Award Information
This proposed research is a twelve-month ethnographic study of two outposts (ma’achazim) of second-generation settlers in the West Bank. Located in isolated areas and following a frontier attitude, a growing number of second-generation settlers who were born and raised in “Judea and Samaria” are choosing to establish these “unauthorized” outposts. Based on participant observation in two of these outposts and their “mother settlements”, this project compares first generation settlers, members of the ‘Gush Emunim’ circle, to their children who live in outposts. Specifically I ask: What is the difference between being a first generation settler - a newcomer to the land - and holding the seemingly contradictory identity of a ‘native settler’, by virtue of being born as a settler? In answering this question, I structure my study around the analysis of three registers of experience: conception of time, understanding of place, and relation to the Palestinian “other.” This project offers two main contributions: first, by bringing an anthropological perspective to bear on the settlement project, I illuminate some of the most important cultural and experiential differences between first generation settlers and their ‘sabra-settler’ children. Second, I explore the implications of these shifts on the geopolitical dynamics of the settlement project, namely, the emergence of the new outpost settling formation.