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”.
Can we stop calling them “settlers”?
Edit: “settlers” is an accurate term, but due to generations of teaching a white washed version of America’s colonial history, the term doesn’t hold the negative connotation that it should to average Americans. It just doesn’t conjure the images it should, whether consciously or not.
Invaders would be more accurate.
I don’t see any daylight between these folks and the KKK this is basically the klan with different headgear
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.)