Between Two Messiahs: An Ethnography of Outpost Settlers in the West Bank

Since the signing of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, the West Bank settlement project has been advanced through state-fabricated anarchism by establishing illegal Jewish outposts deeper into the hinterland. These small outposts are today the central tool in appropriating land in the West Bank, and the people who reside in them are considered the most nationalist settlers of them all. And yet, many of the outpost people position themselves as anti-statist subjects and are often opposed to the professed ideology of settlement society. Some go as far as defining themselves as post-Zionist. Based on twenty months of fieldwork in such an outpost, this research investigates how a national-religious project for the sake of expanding the state is led, paradoxically, by those who try to run away from it.