Power talks: how settler language is infiltrating Israel

Words and phrases that normalise and depoliticise settlements in the West Bank have become mainstream in public discourse.

As I was scrolling through my social media feed, I came across an article published by the online branch of Israel’s’ most popular news company, Channel Two News. The article was in the environmental section, yet it was more revealing about the Jewish-Israeli attitude to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than many news reports dealing directly with the topic.

The article was about rare caves found near the settlement of Ofra in the West Bank, and the fight by several organisations to preserve the caves and not build apartments over them.

Why was the article so revealing? It was its choice of words.

As a child of the ‘90s, I am used to the media calling the settlements by the more biblical Hebrew word, hitnachlut. This term stems from the biblical word Nachala, which means ancestral estate, making the politics of its inhabitants and its legal status abundantly clear to the reader.

However, in this article, reporter Uri Izac, a respected member of a large news organisation, repeatedly described Ofra as a yeshuv. Although both terms translate the same to English, for the Hebrew speaker the distinction is clear. Yeshuv derives from the word lashevet, which means “to sit”. It is a neutral word, merely noting the fact that this is a place of residence. It also harkens back to the original Yishuv, the name given to the Jewish presence in British-controlled Palestine, which is considered legitimate across most of the political spectrum.

I thought this usage was strange and after some investigation I saw that it was not an isolated editorial decision but part of a larger trend in Israeli media - the use of language to normalise and depoliticise Israeli settlements in the West Bank.