someday we'll have a conversation about how MEMRI-style (in fact a zionist think tank) translations have been deliberately utilized to dehumanize, decontextualize and misinterpret palestinians, frequently making perfectly normal translations from arabic sound like a biblical, inflammatory speech when it is just formal but not particularly notable phrasing
another form of violence that israel inflicts is being a colonial state but disguising coloniality through procedure: breaches of trust are "negotiations;" murders are "operations;" bantustans are "area b" and "area c;" meanwhile hamas commits "barbaric atrocities" etc
now interestingly i know in hebrew israelis speak with quite blatantly dramatic and inflammatory speech, but unlike palestine, israel has always had very strong english-speaking self-representation that translates both its language and its intention to suit its needs. palestinians have had no such privilege in the public and political spheresāand in fact did notāuntil scholars like edward said made an enormous push for it
but like one of the facets of this is that palestinians are responding to the same violence they've faced for 75 years. when they call israel "the enemy" it is not a particularly cartoonish phrase, it is the result of a people being caught off-guard by militias who suddenly had the support of the united nations. when palestinian resistance calls itself the resistance its not a fanciful term, it is because they are genuinely resisting an occupying force that patrols their everyday routes with machine guns. it is resistance in its purest form, liberation in its purest form, the exact usage these terms were conceived for in the first place. they are dealing with a colonial relic, cartoonish levels of oppression.
as a colonial vassal and a beneficiary of imperialism, israel has been allowed to progress alongside the first world, a start-up nation of drones and surveillance. palestinians have been forcibly kept in a suspended state of war since 1948. educated, yes, but politically and socially progressing from ethnic cleansing to military rule, to occupation, to blockade, to apartheid. their vocabulary has only expanded to include the offenses against them but has never needed to update because their conditions have never materially changed. they are colonized by an enemy that they are resisting. so of course they use the language that describes their plight most accurately.
palestinians call it as they see it, but israeli vocabulary disguises it, modernizes it, formalizes it. discursive violence, as always.
