Palestinians in the West Bank say they are being driven from their homes by a campaign of terror waged by armed civilians determined to take their land
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)