Suburban Occupation: Contradictory Impulses and Outcomes of Life in Israeli Settlements in the Occupied West Bank

The hundred-year conflict in Israel/Palestine is, at its core, a struggle over competing territorial claims and narratives. But this is not just an asymmetrical territorial conflict between two competing national groups—it is a settler colonial struggle between colonizer and colonized. Since 1967, the conflict has centered on the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt), which include the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. Israeli settlement in the occupied territories began in 1967 following the Arab-Israeli War, despite the fact that the occupation and transfer of civilian population into the Palestinian territories is illegal according to the Fourth Geneva Convention and often criticized under international law. Since the beginning of the military occupation of the West Bank (or “Judea and Samaria”) in 1967, the settler population there and in East Jerusalem has risen to well over half a million Israeli Jews. Despite the fact that this territory remains contested and in a constant state of war and violence, settlement residents describe their communities as safe, desirable places to live. My dissertation analyzes the considerable discursive and material work required to construct and maintain settlements as desirable places to live; the ways in which territorial control is utilized to make the occupation possible and sustainable; and how settlers are responding to and shaping their physical and social environment in relation to the Palestinian “other.” In three substantive chapters, in addition to a chapter examining the history of settler colonialization, I deal with various contradictions of settler life in the West Bank. This research is based on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork in the occupied West Bank, over 100 in-depth interviews with settlement residents and local council officials, participant observation at community events, and document analysis of settlement periodicals, literature by and about settlers, newspaper articles, and marketing materials. In my research I am interested in the conceptual frameworks that settlement residents use to make sense of their lifestyle in a military-occupied, contested area, and also in critiquing their interpretation of the world and in understanding how it is linked to geopolitics, settler colonialism, and unequal relations of power