West Bank settlers diverse

MODIIN ILLIT, West Bank — This ultra-religious city became the largest Jewish settlement in the West Bank this year, but visitors are hard-pressed to find the orange solidarity ribbons that became standard dress among settlers since Israel’s uprooting of the Gaza settlements two years ago.

The ultra-Orthodox and mainline settlers are both strictly religious but have different reasons for colonizing the West Bank.

Nationalist settlers want to hold on at all costs to the land claimed by the Palestinians as a future state. In contrast, ultra-Orthodox are seeking West Bank real estate as a low cost alternative to crowded neighborhoods in Jerusalem.

“People here are all religiously Orthodox, but they don’t consider themselves settlers. They don’t come from the ideology of settling the Land of Israel. … They don’t come from the ideology of fighting with the Arabs, or expelling them,” said Modiin Illit Council Member Yakov Vallenshtein, a boyish grin only partially obscured by a full black beard.

“Young couples preferred to come here, buy an apartment and start building a quality community life. They aren’t right wing or left wing. They want to buy on the cheap.”

The steady exodus from the city combined with the high birthrate among the ultra-Orthodox makes them a major driver of population growth in West Bank Jewish settlements.

According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, the settler population in the West Bank has grown at a clip of 5.45 percent a year to about 275,000.

Without the ultra-Orthodox, that expansion would have been only 3.7 percent, according to the Ha’aretz newspaper.

That’s a potentially awkward demographic for the mainline settler movement.

The ultra-Orthodox newcomers subscribe to a theology that is deeply ambivalent about the a modern Jewish state.

While the nationalist religious settlers have become the new backbone of the Israeli army, the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi as they are known, prefer to get exemptions so they can continue religious study.

Two years after the government uprooted the Gaza settlements, the settlers in the West Bank still display the orange ribbons that symbolized their failed struggle to block the evacuation.

But in the ultra-Orthodox communities, the uniforms remain the same: black suits for men, wigs for women and no ribbons.

“The Haredi settlements aren’t on the same page,” said Ira Sharkansky, a professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University.

“These are exactly the sort of Jews that the [original] settlers don’t want to be like. This is the image of the Diaspora jew. This is the image against which the Zionists built themselves.”

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