Guest Essay Sept. 14, 2026 About a year ago, at B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization I lead, we realized we were struggling to explain what was happening in the West Bank. The problem was not a lack of information. Quite the opposite: By then, for almost three years, day after day, we had documented homes being burned and demolished, communities being expelled, children being shot and killed, roads being blocked and humiliating assertions of Jewish supremacy by settlers and by the Israeli government alike.

Forms of violence once relatively rare in the West Bank, including aerial bombardment, large-scale destruction of residential areas and mass displacement, had become routine. The question we kept returning to was how to find words for a reality no single incident could capture. We eventually realized that describing the larger system required listening to two political languages at once.

These are not parallel vocabularies. One is the language the Israeli system uses to explain and legitimize what it does; the other is the language of the Palestinian people living under Israeli rule, describing what that rule does to their lives. Political language does more than describe reality.

It shapes what people can justify and what they can ignore. For Palestinians living under Israeli rule and for many observers around the world, blocked roads, demolished homes, expulsions and violence are elements of blatantly unjust domination. Israeli political language can make that same reality seem necessary, even natural.

As a Jewish Israeli, I grew up inside that language. It turned violent domination into 'security,' dispossession into 'settlement' and large-scale violence into 'self-defense.' That language draws much of its power from real fear. I know that fear.

I grew up with it. That fear has many sources, including decades of armed attacks against Israelis. The Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023, has intensified it.

Israeli political language manipulates it by dehumanizing Palestinians, collapsing them into a single category — namely, a threat. It uses violence by some to justify the control and oppression of an entire population. This is one way apartheid sustains itself.

The language I grew up with did not require me to deny Palestinian suffering. I could acknowledge it, even be horrified by it, while still regarding the system that produced it as fundamentally legitimate. Today, after years of deepening dehumanization, Palestinian suffering is simply ignored in much of Israeli public discourse.

That is why the language of those who live under this system matters so much. The people who witness, endure and survive under that power can describe what their lives look like: unprotected, shaped by fear, vulnerability and uncertainty. On Monday, B'Tselem is publishing a report on the process unfolding in the West Bank.

It tells a story with deep roots. From the mass expulsion and displacement of Palestinians during the Nakba in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced or expelled and the subsequent refusal of refugees' right to return, through occupation, settlements and apartheid, Israeli policy has repeatedly worked to entrench Jewish sovereignty while making Palestinian presence and political life more precarious. Many Israelis recoil at the term 'settler colonialism.' That reaction is not accidental.

Israeli political language has taught us to hear the term as a denial of Jewish history and belonging. Jewish historical, religious and cultural ties to this land are real, as is the long history of persecution and violence against Jews in many parts of the world. None of that changes the fact that exclusive Jewish sovereignty was built through Palestinian dispossession.

The politics have shifted over time, but the underlying logic has remained the same: Israel has preserved a political order that places Jews above Palestinians in rights, power and control over the land. Over the past three years, this long...