BY VICTOR SHARPE—
This is yet another plea to all who love Israel and write about the embattled Jewish state in the media or in letters to the Editor in their local newspapers. Please, please stop using the word “settlers” or “settlements” when describing Jewish residents or communities in Judea and Samaria or anywhere throughout the Land of Israel. When such words are used in the English language they are considered pejorative terms implying an alien presence in another people’s land. That, of course, is totally false as the Jews are the native and indigenous people of Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel.
We must call them villages or towns, not settlements. Ironically, the same people who habitually and without thinking use the term “settlements” to characterize Jewish communities, automatically describe Arab communities as “villages” when, in many instances, the Arabs can trace their ancestry back only to the massive and illegal entry into British Mandatory Palestine in the early years of the 20th century. Many Jewish villages, on the other hand, are built close to or on the very sites of Jewish towns or villages dating from biblical times.
So please, please all of you who love and support Israel, stop characterizing Jewish communities as “settlements.” Every time you do so, you delegitimize the Jewish people in their biblical and ancestral land and give aid and comfort to Israel’s enemies.
Freelance writer and author of Volume One & Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state
I appreciate the reminder about properly naming the Jewish communities. I write letters to the editor of our local newspaper in support of Israel; and make reference to communities. I don’t at all like the term, “settlements.”