The Israeli colonies are an American problem in a whole new way. Nearly one out of six settlers in the West Bank is an American. Haaretz broke the story. Oxford scholar Sara Yael Hirschhorn says Americans are starkly overrepresented among West Bank settlers:
Roughly 60,000 American Jews live in West Bank settlements, where they account for 15 percent of the settler population, according to figures revealed Thursday by an Oxford University scholar and expert on this population.
Newsweek’s Jack Moore reports the American policy angle:
Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now said that the new figures revealed that the settlement enterprise in the West Bank was not only an internal issue but “an international problem.”
“Unfortunately, while the Obama administration has been persistently vocal against settlement developments, some 60,000 American citizens are taking an active part in an attempt to make the two state solution impossible,” says Anat Ben Nun, Peace Now’s director of development and external relations.
The study leaves out all the settlers in East Jerusalem: 200,000 of them three years ago, per the United Nations.
And remember that the settlement movement is funded not just by the Israeli government but tax-deductible donations from American Zionists. An issue the US media has refused to deal with.
Hirschhorn has a book coming out, called, “City on a Hilltop: Jewish-American Settlers in the Occupied Territories Since 1967,” that reportedly says the Jewish American settlers are idealists who come out of a leftwing background typically but are ardent Zionists and are applying their idealism to that ideology. I’m dubious about that one. I’ve met a lot of American settlers who are anything but leftwing in their orientation. My research is anecdotal, yes, but I’ve heard fundamentalist religious ideas and Jewish-chauvinist ideas of a very intolerant character. These people’s actions destroy the meaning of leftwing. And yes, one or two are former hippies, slinging M-16s. I believe I met Hirschhorn in 2006 in Hebron, when she was starting out on this project; and we had this difference of opinion then too; we have different points of view. [Update: Hirschhorn says it wasn’t her on that trip.]
Hirschhorn says her findings have now been reported in Iran; and she asks an urgent question on her Twitter feed:
A month ago tonight,
#dawabsha family was burned alive#Duma by#settler#terrorists. No arrest/prosecutions since. WHERE IS THE JUSTICE?!
In these days when the new novel by Jonathan Franzen will be published, I’m thinking about the Berglunds in “freedom”, and the topic of Jewish heritage in this novel. The brother of the main figure failed to earn his living in the US, lived on the expenses of his mother and siblings, became more and more observant to Jewish customs, and eventually went to Israel in a settlement with his family. That’s my idea of these American settlers. Was Franzen criticized as anti-Jewish for his novel in the US?
Is this really new information? Maybe the specific report is new, but surely many observers have known about the prominent role Americans play among the settlers, as well as among Israelis in general. Perhaps the fact that Newsweek would mention it is as significant as the report itself.
U, USA taxpayer,R helping 2 fund illegal Israeli settlements although those settlements R not officially supported http://wapo.st/1w5xc9A
Study: 15% of West Bank Settlers Are Jewish Americans http://europe.newsweek.com/332168 via @NewsweekEurope #IsraelSettlementsUSAmerica
Interesting, Phil. You state the 60,000 figure does not include the East Jerusalem settlers. I believe you’re right. The Haaretz article does not clarify this but the Newsweek article does. If the 60 thousand represent 15% of the settlers, then there must be 400 thousand settlers. But the 400 thousand figure does not include East Jerusalem.
The fact that even a liberal Zionist publication whose editors ostensibly support a two state solution can just ignore this point underscores how distant a two state solution is.