Seems Someone is Paying Attention

I have posted some blog thoughts on the terms the media and politicans use to describe in the most unoffensive and misleading ways possible their policies (here) and here and here) and I now see that someone has caught on and written about it:

What’s in a name?

You Say ‘Hitnatkut,’ I Say ‘Hitkansut’

Joshua Mitnick/Tel Aviv

It’s a political question, not a literary one, for Israelis who are debating whether to call Ehud Olmert’s planned pullout of troops and settlers from the West Bank a withdrawal, a disengagement, a convergence, or a realignment.

The difference’s isn’t just semantic for the government, which has to sell a controversial policy.

“It’s domestic political marketing,” said Yaron Ezrahi, political science professor at Hebrew University. “You don’t withdraw from your own land.”

Each pullback over the last 15 years received its own nickname.

When Israel signed the Oslo Accords and agreed to withdraw the army from the major Palestinian population centers, the Labor government termed it a “redeployment.”

Several years later, when the Likud government was forced to continue the pullbacks called for under Oslo, they called them “beats” or “stages,” which allowed then-Prime Minister Netanyahu to show that he was conditioning the concessions to Palestinian progress.

Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon was simply termed an “exit.”

Last year, when Israel left Gaza, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called it a “disengagement,” or ‘hitnatkut” in Hebrew.

But his successor, Ehud Olmert, calls his plan to unilaterally evacuate about 70,000 West Bank settlers and build up three main settlement blocs a “hitkansut,” which literally means a convergence. “Disengagement,” he likely thought, was abandoned, because the Hebrew word comes from a root that means to sever.

“Disengagement means that we want to separate from them, we don’t want any part of them,” said Sam Lehman Wilzig, a political science professor at Bar Ilan University. “The problem was that it had a negative connotation, and the settlers could say that we don’t care about the Land of Israel.”

The new Hebrew has a much more positive connotation. It shares the same root as the words for convention or entrance. It can also be translated as “ingathering,” but that word was thought to be too religiously charged.

Only in the final hours before Olmert’s White House meeting on Tuesday did Israeli government officials confirm that realignment had been chosen as the official translation.

“Realignment is a better translation of what they’re trying to accomplish,” said Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, the president of the Israel Project. “Realignment speaks to shifting the lines, and it’s a way to dealing with friction between the sides” while not giving up Israel’s historic claim to the land.