On October 13, JNS ran Josh Hasten’s analysis of Israeli settlement growth, built on figures from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s party, under a headline calling the West Bank “the Jewish people’s biblical heartland”. Read the headline as a sentence and it has no one in it. “The battle for” declares a war without naming who fights or who has the army; “biblical heartland” decides whose land it is before the first paragraph. “Heartland” is the glittering word, a word of home no reader wants to argue with. A plain sentence from the same page would say: Israel’s government says it is expanding settlements in the West Bank, by figures from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s own Religious Zionism Party. The page keeps the frame. The land is only “Judea and Samaria”, “occupied” never appears, anything Palestinian first surfaces in the sixth paragraph, and “settler violence” appears once, in quotation marks, as “allegations”. The wording matches the Knesset’s sovereignty resolution, which calls the land the “spiritual homeland of the Jewish people”. The tell: when a land claim arrives with a holy book attached, look for the office behind it. Here it is a minister, Smotrich, who told JNS he aims to “effectively kill the idea of a Palestinian state”. Same week, other words. Haaretz headlined “violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians”; CBS wrote that settlers “push Palestinians from their West Bank homes”. OCHA counted 23 Palestinians killed and more than 1,040 injured in settler attacks this year by August 28. The ICJ found Israel’s presence unlawful in 2024, and Ireland cites that ruling in its ban. A heartland cannot be weighed under law the way a policy can. For a reader who already believes the land is owed, the headline hands back the proof they came for.
