The law depends on words. When those words lose their meaning, the protections they promise become impossible to uphold and protect.
On the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre, the International Legal Forum (ILF) is launching an online Dictionary of Terms to confront what it describes as an additional existential warfront that threatens humanity and freedom: the systematic abuse of legal principles.
The initiative addresses a question with consequences far beyond any single country or conflict: what happens when terms intended to identify the most heinous crimes, protect victims from perpetrators, and establish accountability are detached from their definitions and deployed as political weapons?
The damage reaches beyond public debate. Distorted terminology undermines confidence in the law, erodes the commitment to its equal and consistent application, and collapses the shared principles on which societal covenant depends.
The dictionary examines terms including “apartheid,” “genocide,” “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” and “ethnic cleansing.” Each entry begins with a legal definition, presents examples of its application, and then explores what ILF identifies as the term’s hijacking, redefinition, inversion, and weaponisation.
The sequence matters. A reader is first given the meaning and context of a term before encountering the argument about its misuse. For policymakers, journalists, educators, students, and the public, the resource is intended to provide a foundation for assessing claims whose repetition can otherwise substitute for scrutiny.
At the heart of the project is a demand for equal and consistent application of rules. Legal accusations must be assessed against defined standards, with the same commitment to evidence and accountability regardless of the identity of the alleged perpetrator or victim. The force of a word cannot replace the work required to establish its application.
Three years of responses to the October 7 massacre and the multi-front war waged that day have exposed an additional existential warfront. This resource was developed as a means of remembering the origins of legal terms, reclaiming their original meaning, and renewing the shared pledge to uphold and protect them equally and consistently. It is vital to confronting the collapse of morality that threatens humanity and freedom.
It enables to address rising threats of an “eighth front” of a raging war: a battle for hearts and minds that uses language to distort facts and law, impacting the way events are understood, responsibility is assigned, and legitimacy is granted or denied. In the organisation’s account, systematic demonisation, delegitimisation, and double standards fuel ever-mutating antisemitism, embolden extremism, and threaten the foundations of democracies.
That argument gives the launch its wider significance. The ILF views the defence of legal meaning as a shared responsibility, extending to the institutions and individuals who use these terms in international institutions, courtrooms, classrooms, newsrooms, online and in public life.
Developed through research, drafting, and expert consultation, the dictionary is accompanied by a social media campaign featuring experts from around the world. The campaign advances ILF’s call to remember, reclaim, and renew the foundational principles of law in the face of rising extremism, and the normalisation of antisemitism that sounds sirens to it.
The initiative forms part of the organisation’s work in education, advocacy, and accountability. Its stated aim is a world in which the law is applied equally and consistently to all.
Three years after October 7, the launch places the integrity of language alongside the obligation of remembrance. ILF’s message is that reclaiming the meaning of legal terms is essential to preserving their ability and responsibility to protect, and to renewing the shared pledge that never again with such heinous crimes be perpetrated, to anyone.
The Dictionary of Terms is available at www.dictionaryofterms.org
Michal Cotler-Wunsh is the CEO of the International Legal Forum. She previously served as an Israeli Member of Knesset and as Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism
To get more from opinion, click here to sign up for our free Editor's Picks newsletter.