Study: 60,000 U.S. Zionists Live in West Bank
Published in the Iranian Newspaper Kayhan 30 August 2015
http://kayhan.ir/en

RAMALLAH (Dispatches) -- Roughly 60,000 American Zionists live in West Bank
settlements, where they account for 15% of the settler population, according
to figures revealed by an Oxford University scholar and expert on this
population.

"This provides hard evidence that this constituency is strikingly
overrepresented, both within the settler population itself and within the
total population of Jewish American immigrants in Israel,” said Sara Yael
Hirschhorn, the author of the upcoming book "City on a Hilltop: Jewish
American Settlers in the Occupied Territories Since 1967,” scheduled for
release by Harvard University Press in 2016.

The number of American immigrants living in Occupied Palestine, including
their children, has been estimated at about 170,000.

Speaking at the first of a two day Limmud event in Jerusalem Al-Quds,
Hirschhorn noted that the main focus of her research has been American Jews
who immigrated to Occupied Palestine in the 1960s and 1970s and became
active in the settlement movement.

The movement has been behind attacks on Palestinian properties and their
destruction as well as torching of mosques and homes, including a recent
deadly arson attack which claimed the lives of a child and his father.

She said her findings disputed many of the widely held presumptions about
this group, namely that these immigrants had been unsuccessful back home and
came to Occupied Palestine for lack of any other alternative, that they were
very Orthodox and supported rightwing causes in America.

"In fact, these assumptions are patently false,” said Hirschhorn, who serves
as the University Research Lecturer and Sidney Brichto Fellow in Israel
Studies at the University of Oxford.

"What my studies reveal is that they were young, single, highlyeducated –
something like 10% 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.”

Based on 10 years of studying this group, she said, the portrait that
emerges "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.”

As case studies in her upcoming book, Hirschhorn focuses on three
settlements that had American immigrants among their founders: Yamit (which
was evacuated in 1982 following the Israeli Egyptian peace accord), Efrat
(one of the biggest today, with about 10,000 residents) and Tekoa.

She noted two common, yet contradictory caricatures of American immigrants
in West Bank settlements. "One prevalent image is of the zealot for Zion,
the most fanatical ideologues within the movement,” she said. "On the other
hand, there is the prevalent image of the immigrant suburbanite of occupied
Scarsdale, a settler stripped of ideological significance who’s just some
kind of newage yuppie living the American dream over the Green Line.”
Neither, she said, provides a "satisfying portrait” of this group.

As an example, she noted that Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, a well known Modern
Orthodox rabbi who founded the settlement of Efrat, was known to talk in the
same breath about "squatting on a hilltop in Givat Dagan near Efrat and
squatting with African Americans in Selma.” It demonstrates, she said, the
way many American settlers "use the values and language of the left to
justify projects on the right.”

This is the second time Limmud, the global Zionist learning movement, is
holding an event in Jerusalem Al-Quds. Its previous one in the holy city,
which drew 500 participants, was held in May 2012. The organizers estimated
that roughly 600 would be attending the current Limmud JLM, as it is called.