The girls, aged 14 to 16, have come for settler training to learn how to occupy Palestinian land — breaking international law. “God promised us this land and told us if you don’t take it, bad people will try and take it and you will have a war,” says Emuna Billa, 19, one of the camp supervisors. “Why do we have a war in Gaza? Because we don’t take Gaza.”
Their guru is Daniella Weiss, a 79-year-old grandmother in a long skirt and patterned headscarf. Founder of the Nachala or Homeland movement, she has been setting up illegal settlements for 49 years and was recently put under international sanctions. “You will be the new emissaries,” she tells the 50 or so girls at the camp. “I call it redeeming, not settling and this is our duty.”
She unfurls a map of Israel and the Palestinian territories dotted with vivid pink house symbols to represent existing and proposed Jewish settlements. Not only are these all across the West Bank, but also in Gaza. Already 674 people have signed up for beachside plots there, she tells me, and “many more want to join”. When someone asks her about settling Lebanon she smiles and says, “Yes, there too”.
They’re settlers. What they do is violently expel people from their homes in order to claim it for themselves.
Settlers are people who do that.
There’s no need to stop calling them the word that correctly describes what they do.
How about: invader, encroacher, intruder, illegal immigrant, trespasser, violator, infringer or conqueror?
You don’t need to say any of that because they’re already settlers. They’re already all those things because that’s what a settler is.
There is no need for another word.
While you’re correct, the word is misunderstood by the general public. So it doesn’t properly convey its meaning
Words don’t properly convey their own meaning.
People do when they use them.
Rather than lament the way you perceive the present understanding in absolutes, why not start using the word settlers appropriately: preceded a cuss or followed by spitting.
If you think people don’t understand how the word settlers conveys historical meaning then do something about it instead of accepting your own transport to another grammatical space wherein you colonize the meaning and context of other words.
Then are the people illegally coming to the US “settlers” or are they still refugees ?
Because I’m confused on the difference with that definition.
No. People coming to the us and integrating into American culture (even if it’s not recognized by the law) aren’t settlers.
A person wrote a book about this called “settlers”. You can read it.
How about the founding fathers who expelled Native Americans?
Settlers. The frontier means ‘place we can kill and steal from “them” for land and resources’.
But that doesn’t undermine my question about refugees.
Does context matter or not ? Because if it does not matter than the Palestinians fleeing death and destruction could be called settlers, too.
Settlers is an accurate descriptor, the problem is generations of Americans have been taught a white washed version of America’s colonial history, so the term doesn’t hold the negative connotation that it should.
To me it is more about messaging than accuracy. You can describe them accurately using different terms that average Americans immediately understand as negative.
I understand. My point is that, for whatever reason (likely generations of white washed education regarding America’s colonial history), people in the US don’t view the word “settler” with the contempt it deserves.