This talk explores how, within the context of a nationalist and settler-colonial project, gender roles can be both reinforced and, at times, transgressed and even deconstructed. It specifically focuses on the religious-Zionist settlers in the West Bank who live in isolated hilltop communities. Over the past two decades, the illegal outposts (ma’achazim halo choki’im) have become the primary tool by which religious-Zionist settlers appropriate land in the West Bank against Palestinian resistance. These outposts are typically small-scale rustic communities constructed on hilltops, deep inside West Bank territory. Almost all of them are relatively isolated and can be reached only by driving on a rugged gravel road. Based on almost two years of anthropological fieldwork during which I lived in one of these outposts in the Judean Desert, in this talk I focus on how many settlers are driven to “ascend” to the hilltop outposts in search of cultivating particular and surprising gender roles. In essence, we will see how for the young settler couples, the hilltops of the outposts serve as spaces where they can become what they imagine as proper “men” and “women” (raising children together in a tight-knit isolated frontier-style manner as each partner adheres to traditional gender roles), while for others it is the opposite: for them, the outposts is where this small-house-on-the-prairie fantasy can be transgressed (as they break from traditional gender roles, and partake in rather radical experiments in terms of gender performance and sexuality). I will show how among a specific segment of outpost society, most settlers, as they mature, shift from the first model to the second. Ultimately, by focusing on the outpost people, my aim is to illuminate the relationship between nationalism, religion, settler-colonialism, and gender.

From late 2022, Israel's 37th government clarified that annexation was not merely a short-lived rhetorical fixation of previous election cycles but a feature of Israeli politics that deserves sustained and comparative analytic attention. The reemergence of demands to return settlers to Gaza and maintain permanent security control after the war appear to reinforce, and reconfigure, the contours of the “one-state reality” that has received newfound scholarly, policy, and activist attention in recent years. Interlocking long, medium, and short-term political processes have created this situation. Yet the meaning of "annexation" as a political program has remained notoriously ambiguous. Its advocates have proposed and debated myriad plans and strategies, but there has not yet been any convergence or crystallization of a government agenda. The ambiguity of "annexation" is exacerbated by the fact that debates about the "application of sovereignty" and extension of "law, jurisdiction, and administration" transpire alongside arguments that a "one-state reality" already exists and that "de-facto annexation" has already occurred. This paper provides a genealogy of the idea of a “one state reality” and excavates past and contemporary Israeli debates about annexation. It uses this history to bring a degree of conceptual order to analysis of the present juncture in the Israeli state's relationship to the territories conquered in 1967 and the Palestinians it has ruled over since. The paper proposes a conceptual schema to differentiate between different mechanisms of territorial incorporation in order to answer the question of how states annex territory. It concludes by demonstrating how analysis of these mechanisms of incorporation can inform more rigorous thinking about the consequences of different types of annexation than has been the norm in public or scholarly discourse. It demonstrates that there are identifiable links between different mechanisms of incorporation and the political processes they are likely to trigger within Palestinian politics and in Israeli-Palestinian relations

This paper engages in a critical comparative analysis of Israeli discourse on the Gaza Strip across two pivotal periods: the lead up to the Gaza Disengagement Plan in the mid-2000s, and the era following the events of October 2023, especially as certain Israeli factions discuss plans to reoccupy the Strip. It asks, to what extent have Israeli narratives around Gaza changed and in which ways. Specifically, it explores the rhetorical continuities and transformations that have shaped Israeli political, societal and geopolitical perceptions of Gaza, scrutinizing the strategic narratives that underpin the justification either for its continued occupation and control or for its existence as a distinct, separate, and ‘hostile’ entity. Internal Israeli debates leading up to disengagement included those of both substance and process, i.e. the extent to which it was unilateral versus coordinated with Palestinian actors and whether it was an attempt to freeze any remaining peace process. The paper will compare narratives to specifically explore a) how the residents of Gaza are discussed – or not discussed – b) how the territory is described and discussed, and c) what verbs are used to describe Israeli actions toward Gaza. Using a critical discursive analytical approach, the paper will draw from a broad spectrum of sources, including Israeli and Arab newspaper coverage, testimonies from activists and dissidents, and the lived experiences of one of the authors during the lead up to disengagement. This will be complemented by contemporary digital discourse, including social media, blogs, and official communications since October 2023. Beyond tracing rhetoric itself, the analysis will engage with the surrounding political, social and geopolitical dynamics in Israel and Palestine, regionally and globally across the two periods. The study's objective is twofold: to provide a forensic account of the shifts in Israeli rhetoric regarding Gaza across disparate eras and to explore the implications of these discursive evolutions for addressing the current situation.

From the dawn of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Zionist movement and later the State of Israel recruited and handled collaborators within the Palestinians. This phenomenon significantly influenced Palestinian society, fostering suspicion followed by efforts to identify individuals suspected of collaborating with Israel ('umalaa' in Arabic). Initially, this was a local endeavor, but it gradually became more institutionalized through organizations (like Al-Majd, promoted by the founders of Hamas) and apparatuses (such as those of the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s). During the First Intifadha (1987-1993), the intensity of this phenomenon escalated. Numerous Palestinians identified as collaborators were attacked, tortured, and in many cases, even killed by other Palestinians. Furthermore, the term "collaborator" ('amil) gradually expanded to include various kind of individuals that had interactions with Israel, such as Palestinians who sold land to Jews or local leaders who engaged with Israeli authorities. Sometimes, accusations of collaboration with Israel were used as pretexts for attacking others as part of local conflict between Palestinians, without any background of collaboration with Israel. The Israeli authorities in the West Bank and Gaza dealt with this phenomenon during the years of the Intifadha, monitoring it from an intelligence perspective to understand its scope and impact, as well as legally – the Israeli military authorities arrested, interrogated, and prosecuted Palestinians involved in attacking suspected collaborators. The central research question of this paper is: How did the Israeli authorities perceived and respond to the phenomenon of harm to suspected collaborators within Palestinian society during the first Intifadha? The research will be based on a variety of primary sources, mainly intelligence reports from the IDF and documents from the legal proceedings in Israeli military courts against Palestinians suspected of harming collaborators. The research aims to shed light on the unique Israeli perspective on a phenomenon that on one hand Israel itself significantly contributed to its existence and on the other expanded far beyond the military-intelligence aspect, becoming a social phenomenon affecting the entire dynamics of Palestinian society. The conclusions of this research will contribute both to understanding aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that have not been sufficiently explored until now, and to a broader understanding of the implications of human intelligence (HUMINT) activities on the dynamics of conflicts.

This project is a theoretical exploration of the social origins of vigilante violence through the lens of the rise of vigilante group Lehava from the the extreme right fringe to a mainstream force in Israeli politics. It asks: What is the social origin of vigilantism? How do vigilantes justify extra-legal violence? What are the long-term effects of vigilantism? The pre-October 7th increase in incitement to violence and the surge of attacks against Palestinian-Arab citizens within Israel occurred in reaction to an interlude of legal liberalization and judicial interventionism that weakened direct discrimination, enabling Palestinian-Arab citizens’ greater socio-economic mobility, public visibility, and self-assertive political aspirations. The paper makes the claim that vigilantism is an expected outcome of moral panics (following Stanley Cohen), a particular form of privileged backlash to expanding rights, which aims to recover and institutionalize state-enforced inequality. The fusion of privilege/right, moral panic, and vigilantism — three distinct analytic frameworks originating from history, anthropology, political science, legal scholarship, and criminology —  provides an expansive sociological theory of political vigilantism for studying the expansion and contraction of rights. To support this theory, the paper maps Lehava’s origins in radical Kahanism and its expansion through the 2010s to its present position within the Israeli government as part of Otzma Yehudit and a backer of Minister of Internal Security Itamar Ben-Gvir onto Stanley Cohen’s four stages of moral panic. Public letters, news items, and movement bulletins provide a new perspective on Lehava’s rhetorical strategies for encouraging violence within the bounds of Israel’s electoral laws, which have a carve-out for “religious speech” that might otherwise be deemed inciting. In addition, using economic data from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, it highlights the connection between Lehava’s increased vigilante violence within the bounds of the Green Line and Palestinian-Arab advancement. Connecting these two phenomena illuminates the manner in which merchants of moral panics may parlay vigilante violence into enduring political power. The paper will be of interest to a diverse audience, including right-wing studies scholars who wish to center vigilante violence as an interesting phenomenon in its own right, and scholars of Israel concerned with the mainstreaming of religious fundamentalism within Israel.