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”.
When someone asks her about settling Lebanon she smiles and says, “Yes, there too”.
Great, more war crimes.
As a Lebanese, I advise them that we are already destroying our country by ourselves!
Israeli invader*
Settler is more accurate, and is a subset of invader. America were invaders in Iraq, but didn’t invade to set up permanent settlements. Israel is invading Palestine in order to set up permanent settlements
Coloniser?
Coloniser is probably the best term, yeah
That’s actually the word I wanted, but couldn’t remember!
It’s not clear to me that the fundamental ideals of a liberal democracy are compatible with a state where one race or religion is held above all others; or with a state where some races or religions are considered less equal.
Arguably the US is still working on recognizing this idealism and didn’t fully reckon with it until the 1960s.
Basically everyone is sticking their head in the sand re: Israel being an Ethnostate. Basically “sure, but they deserve it”. That had some credibility behind it 70 years ago. Today? Not so much.
I’ve come to find out that in-spite of having many Israeli friends and some family members, I had no idea about what Israeli culture and society were really like. It is mind-boggling to me that the only Jewish people I see speaking against genocide seem to be a part of the diaspora. Every time I hear or see a Jewish person from/ in Israel speaking on this issue, its like “Well its necessary” is basically the argument. Like, I’m sure there must be voices in Israel to the contrary, but I can’t seem to find them.
Its as if Zionism has supplanted Judaism in Israel entirely and there is no distinction in current Israeli culture or media.
There’s definitely people protesting in Israel and have been since the start. But it is indeed unclear on whether they’re protesting regarding their government’s actions in Gaza or just protesting against Netanyahu more generally (which they had also been doing prior to all this anyways).
There are voices inside Israel opposing this, but it sounds like (i don’t have personal knowledge) all the moderates got co-opted. The opposition voices don’t get any media play, not in the US at least. Some Israeli press covers them, or used to at least.
Haaretz is the only real source of coverage of such opposing voices. And the Israeli government has already been trying to make moves to have them be shut down for daring to not support the will of the government.
I honestly feel like if the national powers at the time had been actually serious about the Jewish people deserving a homeland after the horrors of the Holocaust, then Israel should have been created out of a portion of western Germany.
That’s my position, 100%. That they didn’t is telling, imo.
Make space in Europe for the JEWS?! When there’s plenty of land that has only brown people in it?!
The reasoning was that, I think.
Yep
The Jewish people have a right to self determination and had many good reasons to leave Europe for their ancestral homeland. Offering Jews a different homeland failed with the Jewish Oblast in the Soviet Union.
Herding European Jews into a new Ghetto while displacing Germans would not have gone well.
Now do Palestinians. Did they not have a right to their own land they were already on?
Sure Palestinians have a claim to the land as well. That’s what this whole conflict is about: competing claims over the same land.
They can’t both have a right to the same land without sharing it. This is the problem with ethnostates.
Israel is less of an ethnostate than many other European and Asian countries.
Sharing the land in some kind of two state solution, federation, Emirates/Kanton system, is possible.
Herding? Dude you just give them Germany. Done.
No one is herded.
Maybe the Jews want to live elsewhere. Also what do you do with all the Germans who live on the land?
Zionists would not have wanted that. Establishment of a Jewish state around Jerusalem is a core idea of Zionism and Jerusalem is not in West Germany.
The plan to realize this ideology is much older than the Holocaust.
It is not about having a safe place to stay, it’s about religion.
It is pretty funny that they discussed a bunch of other places, too, including Uganda, and shot down a bunch of them because they were inhabited and weren’t sure how the locals would react or there were already white settlers in the area. The irony 🙄
THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS!!!
If there was credibility for a Jewish ethnostate 70 years ago due to the Holocaust and global antisemitism, how do we get to say things are better now and take the country back. Especially with all the other ethnostates in the world.
Obviously there is a problem because the region had changed hands over the past 1-2000 years and had other ethnic groups when the country was established by the Allies. The idea of having taken the land from Germany instead of the area around l Jerusalem sounds like poetic justice, but ignores that they have a historic homeland. Anyone would want their historic homeland with their historic religious sites back over somewhere else.
It seems like Jews are treated as second class when it comes to that. Talk of giving Mt Rushmore back is because it was that tribes sacred religious site, and no one would be happy giving them another mountain in another state.
And this isn’t even the first time we’ve realized this either. Look at Ireland, and how they only achieved peace when they enforced equality with their power sharing agreement. Heck, look at the entire EU. Instead of Germany and France invading each other every 30 years, they just said “fuck it”, and let their citizens live on both sides of the border. Trying to create ethnostates and encourage division never works.
At this point the only serious solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict is the “one state solution”.
Two states with some kind of federation or union is a more realistic idea.
A one state would only result in civil war and we end up right back where we are. The failure of one state in the Mandate for Palestine is of historic record.
The failure of that one state is because one side kept spreading. That will happen with two states as well as long as Israel believes they deserve all the land and are supported by the West and Palestine isn’t. Hell, you can see it now with Israel constantly starting fights with Lebanon and their other next door neighbors. The place needs to be dismantled and rebuilt as a one state in the whole area with a secular government and Constitutional rights for everyone, a la what happened in South Africa with the help of the international community, or they’re going to be constantly doing Nazi things.
Israel would leave Lebanon alone if Hezbollah didn’t regularly attack. The Lebanon war in the 1980s only came about because of constant attacks against Israel from Lebanese soil.
Palestinians get more support than any similar group. Billions have been spent by the USA and Europe to build a state, economy, and peace. However Palestinians prefer to spend the money on pensions for terrorists instead of economic development and cooperation with their richest neighbor. The amount of support Palestinians get from the west is without equal.
Of course you go straight to an antisemitic Nazi comparison.
OK that is some hilarious straight up lies. I get it now.
For years we kept being told that Israel had “Western Values” as part of the pro-Zionist propaganda in the West.
And indeed they do: 19th Century Western Values.
Why aren’t these terrorist training camps being bombed?
Israel is a terrorist state.
Daniella Weiss, what a horrible person. She will probably never face justice for her crimes.
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That combined with the “Killology” guy really explains how worthless and barbaric the entire US police system is.
Fucking cultists.
(To be clear, Judaism in general isn’t a cult, but these assholes’ version sure looks like one.)
Judaism is a cult, Christianity is a cult, Islam is a cult. They are all cults. Insane fantasies and power grabs. There aren’t any good religions.
Discordianism
Zionism =\= Judism. and aparthied Israel does not represent the Jewish faith or people. It represents stinking hatful genocidal racism which no nation on the world should accept while in reality many fully enable and aide
Edit: why tf do you need to escape the backlash in my comment like I’m coding perl
You should probably use a double slash in that non-equality sign as a single slash will be seen as an escape character by some parsers and then not rendered. In my client it just shows two equal signs, i.e. the opposite of what you wanted to convey.
Or
/=or!=or≠. There’s no reason to ever use a backslash or a double=to represent inequality.there is a reason. =\= is understood in text format. but != and /= make no sense to non-programmers, and I dont even have the last symbol you typed on my phone neither keyboard
If you use a forward slash in that case, it won’t get eaten like a backslash.
=\= is understood in text format
Not very sure about that. If it were me, I would go with =/= instead, due to the “not equal” sign having the slant that way. I also remember having used =|= somewhere.
Also, the forward slash is considered a text character, whereas backslash, a special character / escape character / compose character in different conditions.I dont even have the last symbol you typed on my phone neither keyboard
For a keyboard user, it’s probably a good idea to get a compose key setup for stuff such as ≠°×∵∴ and the rest. That way you don’t have to copy paste those things all the time.
For Android, depending upon what keyboard you use, you might want to get an addon. In case of the default GBoard, long-press the ‘=’ key, and you will find ≠.
For iOS, good luck.
Those particular Zionists are the religious kind, though. They’re specifically claiming they’re entitled to all of the Palestinians’ land because their sky daddy said so. The secular ones usually claim Zionism is needed because that ethnic Jews need a place to be safe from persecution.
Also, never, ever use a double equality sign to say things are not equal. It will only cause confusion.
Israel represents half of the global Jewish population. The US represents most of the remainder. In the US 8 in ten say caring about Israel is important or essential.
Israel and its actions like it or not represents Jewish people as a whole fairly well. Obviously not every single person but the majority thereof.
At least it’s not Java with
someString.replaceAll("\\\\\\\\", "\\\\");A vast majority of Jews worldwide are Zionist in some way or another. Zionist as in they support the existence of Israel as the state of the Jewish people.
Zionism really isn’t much different from other kinds of nationalism you find elsewhere.
All settlers are terrorists. There are over 750k people living in the occupied territories. They need to gtfo asap. Their claims hold no water and there is absolutely no legal foundation to creating little settler colonies on another people’s land. I’m talking about the West Bank and the other occupied territories here, not Israel proper.
Israel has a legal claim to the West Bank and Gaza under international law according to Uti Possidetis Juris. Israel was the only state founded in the territory after the end of the British Mandate for Palestine in 1948. The West Bank was immediately occupied by Jordan and Gaza by Egypt. According to Uti Possidetis Juris Israel is the successor state to the British Mandate for Palestine and thus eligible to all the territory.
Palestine only declared a state and independence in 1988, claiming all of Mandatory Palestine. There had been earlier attempts by Palestinians to take over Jordan and Lebanon.
So Israel has a legal claim to the West Bank. However due to demographic policies, it has avoided annexing it, leaving it in this weird occupied limbo status.
There are other claims of historic ties to the land of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) to be made as well. Although these aren’t recognized in international law afaik.
Of course you’re German. Unsurprising. “Other historic ties to the land of Judea and Samaria”. Can’t get more crazy than that lol
That the Jewish people have historic ties to Judea is not only in the name, there’s plenty of archeology as well.
Yeah and so does Germany over vast areas of western Poland, yet you don’t see normal people claiming that Germany should invade, settle, and occupy those parts. Secondly, I’m part jewish and have no connection to Israel, and never will. The Zionist mission to look for Lebensraum in the West Bank will never have my support. Zionism doesn’t represent Judaism. If you think so, then you’re just another philosemitic antisemite, or someone delusional enough to think that supporting the mass slaughter of children will wash his family’s past crimes.
Yes, you don’t see German terrorists shelling Western Poland or Polish terrorists blowing up buses in Lviv. That’s because we accepted that the borders moved. Palestinians don’t accept that the borders change and still want all of Israel.
The Zionist mission to look for Lebensraum in the West Bank will never have my support
West Bank settlements should stop, agreed.
Do think Israel has a right to exist?
And where Palestinians should go. Shall they magically disappear to leave more Lebensraum for Israel? Or what’s your solution?
Two states is the obvious solution.
There have been many viable deals on the table like Olmert’s for example. Palestinians don’t want that though.
Attentive solutions like this one https://www.alandforall.org/ are also worth trying.
Palestinians living for generations in camps in Lebanon, Syria, etc. should be allowed to fully integrate into their host countries if they wish to.
Palestinians don’t accept that the borders change and still want all of Israel.
“Palestinians” here is a useless generalization, because it lacks a quantifier. Certainly some do, and just as certainly not all do.
You can look up polls here as to what Palestinians support politically. https://www.pcpsr.org/en
Just a friendly reminder, that Israel is an Apartheid state - according to the ICJ.
Can we stop calling them “settlers”?
Edit: “settlers” is an accurate term, but due to generations of teaching a white washed version of America’s colonial history, the term doesn’t hold the negative connotation that it should to average Americans. It just doesn’t conjure the images it should, whether consciously or not.
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.
I don’t think the term settler requires the land already be occupied, though it often is so there is that connotation. But there are better words to describe explicitly the invasion of land.
I know of one example of settlers moving into unoccupied land and that claim is disputed.
If in all but one (possibly) circumstance the situation is the same then is the meaning tainted? No. Of course not. Settlers and settlement violently disrupt and displace the occupants of land in order to claim it for their own.
In the context of Israel, settlers is the best word because Israel is a settler colonial state.
Why do you think a different word is needed?
Why do you think a different word is needed?
Because the word has been largely washed of all negative connotations, at least across the minds of the majority of the populace in the U.S.
If you are trying to convey what the word settler means in a dictionary by using it in casual conversation, you are likely to find that it is not carrying the full weight of its intended meaning in the mind(s) of the listener(s).
This makes it a FUNCTIONALLY inadequate word despite being a technically correct one.
Why has the negative connotation of the word settlers been removed among people in the United States?
Why has the negative connotation been removed in the state whose subjugation of other nations literally inspired Hitler?
I’m not saying another is needed necessarily, but that others may be more precise. Colonizers, for example, may be so. Settlers is a superset here, and the only reason it nearly always involves occupied land is because most habitable land is currently inhabited. Imagine that we begin to settle Mars, hypothetically. That would be settling without taking the land others are occupying. So the word is just imprecise.
Settlers is absolutely pinpoint precise. There isn’t a need for a different word to describe what’s going on.
Settlers is not a superset of colonizers.
Hypothetical situations don’t matter. There’s no grand council of English language administration that considers every bizarre possibility and issues proclamations regarding them.
The words settler and colonist in science fiction were chosen to invoke our history and imply the question of weather human expansion beyond earth was right at best and used to sell space trades to the same people buying cowboy trades at worst.
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.
How about the founding fathers who expelled Native Americans?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah. It’s darkly funny that right after the founding of Israel and the nakba the un went and changed the rules so displaced people have no right of return.
Big “”no one’s gonna know” “they’re gonna know!”” Energy.
I think perhaps the best thing to do to be understood is to continue to refer to them as settlers while people are seeing armed attacks and hate.
Invaders would be more accurate.
I don’t see any daylight between these folks and the KKK this is basically the klan with different headgear
That’s what they are, even according to themselves they’re settlers. Perhaps a more accurate term might be settler-colonial but I think just settler works (when you stop glorifying America settlers it especially works.)
They have become what they swore to destroy
Nazis, more specifically.
Thanks American imperialists for enabling these invaders
Yes we already finished first genocide (the Native Americans), but what about second genocide?
I’m not surprised. That’s what Israeli settlers are doing for decades, not just since October.
Tell me how people should not get radicalized, when your home and existence and that of your family is constantly threatened.
I’m not condoning the actions of Hamas, they are brutal and wrong. But Israel created that beast themselves and left Palestinians with no other options.
If you want a more human focused instead of politics I would recommend to read Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation
Jewish author Michael Chabon and Israeli born author Ayelet Waldman asked writers, journalists, authors of both sides and not involved at all, to visit the occupied territories and write an essay about their expierience. It shows a heartbreakingly personal point of view of the situation before the current war.
The wild things is, their* religious leaders know they are worshipping a co-opted war god, that exists only in their shadows.
*Spelling
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Wow Israel really thinks the world will go like “welp it is now a conflict between civilians so the Israeli government can’t be blamed”. I bet they are praying that locals organise a defense against these invader settlers so that they can pretend like they have a good excuse to send troops.
This already happens
Settlers like this have forfeited their status as innocent civilians. This makes them active aggressors in my eyes.
That is literally what they’ve done for many, many decades, let the settlers expand and antagonize, then send in the military to protect the innocent civilians living on Palestinian land.
