(English) Occupied words: On Israel’s colonial narrative

The language of sociopolitical constructs is rarely a mere collection of words arranged to reflect reality. More often, it is the very infrastructure of thought, laid out in a way to facilitate, or preclude, specific ideas.

In the case of a settler colonial enterprise, the selection of words is highly deliberate and meant to construct a moral syntax to contextualise ethnic cleansing and settlement.

The Israeli colonisation of Palestine has followed time-tested colonial narratives, which first describe conquered lands as uninhabited frontiers for hardworking underdogs, replete with the romantic language of, for example, “making the desert bloom”.

The creation of Israel by recent foreign immigrants in Palestine gained an exceptionally sentimental dimension in the West, given that it was born on the heels (and as a result) of Europe’s genocide of its own Jewish citizenry.

The story of “a land without a people for a people without a land” was the perfect outcome of a terrible chapter in Europe’s history. It was their happy ending – one that helped assuage their guilt.

It was the only story the West wanted, or was willing to hear.

But it was a lie.

Palestine already had an ancient history that had produced an extensive society, whose character formed organically over thousands of years of documented habitation, conquests, pilgrimages, births of religions, religious conversions, settlements, wars, crusades and natural migrations.

It was a population of peasants and professionals, scholars and technicians, readers and illiterates, city dwellers and farmers.

It was a pluralistic society, where people of different religious, ethnic and racial backgrounds lived together in relative harmony.

Over many centuries, Palestine had been the object of wars and conquerors who came and went, but not before mixing with the local inhabitants and leaving their mark in the genetic, cultural and even linguistic makeup of the Palestinian people.

The only way an exclusive and exclusionist Jewish state could be created was by the forced physical removal of this society, which began in earnest in 1947 by highly trained and well-funded armed groups of European Jews.

When fledgling Arab nations intervened on behalf of their Palestinian brethren, their disorganised, smaller and weaker forces with their outdated weaponry were no match for the nascent Jewish state.

In the axiom that history is written by the victors, this moment became known as Israel’s war of “independence”. It is perhaps the only time in history when a group of foreigners have invaded and conquered a land, taken its cities and gardens, then claimed “independence” from the native population of that land.

Thus began the perversion of language that continues to subsidise and propagate power.