The Narrative of 'Settler Aggression': A Fifty-Year Campaign

The word "settlers" (mitnahalim) was once one of the most exalted titles of the pioneering settlement enterprise. It belonged to the lexicon of redeeming the land, conquering labor, conquering the wilderness, and conquering the pasture. These were not merely descriptive terms, but foundational words charged with mission, renewal, and redemption, even in the mouths of secular pioneers.

Settler protest at the entrance to Shechem | Free credit

These words did not carry any negative charge back then. On the contrary: they were a natural part of the language of the labor settlement movement, from the day of settling on the land, which was marked in kibbutzim as the "Settlement Holiday," through romantic descriptions of "the settlers on the mountain," to the headlines and publications of the Kibbutz Movement that celebrated their "day of settlement." The State of Israel was built on these words.

However, less than forty years after the establishment of the state, around the rise of Gush Emunim and the 1977 political upheaval, a politicization and blackening of these foundational concepts began. The new settlers were no longer perceived as the ideological kin of the historical "settlers," and the words themselves were gradually exiled from public discourse as words associated with violence, threat, and condemnation.

The current wave of headlines about "settler violence" and "Jewish terror" has intensified greatly since the October 7 massacre, and has sharpened especially in recent weeks. This is the contemporary peak of an ongoing linguistic and historical reversal. Every few hours, another report and another commentary appear, sometimes even before the facts have been fully clarified.

Thus, a localized event immediately becomes a public category. An act by an individual or a group is attributed to an entire public. There is no discourse about "Tel Avivian violence" or "kibbutznik violence." Only one Jewish public in Israel has earned the status, as a category, of being a violent public, a permanent character in a plot that has been written for over fifty years.

It is enough to leaf through countless headlines in the press since the seventies, eighties, and nineties, the decades when this campaign gained momentum, among other things with the encouragement of new "peace movements" that emerged then, mainly to topple right-wing governments. "Jewish terror," "The Jewish Underground," "militias," cartoons depicting the settler as an armed thug, sometimes even using imagery taken from European history, front pages dealing with "violent settlement," and articles about "the new anti-Semites."

Each of the cases dealt with a different context, but their accumulation created over the years a stable public lexicon, into which almost every new incident was inserted. This was not a random series of headlines, but a consistent cluster of images, concepts, and symbols that built a defamatory public language over decades.

Parallel to the shaping of media discourse, a new legal discourse began to take shape around the settlement enterprise. The Karp Report, prepared at the initiative of then-Attorney General Yitzhak Zamir, was one of the documents that influenced this smear campaign. Its influence extended beyond the legal plane into the broad public discourse and, in fact, is felt to this day.

The roots of the reversal lie in the political and cultural upheaval of the late seventies. Settlement in Judea and Samaria opened not only a dispute over borders, but also a struggle over the story of Jewish revival in the Land of Israel. From the moment settlement became the focus of political dispute in Israel, the vocabulary used to describe it gradually changed as well.

Thus, "settlers" ceased to be a word of pioneering and gradually became a charged epithet. "Settlement" (hitnahalut) moved away from its biblical and Zionist meaning. Even the term "occupation" (kibbush), which for decades was an inseparable part of the ethos of conquering labor, land, wilderness, and pasture, inspired by the biblical conquests of the land, remained almost only in its accusatory political meaning.

The land itself was also maligned. Judea and Samaria, Gaza and Sinai, the cradle of the Tanakh and the expanses where the foundational chapters of the growth of the Jewish nation took place, were gradually presented in public discourse not as a homeland, but mainly as a scene of conflict. Hebron, Shiloh, Beit El, Elon Moreh, and Mount Gerizim were pushed behind headlines about clashes, checkpoints, and disturbances.

The image built for the settlers stuck to the places where they live as well. They too began to be perceived, by many, first and foremost through venom-dripping campaigns, rather than through historical, biblical, and Zionist continuity.

The letter from hundreds of former senior security officials to US President Donald Trump, in which the rise of "Jewish terror" was presented as a threat to Israel's security, the interests of the United States, and regional stability, illustrates that even today this is not just a discussion about specific events. It is about the continued existence of the same public lexicon that has been built over decades.

The current storm is not just an argument about a series of events. It reveals how complete the linguistic reversal is: a word that once expressed the peak of Zionist fulfillment appears today almost always next to the words "violence" or "terror."

A diplomatic, political, and territorial struggle is being waged on the soil of the homeland, but a no less deep struggle is taking place in the field of language. Restoring the true meaning of the words is not just a semantic correction, but a necessary condition for restoring the truth to the act of settling the land and to the words that were stripped of their original meaning.