The riots against Palestinians on Sunday night were appalling—but they weren’t “pogroms.” Hundreds of Israeli settlers vandalized the West Bank town of Huwara, enraged that a Palestinian terrorist murdered two Jewish brothers driving through there earlier that day. The rioters killed one Palestinian, 37-year-old Sameh Aqtash , and wounded dozens, while torching houses and cars. For decades “pogrom” was the most chilling word in the Jewish vocabulary until the Nazi mass murder generated a new lexicon of horrors. After the czarist government orchestrated anti-Jewish violence in 1881, the word pogrom—from the Russian grom, meaning thunder—terrified Jews. “Perhaps most shocking of all, many supposedly decent people appeared among the makers of the pogroms.”

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