War on Words: The Israel Project’s Global Language Dictionary
Frank Luntz has a long history of perverting and weaponizing language.
The Israel Project’s Global Language Dictionary uses strategic language to reframe occupation, deflect criticism, and shape public perception of Israeli policy.
Few documents lay bare the machinery of modern propaganda with such brazen clarity as The Israel Project’s Global Language Dictionary.
Conceived by Republican pollster and messaging tactician Frank Luntz, the 112-page handbook serves as a disturbingly frank instruction manual for manipulating public opinion in service of Israeli state violence.
Leaked shortly after Operation Cast Lead — Israel’s brutal 2008–09 assault on Gaza that killed over 1,300 Palestinians, many of them civilians — the guide was intended for pro-Israel spokespeople on what it explicitly calls “the front lines of the media war for Israel.”
This dictionary’s core feature is its bastardization of euphemisms, reframing Israel’s contentious policies and inhumane actions in ways that sound benign or even noble.
At its core, the dictionary promotes euphemism as strategy. It advises spokespeople to describe illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank as “neighborhoods,” a term that evokes peaceful suburbia while erasing the violent displacement of Palestinian communities.
The same applies to language about land itself. Luntz’s guide further proposes referringto “Occupied territories” as “disputed territories,” while “colonization” is stripped from the vocabulary entirely. Words that imply injustice are swapped for those that suggest shared confusion or diplomatic gray zones.
While Israel is far from alone in deploying this kind of narrative control, what makes the Global Language Dictionary exceptional is its blatant audacity — and its success. It offers not reflection, but redirection; not dialogue, but manipulation.
By prescribing a sanitized lexicon, it transforms occupation into policy, violence into necessity, and apartheid into semantics. Far from merely hiding atrocity, it gentrifies it.
Fearmongering and Playing the Victim
Another revealing aspect of the Global Language Dictionary is its focus on exploiting fear. Luntz’s document encourages Israeli spokespeople to highlight Israel’s “self-defense” against terrorism, positioning Israeli actions as reluctant responses to existential threats.
The handbook instructs spokespeople to evoke images of American struggles with terrorism, a psychological tactic to make American audiences empathize with Israel by projecting their own fears onto Israel’s situation.
The document urges spokespeople to never use the word “give” in relation to Palestinians — as in “Israel giving land” — because it implies Israeli ownership and control. Instead, they’re told to say Israel is “building opportunities” or “creating pathways.”
In one of its more sinister flourishes, the guide advises avoiding the phrase “right of return” altogether — even though it’s enshrined in international law — and to instead refer to it as a “demand,” because Americans “don’t like people who make demands.”
It’s a game of wordplay with stakes measured in blood and ruin.
“Every one of the 112 pages in the booklet is marked ‘not for distribution or publication’ and it is easy to see why.
The Luntz report, officially entitled ‘The Israel project's 2009 Global Language Dictionary,’ was leaked almost immediately to Newsweek, but its true importance has seldom been appreciated.
It should be required reading for everybody, especially journalists interested in any aspect of Israeli policy because of its ‘dos and don'ts’ for Israeli spokesmen.”
One of the more insidious tactics involves casting suspicion on casualty figures reported by Palestinian ministries, particularly those under Hamas governance. Even when these numbers align with independent counts from the World Health Organization and humanitarian NGOs, they’re routinely dismissed as propaganda.
This rhetorical strategy doesn’t just challenge the facts — it erodes their legitimacy. The goal isn’t to prove the numbers wrong, but to make them seem unknowable. Civilian deaths become abstract, loss becomes debatable, and atrocity is slowly papered over with manufactured doubt.
No Room for Palestine
Following the imposed narrative that has governed the region for nigh on eight decades, the guide casts the Palestinian people solely as problems — labeled either as militants or as obstructionists. There is no version of Palestinian existence that isn’t framed as a threat.
There is no room for resistance rooted in history, no acknowledgment of a people fighting dispossession, no space for autonomy, sovereignty, or grief. Instead, Palestinian demands for dignity are recast as threats, their legal right to resist rewritten as terrorism, and their very existence reduced to a rhetorical inconvenience.
Even gestures of supposed compassion — like mentions of children or humanitarian hardship — are strategically deployed only to moralize Israeli actions, not to humanize Palestinian lives. Their reality is not debated; it is redacted.
Weaponizing Compassion: The Irony of Humanitarian Rhetoric
Where the guide doesn’t suppress truth, it weaponizes emotion. The most grotesque portion of the handbook encourages what it calls “strategic humility.”
Admit “mistakes” — without ever specifying them — then pivot to how both sides suffer.
Spokespeople are instructed to appear compassionate — especially toward Palestinian children — but never to the point of accountability.
Luntz suggests feigning remorse by acknowledging Israeli errors in military operations, only to redirect attention toward Palestinian “terrorism,” reinforcing the narrative of Israeli necessity and restraint.
This faux-humility frames Israel as regretful but constrained — a nation burdened by its duty to defend — in a strategy designed to resonate with empathetic audiences while concealing the scale of Palestinian suffering, particularly among civilians and children.
That performance of grief is then bolstered by selective compassion. Luntz instructs advocates to lament the hardship faced by Palestinian children only in ways that reinforce Israel’s image as a humane and reluctant actor. Sympathy is permissible only if it strengthens the myth of moral high ground.
This manipulation of empathy alters narratives by perverting them, exploiting genuine humanitarian concern as another tool for controlling the discourse — a form of institutional tone policing that punishes emotional truth while rewarding sterile, state-sanctioned restraint.
Repercussions and the Long Arm of Propaganda
The impacts of Luntz’s Global Language Dictionary are not confined to Israel’s actions alone; they ripple outward, subtly but pervasively reshaping media discourse, public debate, and political framing on a global scale.
Mainstream outlets often echo the guide’s sanitized vocabulary — describing illegal settlements as “disputed territories,” military offensives as “self-defense,” and occupation as a “security dilemma.” These journalistic slip-ups are the result of a deliberate strategy to insert euphemism in the stead of clarity.
This linguistic manipulation has consequences beyond semantics. It conditions audiences to absorb state violence as reasonable, even humane. It replaces objective inquiry with engineered empathy for the aggressor and remaps reality in ways that preempt resistence. The terms of the conversation are fixed before it even begins.
It manufactures consent — not by silencing opposition, but by scripting the very lens through which that opposition is understood.
Those who speak plainly about apartheid, colonization, or genocide are painted as hysterical, biased, or antisemitic, while those parroting rehearsed talking points are framed as reasonable and objective.
When people hear the words of the Hamas charter, Israel goes from bully to victim – and sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians dissipates.
— Frank Luntz
Breaking the Chains of Manufactured Reality
The Israel Project’s Global Language Dictionary serves as a case study in linguistic colonialism — a blueprint for reshaping public consciousness through euphemism, moral inversion, and emotional engineering.
This is propaganda in its most dangerous form: calculated, empathic, and deeply embedded. Its risk lies not only in the narratives it promotes but in the realities it trains people to ignore.
Undoing its grip means rejecting its framing, syntax, and the assumptions it sneaks in through the language of peace, security, and “democracy.”
In a world where occupation becomes “disputed territory,” where forced displacement becomes “painful compromise,” and where genocide is softened into “security operations,” the words we choose are not descriptions. They are accomplices.
More than a messaging guide, it exists as a linguistic contagion; infecting journalism, diplomacy, and public discourse with the vocabulary of apartheid and oppression. It functions as a standard operating procedure for how to sanitize occupation, obscure war crimes, and maintain the illusion of moral high ground.
Any truth that survives does so not because of language like this, but in spite of it.