Settlers and Settlements

Summary

When one says the word ‘settlers’, a variety of images come to mind. Depending on one's experience, education and ethnicity, the word may have a positive or a negative connotation. In Israel/Palestine, ‘settlers’ are Jewish people who have moved onto confiscated Palestinian land and have established settlements, or communities upon that land. In American terms, they could be seen as ‘squatters’, however they are in reality colonialists who are on the land through the invitation of the Israeli government. As Dr Jeff Halper (American Jewish Professor of Anthropology at Israel's Ben Gurion University and Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions) explained to us at the International Sabeel Conference in 2002, some settlers are religious Jews, many from the United States. Religious Jews are those who not only identify themselves as having an ethnic link to Judaism – through birth or through adoption or through conversion – but religious Jews are called such or are self-named because they are believers and practitioners of Judaism. Others are secular Jews, with no theology or idolatry driving them to take the land; rather they are simply Israeli Jews who have been offered low cost or free housing outside of the city – housing far better than they could afford on their wages, with the luxuries of community swimming pools, green lawns, lush gardens, all, by the way, draining water from the aquifers of the Palestinians.