Words matter: How vocabulary defines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Settlements or Jewish communities? West Bank or Judea and Samaria? East Jerusalem or eastern Jerusalem? Those are some of the language choices that journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are faced with each day-and those choices should not be taken lightly, experts say.

"It's the terminology that actually defines the conflict and defines what you think about the conflict," says Ari Briggs, director of Regavim, an Israeli NGO that works on legal land use issues. "Whereas journalists' job, I believe, is to present the news, as soon as you use certain terminology, you're presenting an opinion and not the news anymore."

"Accuracy requires precision; ideology employs euphemism," says Eric Rozenman, Washington director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).

At the conclusion of his famed essay, "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell argues that writers have the power to "send some worn-out and useless phrase-some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse-into the dustbin, where it belongs." Many Jewish leaders, organizations, and analysts wish to do just that with the following terms, which are commonly used by the mainstream media in coverage of Israel.

West Bank

Dani Dayan believes the "funniest" term of all that are used in mainstream coverage of Israel is "West Bank." Dayan is the chief foreign envoy of the Yesha Council, an umbrella organization representing the municipal councils of Jewish communities in an area that the Israeli government calls Judea and Samaria, in line with the region's biblical roots. Yet media usually use "West Bank" to describe the area, in reference to the bank of the river situated on its eastern border.

"[The Jordan River] is the only river on planet earth that on its good days is a few feet wide, and people claim that it has a bank 40 miles wide [spanning across Judea and Samaria]," Dayan tells JNS.org. "There is no other example of such a thing in the geography of planet earth. That proves that West Bank is the politicized terminology, and not Judea and Samaria, as people claim."

Member of Knesset Danny Danon (Likud) calls it "ridiculous" that West Bank-a geographic term that once described half of the Mandate of Palestine that the British government promised to the Jewish people-has "taken on a political meaning that attempts to supersede thousands of years of Jewish tradition."

"The correct name of the heartland of the Land of Israel is obviously Judea and Samaria," he tells JNS.org.

CAMERA's Rozenman, the former editor of the Washington Jewish Week and B'nai B'rith Magazine, draws a distinction between Palestinian and Jewish communities in the area.

"If I'm referring to Palestinian Arab usage or demands, I use West Bank," he says. "If I'm referring to Israeli usage or Jewish history and religion, etc., I use Judea and Samaria. Israeli prime ministers from 1967 on, if not before, used and [now] use Yehuda and Shomron, the Hebrew from which the Romans Latinized Judea and Samaria."

West Bank is fair to use "so long as it's noted that Jordan adopted that usage in the early 1950s to try to legitimate its illegal occupation, as the result of aggression, of what was commonly known as Judea and Samaria by British Mandatory authorities," adds Rozenman.

Dayan, meanwhile, prefers to call Palestinian communities in Judea and Samaria exactly that.

"The area is Judea and Samaria, and in Judea and Samaria there are indeed Palestinian population centers, and that's perfectly okay," he says. "We cannot neglect that fact, that yes, we [Jews] are living together with Palestinians. And in Judea and Samaria there is ample room for many Jews, for many Palestinians, and for peaceful coexistence between them if the will exists."

Settlements

Judea and Samaria's Jewish communities are often called "settlements," a term that some believe depicts modern-day residents of the area as primitive.

"['Settlements'] once referred in a positive manner to all communities in the Land of Israel, but at some point was misappropriated as a negative term specifically against those Jews who settled in Judea and Samaria," Danon says. "I prefer to use 'Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria' when discussing the brave modern-day Zionistic pioneers." 

Dayan believes "settlements" is not pejorative, but still inaccurate. He analogizes the Israeli city of Ariel, home to one of Israel's eight accredited universities, to the American municipality of Princeton, N.J., home to the Ivy League school of the same name. While Ariel is labeled as a settlement, nobody would give such a label to Princeton, Dayan argues.

"It's a politically driven labeling in order to target those [Israeli] communities," he says. "Most communities in Judea and Samaria are not different from any suburban or even urban community in Europe, in the United States, in Israel itself, or elsewhere."

East Jerusalem

Though Jerusalem is the undivided capital of Israel, some refer to the city's Arab-heavy portion as "East Jerusalem"-with the uppercase "E" implying that the area is its own municipality.

"There is a typo here," says Danon. "There is the western part of Jerusalem and the eastern part of Jerusalem, but there is only one capital city of the State of Israel. ... We should treat and invest in all parts of the city equally and make sure the world understands that Jerusalem will forever remain united."

Even if spelled with a lowercase "e," Dayan notes that the area media call "east Jerusalem" actually comprises the eastern, northern, and southern parts of the city. "Take for instance the Jewish neighborhood of Gilo in Jerusalem, it's not in east Jerusalem, it's in south Jerusalem. Or take for instance Pisgat Ze'ev-it is in north Jerusalem and not in east Jerusalem," he says.

Rozenman says, "One day an Israeli-Palestinian agreement might establish a new 'East' and 'West' Jerusalem... but until then, journalistic usages of 'East Jerusalem,' let alone 'Palestine,' are prejudgements."

Militants

By describing Palestinian terrorists as "militants," newswire services such as the Associated Press (AP) and Reuters set the de facto industry standard, as their coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is reprinted by their numerous client newspapers.

After the Nov. 18 attack by two Palestinian terrorists on a Jerusalem synagogue, numerous headlines in major newspapers who ran the AP story read something along the lines of, "Palestinian militants kill 5 in Jerusalem synagogue attack." The impact of not describing terrorists as "terrorists" is destructive, Danon says.

"Any news outlet that uses 'militants' to describe the savages who brutally murder Jews at prayer is dishonest and possible even anti-Semitic," he says. "This attempt at moral equivalency does no one justice and only serves to encourage violent terrorism."

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) issued an Aug. 20 press release on media usage of "militants" to characterize members of Hamas, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Islamic State, and Hezbollah.

"These groups intentionally murder innocent Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and others across the globe... To call them 'militants' greatly understates and minimizes the horror of their vile actions and may even camouflage the appropriateness and the imperative of those who fight them," ZOA said.

Palestinian Bedouin

Bedouin, in its simplest form the Arabic word for "nomad," can turn into a charged term depending on what comes after it, according to Regavim's Briggs, whose NGO's stated mission is "ensuring the responsible, legal and environmentally friendly use of Israel's national lands."

In United Nations documents' description of land disputes related to Bedouins living in Israel, Briggs sees a trend of "trying to connect what is a local problem to a larger national problem."

"Ten years ago they spoke about Israeli Bedouins, five years ago they spoke about Israeli Arab Bedouins, three years ago they spoke about Bedouins living in Israel, and now they talk about Palestinian Bedouins," he tells JNS.org. "And they're talking about the same Bedouins. What you find is that to try to politically charge an issue, or to try and connect what is a social, local, limited geographic issue to a larger national conflict, you need to change the terminology used, and that's why we've see this shift."

Haram al-Sharif

Briggs also notes the Arab push to have the United Kingdom-based BBC stop using "Temple Mount" to describe the Jerusalem compound on which the first and second Jewish Temples were built. Instead, "Temple Mount" opponents promote the usage of the Arabic term "Haram al-Sharif," which translates to "noble sanctuary."

But if media abandon "Temple Mount," not just Jewish history is re-written, Briggs explains.

"What's most interesting there is that a lot of Christianity is based on these stories of Jesus clearing out the money-changers standing at the entrance to the Temple, and if the Temple never existed as [media are] now being told, then what does that do to Christianity?" he says.

"The journalist has to understand that when they use certain terminology, when they remove certain terminology from the lexicon, then they're impacting things a lot bigger than just a news story," adds Briggs. "They're impacting a religion."