Aren’t they just buildings and infra?
In the context of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict:
Settlements - refers to illegal makeshift “towns” (usually no more than a few trailers) built on lands that belong to Palestinians by right wing Israeli extremists who believe that the entire land belongs to them. As of 2006, these are strictly in the west bank.
Everything else (city, town, kibutz etc) - traditional meaning but also indicates that they are within the official internationally recognised Israeli border.
Here’s some wiki reading I found interesting.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_settlement
Because international agencies and governments recognize those settlements as violations of international laws https://press.un.org/en/2016/sc12657.doc.htm . To create those settlements, most often, people previously living there were forced to move somewhere else, often by using army.
That’s the reason. Whatever is someone’s side on the conflicts, those settlements are simply widely recognized as illegal
I always assumed it was because of their ambiguous legal status—“town” implies it’s a recognized political jurisdiction, while “settlement” only implies that people live there.
Because the people settle there. The land was “empty”, like it was “empty” for the settlers in the Americas. See first synonym below.
settler: noun a person who moves with a group of others to live in a new country or area. “the early European settlers in America were often fleeing from religious persecution”
synonyms: colonist, colonizer, frontiersman, frontierswoman, pioneer, immigrant, newcomer, incomer, homesteader, habitant, redemptioner, squatter
“is back”
No stupid questions, right, but where do you think it went?
Is back in the global news. They were forgotten for the last several years, to suffer in silence… The reward for peace is being ignored…
Well, whilst I abhor the violent terrorism that Hamas have committed and abhor the overwhelming overreaction and horrific vengence that the state of Israel have, as usual, immediately begun, it’s just not accurate to call what preceded recent events “peace”.
The people I know who have separately and recently visited Israel and Palestine variously called it “viscious apartheid”, “appalling”, “military occupation” and phrases like that. No one called it peace.
I think you erroneously assumed that because it wasn’t in the news, violence was not occurring, whereas I think it’s more accurate to say that it wasn’t in the news because the violence was so everyday and constant that there was nothing new to say about it. A child getting run over by a car won’t make the national news either, for almost exactly the same reason.
What news do you read? It has been on the news constantly over the past decades. Now we have a dramatic escalation of an ongoing conflict
I read the news where KSA and Israel were going to normalize relations in exchange for US military aid in Yemen which would threaten Iran’s power broker status and it became urgent to derail such a detant.
The fact KSA was even willing to entertain such an agreement is because the Palestine apartheid hadn’t been getting global coverage for a few news cycles.
It’s not that the situation disappeared, but the conversation was not talking about the situation, making it politically palatable to put it on the back burner to ignore it. At the global level
Yeah, the point I’m making is that for some of us it hasn’t gone away. That saying “it’s back” is such a weirdly privillidged and ignorant position to take.
Like it’s this year’s hot conflict.
Also, they haven’t been forgotten. Certainly not in Europe. I can’t speak for the US though.
