Metastasizing Language
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, even an enemy such as Hamas usually retains this kind of agency. It plans, bargains, pressures, delays, coerces and seeks survival. It may be condemned absolutely, but it remains strategically intelligible. The deeper divide is therefore not simply Israeli versus Palestinian, friend versus enemy, or legitimate versus illegitimate. Organized institutions are routinely treated as actors. Civilian populations are much more easily treated as environments.
Gaza provides perhaps the clearest recurring case. In discussions about reconstruction, aid, demilitarization and “the day after,” Gazans repeatedly appear inside plans designed by Israel, the United States, Arab governments, international organizations or proposed technocratic administrations. They are to be housed, screened, fed, moved, protected, stabilized, governed or reconstructed around. The point is not that every such policy is illegitimate, nor that the reports describing them are false. The point is grammatical and political: one side receives the verbs of planning, while the other becomes the population upon which plans are performed.
There are important counterexamples. Some reporting restores precisely the agency that other accounts suppress, presenting Gazans as people with conflicting political preferences, institutional loyalties, strategies and expectations. That difference matters. It shows that the problem is not an unavoidable property of reporting on war. It is a choice of political grammar.
Here grammar becomes political ontology. People can remain fully visible as humanitarian subjects while almost disappearing as political ones. Their hunger matters, their displacement matters, their deaths matter, yet their projects, preferences, disagreements and possible futures may receive far less explanatory weight. Sympathy does not automatically confer agency. A population can become intensely visible as suffering while remaining strangely absent as a collective capable of wanting something.
The same transformation appears elsewhere. Arab citizens of Israel may be represented as voters with differentiated priorities and views about coalition participation. In another frame, the same citizens become “Arab turnout,” demographic weight or coalition arithmetic. Their most obviously political act — voting — can be narrated mainly as a condition affecting somebody else’s ability to govern.
Critics of Israel undergo a related shift. Sometimes they appear as participants in an argument, with claims that can be tested, rejected or corrected. At other times criticism becomes evidence about the critic. Instead of asking whether a claim is true, false, exaggerated or poorly supported, the language asks what kind of person would make it. The critic becomes hateful, ignorant, disloyal, radicalized, anti-Israel or antisemitic. The proposition has not been answered; its speaker has been reclassified.
One blog post makes this mechanism unusually explicit. Its author describes feeling betrayed by Jewish friends who voted for a particular candidate while not feeling betrayed by non-Jewish friends who made exactly the same political choice. The act is identical. Its moral meaning changes with the identity of the actor. The substitution test is performed by the text itself.
This matters especially during an election campaign because elections should expand political subjecthood. Citizens choose, parties bargain, constituencies articulate interests and alliances remain contingent. Yet campaign language can also perform the opposite operation. Arab parties become “backing.” Haredim become draft quotas or compliance categories. Diaspora Jews become reservoirs of legitimacy or signs of erosion. Students become indicators of radicalization. NGOs become influence networks. Criticism becomes a measure of hostility.
The more useful distinction is therefore not left versus right, Jewish versus Palestinian or Israeli versus foreign. It is the distinction between default and conditional subjecthood. Mainstream state actors do not usually have to prove that they are political before their motives are examined. Palestinian civilians, Arab collectivities, transnational critics, NGOs and student activists more often become fully political only when a text makes an additional effort to restore their internal differences, institutions, arguments and choices.
This is why fact-checking, indispensable as it is, cannot solve the entire problem. A sentence can be factually correct and still distribute agency unequally. “People were relocated” may be true while concealing who decided. “In response to” may accurately describe chronology while silently choosing where causality begins. “No choice” may express genuine trauma while converting a political decision into necessity. “Anti-Israel” may describe a real position while turning one policy disagreement into a total political identity. None of these operations requires inventing a fact.
It would also be dishonest to describe this as a single Times of Israel machine. Some of the strongest counterexamples come from ToI itself: reporting that explicitly names Jewish terrorism, identifies illegal settler actions as the beginning of a causal chain, distinguishes Arab parties from Hamas, examines criticism rather than pathologizing critics, and gives Palestinian civilians conflicting political voices. The platform contains competing grammars rather than one ideological code.
That contradiction may be the most revealing fact. Under the same institutional roof, one language investigates responsibility while another investigates the loyalty of the person asking about it. One restores motives and choices; another converts people into populations, pressures, threats or symbols. One leaves political disagreement open; another resolves it in advance by deciding which actors count as political.
This is why the use of language matters before any individual dispute is settled. A political community does not require unanimity, but it does require some common discipline of naming. Responsibility cannot mean one thing when applied to an opponent and another when applied to an ally. Fear cannot make one population intelligible while making another suspicious. A citizen cannot become fully political only after proving that his vote, criticism or identity is harmless to somebody else.
The deepest danger is therefore not that public language contains false statements. Democracies have always survived liars. The more serious danger begins when language quietly distributes the right to possess motives, reasons, alternatives and responsibility unequally. A community begins to fracture not when people cease to agree, but when its language no longer allows everyone to appear as someone capable of choosing, answering, arguing and being answered.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
