Why So Many Israelis Dropped Their Opposition to Settlements

Kudos to Daniel Kane for thoroughly explaining a fact that too many people, especially overseas, ignore: the settlement movement is far from being monolithic. He does an excellent job of delineating the movement’s main subsets, though I think he overstates the influence of what he terms the Har Etzion branch. The settlement movement’s leaders and activists still largely come from the rival Mercaz HaRav branch of religious Zionism, which tends to be more ideological and less politically pragmatic; and in my experience, these leaders still consider it important “to build in every instance.”

But I’d like to focus instead on a more important issue, namely Kane’s assertion near the end of the essay that the settlement project has been “embraced by the Zionist mainstream.” Here, too, I think he overstates the case. Not only do settlements still have plenty of opponents, but much of their support stems from the specific circumstances of this historical moment rather than ideological conviction; consequently, it’s easily reversible. Nevertheless, he’s right that Israeli attitudes have changed in the three decades since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993.

Partly, that’s because many more Israelis today can’t even remember a time when the settlements didn’t exist, making it easier for them to view settlements as a normal part of Israel’s landscape. Partly, it’s because the movement’s growth and diversification mean that many more Israelis now have family or friends in settlements; that’s especially true for the Ḥaredim, whose changing attitude toward the settlements is undoubtedly related to the fact that 150,000 Ḥaredim now live there, up from almost zero three decades ago. But above all, this “mainstreaming” happened for the exact same reason that the self-styled “peace camp” collapsed—massive upswings in Palestinian terror after both Oslo and the 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip altered Israelis’ perception of what their own security requires.