents (2017), Kafr Qassem Massacre: A Political Biography (2018), The Military Rule 1948-1966 (2021). In English, he has published The Demagogue – the Mechanics of Political Power (2023) and Loot: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property (2024). Raz works at Akevot: Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research. Original music by Jalal Yaquoub.