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”.
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?