15% of settlers are American, new research claims. Approximately 60,000 US Jews, out of the 170,000 in Israel, live in West Bank, study shows
Fifteen percent of West Bank settlers are American citizens. According to an Oxford University professor, approximately 60,000 American Jews live in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Haaretz reported Thursday.
“This provides hard evidence that this constituency is strikingly over-represented, both within the settler population itself and within the total population of Jewish American immigrants in Israel,” Sara Yael Hirschhorn, the author of the forthcoming book “City on a Hilltop: Jewish-American Settlers in the Occupied Territories Since 1967,” said during a presentation at Jerusalem’s Limmud conference, Haaretz reported.
The book will be published by Harvard University Press next year.
An estimated 170,000 American immigrants and their children live in Israel, according to Haaretz.
Hirschhorn said her findings contradict much of the conventional wisdom about American Israelis who immigrated in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly that they came to Israel for lack of any other options, that they were very Orthodox and that they had supported right-wing causes in America.
Hirschhorn said her research reveals that most American Jewish settlers came when they
“were young, single, highly-educated – something like 10 percent of American settlers in the occupied territories hold PhDs, they’re upwardly mobile, they’re traditional but not necessarily Orthodox in their religious practice, and most importantly, they were politically active in the leftist socialist movements in the US in the 1960s and 70s and voted for the Democratic Party prior to their immigration to Israel.”
She said her 10 years of research reveal a portrait that “is one of young, idealistic, intelligent and seasoned liberal Americans who were Zionist activists, and who were eager to apply their values and experiences to the Israeli settler movement.”
According to Haaretz, Hirschhorn said at Limmud that she reached the following conclusion about this group of immigrants:
“They’re not only compelled by some biblical imperative to live in the Holy Land of Israel and hasten the coming of the messiah, but also deeply inspired by an American vision of pioneering and building new suburbanized utopian communities in the territories. They draw on their American background and mobilize the language they were comfortable with, discourses about human rights and civil liberties that justify the kind of work that they’re doing.”
Many American settlers “use the values and language of the left to justify projects on the right,” she added.
@ Ted Belman:Thanks for the comment about Liberal Zionists in Israel, I thought it was a very good description.
bernard ross Said:
Bennett, most definitely. But this is not inconsistent with their liberal values. There are many reasons why they support Bennett or Likud for that matter.
1. They believe that the settlements are legal which they are.
2. That Jews have the legal right to settle in Judea and Samaria.
3. Bennett wants to break the stranglehold the religious parties have over Israel when it comes to religious matters.
4. Bennett is on the right side of the two key issues in Israel namely security (no withdrawal) and Zionism as opposed to universalism.
Bennett wants to strengthen Zionism in Israel. One might argue that Zionism is not a liberal value but it is. It is the national liberation movement of the Jews and liberalism supports national liberation movements. How liberal Zionists differ from liberal American Jews is by wanting to be more Jewish and more Zionist whereas liberal American Jews want to be less Jewish which includes being against Zionism. They embrace Islam and its followers even though they don’t share such values and they reject Zionists. Not only is this hypocritical it is not liberal. Liberal Zionists reject the tenets of Islam which denigrate everyone else and call for Jihad and world domination. Liberal American Jews embrace Jihadists i.e., they support Obama who supports Islamists unconditionally and who whitewashes them in America.
Liberal American Jews support the UN even thought it discriminates against Israel virtually daily. Liberal Zionists do not.
Liberal American Jews support the two state solution with its holocaust borders and the expulsion of hundreds of thousand Jews from their homes. How can this be considered liberal? Bennett’s supporters don’t.
@ bernard ross:
I have no statistical data on how ex-Pat Americans vote. I know of Americans are involved in all the major parties across the political spectrum.
Bear Klein Said:
thanks for the correction and information. Do the liberal Jews, who are also zionists, vote towards Bennett or the “zionist” union?
A good article on the same subject American Jews in Judah and Samaria.
For the purposes of this article, what is the definition of “liberal Jews”? I doubt these “liberal Jews” who settle in J & S support Obama’s obsession to turn their homes into The Islamic Republic Of Palestine. By the standards of the Left, such “liberal Jews” are nothing more than Zionazis.
@ bernard ross: Sorry
the world of focusing who lives where based on bloggers is inaccurate. American ex-pats live everywhere in Judah/Samaria from Gush Etzion to Hebron. These places are loaded with Zionists. Also liberal Jews Ex-Pats who came are also Zionists and live all over Israel.
when was this research done…. anyone who came in the 60’s and 70’s cannot be today young and idealistic… they are as old as me.
what is not mentioned here is that many of these liberal Jews were involved in social causes like the civil rights struggle and got to experience the turning of the US blacks to betraying the Jews. They saw the same in african countries who took the muslim oil dollar to turn on the Jews. They were disappointed and rejected.
I am curious as to where most of these Jews live in the settlements. My suspicion is that they live in the major blocks which will be kept. My experience with bloggers is that many of those in the settlements to be kept are anti zionist and anti settlement of the rest of YS due to seeking to protect their own interests. IN other words some are quite willing to give up the rest of YS if it serves their personal interest. Hence they see BB as their protector and Bennett as someone who rocks their boat. Perhaps yesterdays zionist and settler is todays establishment supporter. something like the “zionist” union…. who of course are the opposite of zionists.