About a year ago, those of us at B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation I lead, confronted a troubling problem: the language we had long used no longer seemed sufficient to describe what was unfolding in the West Bank.
The difficulty was not a shortage of evidence. For nearly three years, we had documented a relentless pattern of destruction and violence: Palestinian homes burned or demolished, entire communities forced from their land, children shot and killed, roads closed and movement restricted, and increasingly open assertions of Jewish supremacy by both settlers and the Israeli authorities. Practices that had once been relatively uncommon in the West Bank — including aerial attacks, widespread destruction of residential areas and large-scale displacement — had increasingly become part of everyday reality.
The challenge was therefore larger than documenting individual incidents. No single demolition, killing, expulsion or blocked road could adequately explain the system within which these events were taking place. Understanding that system required recognising two fundamentally different political languages.
The first is the language through which the Israeli state explains and legitimises its policies. The second is the language of Palestinians who experience Israeli rule in their daily lives. These are not simply two different descriptions of the same events. Political language shapes how power is understood: it can determine which actions appear acceptable, which forms of suffering receive attention and which are pushed aside.
For Palestinians living under Israeli control, and for many people observing the situation from outside, demolished homes, restricted roads, expulsions and violence are manifestations of an unjust system of domination. Within mainstream Israeli political discourse, however, many of these same practices are presented as necessary, legitimate or unavoidable.
As a Jewish Israeli, I was raised within that political vocabulary. Military domination could be described as “security,” dispossession as “settlement,” and extensive military force as “self-defence.” This language draws much of its persuasive power from genuine Israeli fears. Those fears are not imaginary. They have been shaped by decades of armed attacks against Israelis and were dramatically intensified by the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023.
But fear can also be politically manipulated. Palestinians are increasingly reduced to a single identity: a security threat. Violence committed by some Palestinians is then invoked to justify control, restrictions and oppression imposed upon an entire population. This, in our analysis, is one of the mechanisms through which apartheid maintains itself.
The political language in which I grew up did not necessarily require denying Palestinian suffering. It was possible to recognise that suffering, even to be deeply disturbed by it, while continuing to regard the political system responsible for it as essentially legitimate. After years of intensifying dehumanisation, however, Palestinian suffering has increasingly disappeared from much of Israeli public discussion.
This makes Palestinian testimony indispensable. Those who live under this system of power can describe what it means in everyday terms: a life shaped by insecurity, fear, vulnerability and uncertainty, often without meaningful protection.
B’Tselem is now publishing a report examining the broader process taking place in the West Bank. Its argument reaches far beyond recent events. It traces a historical trajectory beginning with the Nakba of 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or displaced, followed by Israel’s refusal to allow refugees to return. It then follows the development of occupation, settlements and what B’Tselem describes as apartheid. Across these different periods, the report argues, Israeli policy has consistently strengthened Jewish sovereignty while making Palestinian presence, rights and political existence increasingly insecure.
The concept of “settler colonialism” remains deeply uncomfortable for many Israelis. That discomfort has itself been shaped by Israeli political discourse, which often presents the term as a rejection of Jewish history or Jewish belonging to the land.
Yet Jewish historical, religious and cultural connections to the land are real. So too is the long history of persecution and violence experienced by Jewish communities across different parts of the world. Recognising those realities does not, however, resolve the Palestinian question or erase the dispossession through which exclusive Jewish sovereignty was established.
The policies, institutions and political circumstances have changed over time, but the central argument remains: Israel has maintained a political order in which Jews and Palestinians do not possess equal rights, equal political power or equal control over the land.
