Style Reminder: Please Use 'Settler' For Jews, 'Immigrant' For Anyone Else (PreOccupied Territory)

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Style Reminder: Please Use 'Settler' For Jews, 'Immigrant' For Anyone Else

By the Standards Editor, The Guardian

London, 22 October - It has come to the Editorial Board's attention that some writers employ terminology that runs afoul of the standards this publication demands for purposes of journalistic objectivity - with a specific lapse in the proper application of "settler" as referring only to Jews or Israelis, and "migrant" or "immigrant" as referring to others.

Going forward, we expect strict adherence to this policy. Any writer who fails to use the neutral "migrant" or sympathetic "immigrant" when discussing those who come to Western countries - even if representatives of those migrants explicitly call their movements "conquest" - will face disciplinary measures. While only applicable in a relatively small number of cases, we will also accept "asylum seeker" as the default description of non-Europeans moving to Europe.

This does not hold true in the slightest when writing about Jews who live in the ancestral Jewish homeland, and certainly not about the Jews who moved to, or were raised in, the parts of that homeland that Jordan, Egypt, or Syria conquered in 1948. The only acceptable descriptor for such people remains "settler," regardless of the background of their presence in that territory. Arabs who moved to that territory any time before June 1967, whether under Jordanian, Syrian, Egyptian, British, or Ottoman rule, will under no circumstances be called "settlers," while Jews who moved there, no matter when, were and will always be "settlers."

Please also refrain from referring to Jews who, just before, during, and right after the Holocaust, had nowhere safe to go because no country would admit them - including the British who controlled Palestine at the time - as "refugees." Such sympathetic terminology violates the neutral objectivity incumbent on a Guardian journalist.

On the other hand, Arabs who fled Palestine when Israel was established, and their descendants in perpetuity, will continue to carry the designation "refugee," even while refugees from other conflicts cannot, under international conventions, bequeath refugee status to offspring who are not, themselves, fleeing the conflict.

For the avoidance of doubt, the same discipline applies to historical framing. European-descended populations in the Americas, Australia, or New Zealand may still be described as settlers where the established literature does so. No equivalent latitude exists for Jews in the places of documented Jewish continuity. Attempts to align the vocabulary across these cases will be treated as a failure of objectivity. Copy that observes the distinction as drawn will proceed; copy that does not will be returned. These rules exist to protect the clarity and impartiality our readers expect.

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