Our Promised Land
Faith and Militant Zionism in Israeli Settlements
By (author) Charles Selengut Author of Sacred Fury and
Publication date:
06 August 2015Length of book:
202 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersDimensions:
236x161mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9781442216853
Our Promised Land takes readers inside radical Israeli settlements to explore how they were formed, what the people in them believe, and their role in the Middle East today. Charles Selengut analyzes the emergence of the radical Israeli Messianic Zionist movement, which advocates Jewish settlement and sovereignty over the whole of biblical Israel as a religious obligation and as the means of world transformation. The movement has established scores of controversial settlements throughout the contested West Bank, bringing more than 300,000 Jews to the area. Messianic Zionism is a fundamentalist movement but wields considerable political power.
Our Promised Land, which draws on years of research and interviews in these settlements, offers an intimate and nuanced look at Messianic Zionism, life in the settlements, connections with the worldwide Christian community, and the impact on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Selengut offers an in-depth exploration of a topic that is often mentioned in the headlines but little understood.
Our Promised Land, which draws on years of research and interviews in these settlements, offers an intimate and nuanced look at Messianic Zionism, life in the settlements, connections with the worldwide Christian community, and the impact on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Selengut offers an in-depth exploration of a topic that is often mentioned in the headlines but little understood.
Yesha—an acronym made up of the Hebrew initials of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, the lands Israel wrested from Syria, Jordan, and Egypt in the 1967 Six-Day War—is also the name of the movement to reestablish Jewish control of all of biblical Israel by resettlement. Stereotyped as violent, intransigent fundamentalists, the people of Yesha, as sociologist Selengut, who has studied them for many years, demonstrates, show a broad range of ideas about how their bedrock conviction that Jews are duty-bound to occupy the land God gave them should be realized. Some are downright pacifist, while at the other extreme are settlers who practice eye-for-an-eye retaliation for attacks. In five long, sober chapters, Selengut reviews the rise of the settlements after the Six-Day War, the evolution of some Zionists into messianic nationalists, the culture and faith of settler communities, authoritative settlement figures, and the future of Yesha in the ongoing Middle East conflict. Selengut’s dense, compact report is an invaluable resource for everyone studying modern Israel.