George OrwellGeorge Orwell, author of “1984” (1949), was already dead for over a third of a century when the date of that sardonic classic came and went. Yet you would not know it from contemporary broadsides about the Gaza War invoking Orwell and his ideas, pro- and con-Israel. There has been a back-and-forth in the “Forward” between Daniel May—who argues that apologists for Israel are using alleged clichés like “right to defend” and “collateral damage” to obscure in the fashion of Orwellian Doublespeak the bad choices made by Israel leaders in choosing war that should have been avoided, and Gil Troy who counterargues that enemies of Israel personify the perversion of language in their libeling the Jewish state as a “genocidal aggressor” guilty of “war crimes” through “disproportionate” violence against Gaza’s “innocent” civilians. See May, ”What Would George Orwell Say About Gaza War” at http://blogs.forward.com/forward-thinking/203147/what-would-george-orwell-say-about-gaza-war/? and Troy, “Actually Orwell Would Have Supported Israel,” at http://blogs.forward.com/forward-thinking/203198/actually-george-orwell-would-support-israel/? This debate has even reopened discussion of Orwell’s attitude toward the Jews. Anshel Pfeffer, also in the “Forward,” has written a generally excellent piece, based mostly on the late Christopher Hitchens’ “Why Orwell Matters” (2003) as well as his coediting of “The Orwell Diaries” (2012). See Pfeffer’s “Was George Orwell an Anti-Semite?” at http://forward.com/articles/160496/was-george-orwell-an-anti-semite/?p=all Hitchens, who discovered at 38 that his deceased mother had been born Jewish, tried his best to be anti-Israel without being anti-Semitic. He was shocked by Orwell’s almost obsessive references to Jews whom he pictured as repulsive in a manner reminiscent of T. S. Eliot. Of course, Orwell also had many Jewish journalistic and literary friends. Hitchens argued that Orwell’s anti-Semitism was mostly an adolescent stage that he gradually outgrew. Pfeffer knows better. Orwell—who grew up in a shabby genteel milieu rife with anti-Semitism—spent much of his life grappling with his own aversions to Jews and “Zionists” without transcending them. It can be argued that the Jewish world was better off with an honest writer who tried to understand his own prejudices from within than just another convert from anti-Semitism to philo-Semitism. In any case, I think that Troy wins his argument with May hands down. As Orwell told us, most famously in “Politics and the English Language,” words have meanings that are always been trifled with by politicians and, more shamefully, intellectuals. Israel haters accuse Israel of “aggression” in a war started by Hamas missile attacks, of “war crimes” in a war in which Israel (for both moral and political reasons) has bent over backwards to limit civilian casualties, and “disproportionality” in a war in which Hamas has done everything to maximize the deaths of its own innocents by hiding behind them. Israel haters—to put them in the dock in front of Judge Orwell—have been guilty of murdering the clear meaning of important terms like self-defense to defend Hamas. If May believes that Israel had better choices than resorting to “the right of defense” to respond to Hamas, he fails to explain what they were.