Cultural, Religious and Ideological Criticism

Tom Segev quotes from the recent Nekuda issue:-

"The settlement movement in Judea and Samaria has created within itself elements that are causing a cheapening of the values of settlement. When young people set out every Monday and Thursday to some point, put a mobile home, a barrel, an iron pole, a Subaru and a stroller on it and call it a settlement, and even invent a name for it, this sends a message of scorn and lack of seriousness," writes journalist Amnon Lord, editor of the national-religious daily Makor Rishon.

Dror Idar, a cultural researcher, and a columnist for the freebie newspaper Yisrael Hayom, warns of a "creative desolation" that is isolating the settlers from the general public discourse and is causing their movement not to win much cultural influence: "Compare the cultural activity of the settlement movement during the past 40 years with the institutions established by the Labor movement even when they were still very few, in the years prior to World War I - never mind everything that has been established since then - and you will get an idea of the depth of the failure," writes Ider.

..."And then the sector happened,"writes another Makor Rishon journalist, Tsur Ehrlich, of Ma'aleh Mikhmash. A member of the second generation of settlers, he was still raised on songwriter Naomi Shemer's secular Zionism. Members of the third generation, however, are being exposed to "a primitive and clumsy replacement made in Bnei Brak," he writes. The ideology of the Land of Israel has become "sectorialized" and, according to Ehrlich, the settlers' sectoralization marks them out as lepers outside the camp: "The religious coloration of the demonstrations and especially the Hasidic pop music that has taken them over have driven away from them the last of the secular participants." Hence the fear that the settlement movement will not survive: "If the Land of Israel has to rely on the fervor of the religious youngsters' devoutness - the Land of Israel is in danger."