Ideology and practice in the West Bank settlement movement.

摘要

Arguing against narrowly political approaches to the West Bank settlement movement, this dissertation analyzes settlement dynamics as a configuration of neoliberal capitalism. In contrast to the common perception of settlements as the direct or politically mediated realizations of settlers' wills and powers, it demonstrates that settlement practices emerge out of market imperatives, and that settlement ideologies insert individuals into these practices by rationalizing, justifying, and infusing them with normative force and subjective meaning. The dissertation begins with a reconstruction of the settlement practices, showing how privatization of settlement has attracted investments and proffered profits on well-positioned actors; and how settlements' depreciation has left its individuated agents (whom, by investing in settlements, had invested in prospects for upward mobility, wellbeing and social agency) vulnerable to deteriorating conditions. A discussion of settlement discourse and literature underscores the significance of this historical trajectory and the stakes of overlooking it.;This account is followed by ethnographies of two settlements, namely (secular-suburban) Ariel and (national-religious) Beit-El, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted there between August 2005 and August 2006. Settlement ideologies are deciphered against the backdrop of the social conditions that render them plausible, showing how liberal ideas in Ariel make virtues out of practical necessities, and how illiberal ones in Beit-El provide mystified reifications of the status quo. Settlers either align themselves with their social roles and relegate deviance to privacy -- as is common in Ariel; or revert to home-grown resources to complement diminishing returns on investments in larger social-economic ones, thus minimizing their field of influence -- as residents of Beit-El are wont to do. Settlers of all stripes are thereby made complicit with their own subjection to forces that ultimately disenfranchise and dehumanize themselves and others. Unveiling this mechanism constitutes a critique of the settlement movement as an agency of neoliberal capital, which deprives its members of their capacity to determine their futures.