• 60,000 American Jews live in the West Bank, new study reveals
    Scholar Sara Yael Hirschhorn calls group ’strikingly over-represented’ in settler movement.
    By Judy Maltz | Aug. 27, 2015 | 10:42 PM |
    http://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/.premium-1.673358

    Speaking at the first of a two-day Limmud event in Jerusalem, [Oxford University scholar Sara] Hirschhorn noted that the main focus of her research has been American Jews who immigrated to Israel in the 1960s and 1970s and became active in the settlement movement. 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 Israel for lack of any other alternative, that they were very Orthodox and supported right-wing 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, highly-educated – something like 10 percent 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 social movements in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s and voted for the Democratic Party prior to their immigration to Israel.”

    #sionisme #messianisme #colons #colonisation #Palestine