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”.

  • @theherk
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    018 days ago

    It doesn’t mean that. Your inability or refusal to read a dictionary is your issue to deal with. I’ve lead you to the information. Now you just sound like a flat earther.

    Every place that has ever been settled, has been settled at least once without inhabitants. You can use low order logic to arrive at that conclusion. But you don’t need to, as you are alive in the 21st century and seem to have access to the internet. Just go look at a dictionary. It is the only thing relevant here because a word’s definition is the only thing about which I have made assertions. If you are arguing connotative implications, I’ve already made it clear I have no issue with that.

    If you just like to argue nonsense positions to hear your keyboard clack, cool. Have fun with that.

    • @[email protected]
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      218 days ago

      So you’re willing to choose the dictionary over all the history of the word, the etymology, all art portraying the ideas the word is associated with, the news, the present, piles of study about its meaning and the obvious fact that all settlement is dispossession.

      Have you ever entertained the possibility that the dictionary is incomplete or not intended as a universal reference? That perhaps a few scant lines fail to communicate critical information that you might be missing?