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58 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 43, No.3, Spring 2020 From Divine Sanction to Suburbanization: The Evolution of the Israeli Settler Movement and the Future of the Two-State Solution Sara Yael Hirschhorn* If I were to ask the average lay-observer of the Israel-Palestine conflict to describe a Jewish-Israeli settler, they would probably relate the still-life they often see presented in the media of a man, clad in baggy-hippy-style cotton clothing, a big knitted kippah, and possibly a beard and peyus (sidelocks), toting an automatic machine gun, with flashing eyes and a snarl full of religious zeal, marauding through a Palestinian olive grove, erecting an illegal outpost, or praying fervently for the coming of the Messiah.1 While this image may represent the most ideological wing of the Israeli settler movement, we don’t often envision a secular suburbanite driving their Skoda to a high-tech job in Tel Aviv, an ultra-Orthodox family with ten children, a female future doctor studying medicine on the campus of Ariel University, a rabbi with a flowing beard leading a dialogue group with local *Sara Yael Hirschhorn is Assistant Professor of Israel Studies at Northwestern University and Research Lecturer and Sidney Brichto Fellow in Israel and Hebrew Studies at the University of Oxford. She is the author of City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement and is a contributor at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, as well as news publications such as The New York Times, Haaretz, The Times of Israel, and Jewish Chronicle. In 2018, Hirschhorn was awarded silver medal as runner-up to Ilana Kurshan in the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and she was also picked as the Choice Award winner. In 2019, Haaretz covered her research into the role of American Jews in the Israeli settler movement. 1 These kinds of stock photographs can be found by entering keyword term “West Bank Settler” or “Israeli settlements” into the Getty Images database, widely used by print journalism : https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/west-bank-settler?mediatype=photography &phrase=west%20bank%20settler&sort=mostpopular Similar still and moving images have often appeared in television news, documentary film, and literature. 59 Palestinians, or bourgeoisie religious families living in million dollar homes in a yuppie township over the Green Line.2 The academic literature too, has mostly failed to recognize the changing face of the Israeli settler camp, mostly focusing on its founding generations in the 1970s and 1980s.3 Over the past 50 years, the ideology, constituency, and discourse of the Israeli settler movement—and its State support—have shifted dramatically over time. This article will re-examine the evolution of this enterprise over the past five decades as well as what recent (rumored) peace plans by the Trump Administration may mean for the future of the two-state solution and the settlement project. 2 Reuters, “Wider Image: Israel’s Settlers and the Palestinians They Live Among,” 9 September 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-election-settlementspalestini /wider-image-israels-settlers-and-the-palestinians-they-live-amongidUSKCN1VU0O2 Settlers themselves have also been keenly aware of the stereotypical images of their population, debating and challenging these ideas in the international media, both in past and present. See, for example, Aron Heller, “Settlers Defy Stereotypes Amid Peace Talks,” Times of Israel, 13 August 2013. Some members of most radical ideological wing of the settler movement, known as the Hilltop Youth, have recently even launched a Youtube Channel to give viewers a chance to “get to know them up close” as a public relations gesture: https://www.facebook.com/pg/NoarHagvaot/posts/?ref=page_internal For two scholarly treatments of settler stereotypes and the public relations of the Israeli settler movement, see Chapter Five of Sara Yael Hirschhorn, City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017). See also Yaakov Hershkovitz, “Settlers Vs. Pioneers: The Deconstruction of the Settler in Assaf Gavron’s The Hilltop,” Shofar 33, No. 4 (Summer 2015): 173-189. 3 See, for example, Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East, trans...

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