Now, the 'in-term' is "Spiking"

Always pay attention to the use of words and terms as part of the semantic wars.

For example:

Settler attacks on Palestinian spike, reflecting Israel's systemic failure by Amos Harel in Haaretz, Nov. 19, 2021

Shall we review the use of "spike"?

Spike in Israeli settler attacks serves Bennett government policy: Terrorize Palestinians and take more land on Otober 18, 2021.

On January 28, 2021, we read: Spike in settler violence backed and encouraged by state and on April 14, 2021, the UN 'says': Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians spike to 210 so far this year. And on February 2020, a year earlier, the EU spoke out against Israeli settler spike.

Back in the Fall of 2012, you could have read in an academic article of "The spike in assaults on Palestinians".

Given that "spike" means a sharp increase in the magnitude or concentration of something, obviously, there is usually a reason for that increase and it behooves those who use it to explain why. Or even prove there is an actual spike.

That, I fear, would then defeat the whole purpose of emplying the term "spike" for it is used more as a scare tactic than anything else.

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The Semantics of Spokespersons

A terror attack occurred today.

How was it tweeted?

Here from IDF:-

And here, from the Israel Police, how they actually reported the event:-

Note the differences.

Anyone questioning why we have problems with public diplomacy and why we are not influencing the discourse?

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Yachad and Occupation, Of A Sort

I know many are upset at the term 'occupation' when discussing Israel and Zionism.

I am not.

After all, "...but words will never harm me."

I am occupied typing this blog post.

You are occupied now reading it.

You are occupying space in a room while reading this.

Your occupation could be educator, doctor, lawyer or pensioner.

And to the point.  Yachad is an anti-occupation British Jewish group.

Their address I note is

Phoenix Yard

65 Kings Cross Road

London

WC1X 9LW

Not far from Sadler's Wells Theatre.

I checked out the premises (I can be so associatively curious).  And what did I find?

Rental fees are

costs & availability
Work station monthly licence fees from £280 per person per work station, including broadband. 

and 

at 65 (VAT not applicable):
ground floor: All occupied.
first floor: All occupied.
second floor: All occupied.
at 69 (plus VAT):
ground floor: All occupied.
first floor: All occupied.
second floor: All occupied.

Yachad is surrounded by occupation.

Of course, it's all in the linguistics.

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More on the War of Semantics

From Michael Medved's Media Distort Mideast Debate who illustrates why words can be as powerful as bullets:-

Careless language, reflexively recycled from Palestinian propaganda, contributes to contemporary confusion about the stalled Middle East peace process...Major media, for instance, regularly cite Israel’s “creation” in 1948—as if the Jewish state came into existence like an oddball lab experiment—through a sudden, arbitrary top-down process...

Commentators also frequently mention the “displacement” or “uprooting” of Palestinians, suggesting that the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland resulted in ethnic cleansing of the indigenous inhabitants...

...Israel was no more “created” in 1948 than the United States was created in 1776...when Israeli leaders declared their own independence in 1948, it represented a culmination of their nation-building efforts, not their initiation...This nation in formation also managed to defend itself against murderous Arab riots in 1921, 1929, 1936, and 1939...

Greater care and clarity in describing the history of the conflict will encourage policymakers and the public to grasp its essential contours, and to recognize the absence of any real equivalence in the goals or strategies of the two sides.

...Nor did these efforts in any way “uproot” or “displace” Palestinian society. During the years of intensive immigration between World War I and World War II, the Jewish population west of the Jordan increased by 470,000 while the non-Jewish population swelled by 588,000. According to respected British census figures, the number of Palestinian Arabs exploded on the eve of Israeli independence, increasing 120 percent between 1922 and 1947. These figures prove that the rise of the Jewish state (with its greatly heightened economic development) drew more Palestinians into the area, rather than driving them away.

Palestinians became refugees only after fighting began in the War of Independence, especially after five Arab states with well-equipped armies invaded the fledgling Jewish state, pledged to achieve its total annihilation...

...the Palestinian leaders themselves (led by the grand mufti of Jerusalem, a close Hitler ally during the war) rejected the U.N. partition and made no effort to set up a Palestinian state, either before or after the War of Independence. Between 1949 and 1967, Arabs (the Egyptians and Jordanians) controlled every inch of territory that Abbas now seeks for his new state—all of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. They could have established a Palestinian homeland at any point during those 18 years and, incidentally, continued denying Jews any access to their holy sites. With scant protest from Palestinians, the Arab states made no effort to “fulfill the promise” because they concentrated all their attention and effort on destroying Israel rather than building Palestine. They cared far more about expelling Jews than they did about re-settling Palestinians.

...The success of propagandistic distortions leads to odd reactions from the West, which saw Israeli housing projects in Jerusalem as a greater threat to peace than Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza, worrying far more about Jewish building than about Arab bombing.

...Greater care and clarity in describing the history of the conflict will encourage policymakers and the public to grasp its essential contours, and to recognize the absence of any real equivalence in the goals or strategies of the two sides...

Good summary.

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On The War of Semantics

As Michael Rubin makes clear:-

Technically, the West Bank is disputed territory, not occupied territory. There was no independent Palestine in 1967 before the Six-Day War. The status of the territory was just as unresolved before 1967 as it was after. If the Israelis “occupy” the portions of the West Bank unresolved under Oslo and subsequent accords then the Palestinian Authority also “occupies” those areas...Along the same lines, the term settlement shows tremendous bias. If portions of Jerusalem are unresolved, then new Palestinian construction on disputed lands are as much “settlements” as new Israeli construction. To speak of Palestinian civilians and Israeli settlers is to accept a false narrative and a dehumanizing one.

It behooves those who believe that Israel matters and its security and Jewish identity are important to be accurate with language. Otherwise, they simply cede points in negotiations and risk putting Israel in an even more precarious position as diplomacy continues.

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Couldn't Have Said It Better

For at least 30 years and more, I have focused on semantics in my Hasbara seminars/lectures.

There are no "settlements" but communities, villages, towns and cities.

There are no "settlers" but either revenants (my creation) or simply residents.

If there is an "occupation", it is the occupation by Arabs of portions of the Jewish national homeland.

If there are "refugees", they also include Jewish refugees.

Now read
The Forward's Philologos:-

It’s obviously a losing battle, but I can’t help carrying on with the fight...

How long will the canard continue to be repeated by supposedly educated journalists that “Judea” and “Samaria” are territorially expansionist terms, resurrected from the time of the Bible by right-wing Jewish settlers and their supporters, for a geographical area whose rightful name is “the West Bank”? When will this idiocy finally stop?

One would like to ask the Diehls, the Cohens and all the others a simple question: In the long centuries after the final redaction of the Hebrew Bible, which took place sometime in the second or first century BCE, what, in their humble opinion, was the hill country south and north of Jerusalem called?

It certainly wasn’t “the West Bank,” a term that is barely 60 years old. A translation of the Arabic ad-difa’a al-gharbiya, “the West Bank” was a coinage introduced in the early 1950s to denote the area of Palestine west of the Jordan River that was annexed by Transjordan — its name now changed to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan — following its conquest by King Abdullah’s Arab Legion in the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli war. You won’t find it in a single book, atlas or newspaper article before that.

...long before the British Mandate, Judea was the standard English word for the hills around Bethlehem and Hebron, just as Samaria was for the hills farther north. Commercial European tourism to Palestine started in the mid-19th century, and from then on, England witnessed a spate of travel books reporting on visits there. All these books use similar terminology...Judea and Samaria, although they derive from the Hebrew biblical terms Yehuda and Shomron, have been part of the geographical vocabulary of Christian Europe since the time of Jesus. “The West Bank” has not been.

To refuse to refer to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria is, whether deliberately or not, to declare that Jews and Christians have no historical connection to these areas. To malign others for calling them that is even worse.

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Compelled Human Shields

I think this report on the unfortunate deaths of Gazan residents:

Two Palestinians killed on Sunday by IDF fire along the Gaza border were not engaged in terrorist activity but were standing next to a Palestinian who was pointing a loaded RPG at the Israeli military force, an investigation of the incident has revealed.

should have been phrased differently in that that the armed terrorist was standing next to them, forcing them to be human shields - a crime as we all recall from Cast Lead,


.

A New "Green-Lined" Blog Post

At the Jerusalem Post.

Another "Wall"

First, there was the security wall.

Then, the apartheid wall.

And now:

Palestinians see the building of Har Homa as the last rampart in a wall of settlements encircling Arab East Jerusalem