🧩 BND Motif Index · M1223
Settler colony
A state is said to be a colonial project: settlers take the land and erase the people already there, their history and their tie to it, until the natives are painted as the foreigners.
🕵️ Theories🗂️ Erasing a people
- 4claims filed under it
- 3left shows it came up on
- 1center show it came up on
- 2claims retold online
⚠️ A story people tell, not a claim that it's true.
A motif is the shape of a story as its tellers tell it, named the way a folklorist names a tale type, so the same story told about other people, by the other side or in another year lands in the same place. Some of the claims below are true, many are false. Arguing against a story is often a story of its own, its answer (Voter fraud is answered by Voter suppression, Lawfare by No one is above the law), and we file it there; where no answer has a motif yet, the arguments against a story sit with its tellings.
🪜 Its family
what it rests on, what rests on it, and the motifs that answer it
🔗 goes with: 🧩 Driven off the land 🧩 Greater Israel
🎙️ Who it came up with
the shows we follow where its claims came up (3 left-leaning, 1 center, 0 right-leaning so far), colored by the show's lean; the bar is how many of its claims each one heard
- left-leaning
- center
"Came up on" means one of its claims was heard on the show: told, reported or argued against. We don't yet mark which. Show leans are our own grouping of the shows we transcribe.
🗣️ In so many words
the words that carry it
💬 the tellers' own words: “40 plus villages in the Jordan Valley had already been ethnically cleansed” “only settlers were allowed to vote” “Settler colonialism and apartheid in action.” “the military and the government and the settlers working together on the central state project of ethnically cleansing the West Bank” “The settler colonial ideology” “this was a foreign European settler movement that came into somebody else's”
🧶 Its claims
what's been told in this shape, in our words, by who told it: newest first in each; a claim's dots are the shows it came up on, in their lean's color (point at them for their names)
Told on the left 2
claims heard on left-leaning shows, and no right-leaning one
- 2026-10-20 “The Israeli military, government, and settlers are working together to ethnically cleanse the West Bank.” 3
- 2026-10-13 “Zionism is a foreign European settler movement that has committed genocide against others.” 2
Told on the right 0
claims heard on right-leaning shows, and no left-leaning one
🦗 No claim heard only on the right so far.
Retold online 2
claims many people posted in their own words
- 2026-11-05 “Zionism is a colonial project that seeks to strip Palestinians of their history and tie to the land and paint them as foreign.”
- 2026-10-29 “Israel is an apartheid state practicing settler colonialism by denying voting rights to Palestinians in their ancestral homeland.”
M1223 · first seen 2026-10-25 · last 2026-10-29 · what this is · how the index works