15% of West Bank settlers are Americans, new research finds

August 27, 2015 4:11pm

(JTA) — 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 ‘70s, 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 U.S. 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 occupied 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.

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