The terminology of "genocide" in Netanyahu's speech yesterday How Netanyahu tried to weaponize "genocide" to save his place in history Inventing a war aim after the war ends so it can later be declared achieved is not a new tactic. Yesterday, in his first speech after the agreement between Tehran and Washington, Benjamin Netanyahu told Israelis that he had spared them "genocide." Had he and Trump not intervened—and the relentless emphasis on "he and Trump" ran throughout the speech—Iran would have acquired a nuclear weapon. Return to the "genocide" Netanyahu claims to have averted. He says he has pushed it back, which means the threat still stands; it has merely been postponed. The choice of word is deliberate. So is its dilution. The aim is to identify so closely with the original that the observer can no longer tell them apart. Take the Palestinian home whose stones are numbered, removed, and rebuilt in a settlement: the new structure becomes an "Israeli building." Can you tell it from the Palestinian original? Take the Israeli model who wears an embroidered thobe and calls it traditional Israeli dress. Take the settlers who seized Palestinian homes in Jerusalem's Al-Bustan neighborhood and handed out sweets after one of their own stabbed a Palestinian. The use of the word "genocide" in yesterday's speech is not incidental. The Prime Minister whom few believed yesterday wants to seize the moment and remind people that the Jewish people were on the brink of genocide—and that only he and President Trump prevented it through what he called a magnificent operation. The aim is to loosen the word's grip on the public mind. In recent years, "genocide" has come to refer—directly, completely, without qualification—to the genocide in Gaza. Netanyahu wants to take the word back. This is not a new move. Alongside his battles against political rivals inside Israel, Netanyahu has long worked to recast the Zionist project within a civilizational struggle, placing himself at its center: the savior of Western civilization against Islamic civilization. His use of "genocide" reinforces that frame. It presents him, in his own telling, as the man who saved the Jewish people from a catastrophe about to strike, whose threat still looms. That is why he said: "We have pushed it back for years." Yesterday's use of the word is the culmination of a thirty-year rhetorical project. Netanyahu has never stopped presenting Iran as a future catastrophe threatening Jewish existence in Palestine, and has long argued that the work to prevent it must be done in the present. Today, in his telling, the action taken by him and his friend Trump has pushed back the threat, the catastrophe, the genocide. The man is obsessed with greatness, and today he says so openly. The security of Israel and the future of its project, he insists, pass through him and him alone. On that point, he may genuinely believe what he is saying. That was the message at the heart of yesterday's speech: Netanyahu wants to be remembered as the man who prevented catastrophe from befalling the Jewish people once again. The speech contains many points worth examining. I have devoted this post to one: the use of the word "genocide" in an important and consequential address.