Who Gets to Be a Political Subject?

Netanyahu reportedly called violent settler extremism a “metastasizing cancer.” It is an unusually brutal metaphor, but perhaps it identifies more than he intended. Political violence metastasizes not only through bodies, roads and villages. It can metastasize through language: from naming an enemy to classifying a critic, from classifying a critic to withdrawing political legitimacy, and from there to a language in which some people remain subjects while others become problems to be managed.

A community begins to fracture when its words cease to bind everyone in the same way. Language is not merely how a society describes itself. It distributes responsibility, agency, legitimacy and belonging. When the same act acquires a different moral weight depending on who performs it, when one group’s fear explains its behavior while another group’s fear becomes a problem requiring management, or when criticism is judged less by what it says than by who says it, language begins deciding who is entitled to appear as a political subject before the argument has even begun.

I initially looked at political language in and around The Times of Israel expecting to find something simpler: lies, distortions, euphemisms and unequal use of words such as “terrorism,” “extremism” or “incitement.” That hypothesis proved too crude. ToI reporting does use terms such as “Jewish terror,” “Jewish terrorist attacks” and “settler terror attacks.” Some of its strongest reporting explicitly identifies settler violence, state inaction and institutional responsibility. The problem is therefore not that certain words are forbidden. It lies deeper, in the conditions under which different actors become politically intelligible.

Governments, ministers and parliamentary parties normally enter a story already equipped with motives. They calculate, negotiate, refuse, compromise, protect constituencies, fear electoral losses and pursue strategies. Even severe criticism rarely removes that status. To accuse a prime minister of prolonging a war for political survival is an exceptionally grave accusation, but it still grants political subjecthood: motive, alternatives, calculation and responsibility remain visible.

Remarkably,........

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