Religious-Zionist Right-Wing Israelis: Their Expectations of Archeological Research in Judea and Samaria and Their Ways of Contending With the Resulting Complicated Findings

Abstract

The encounter between West Bank settlers and the archeologists who came to survey and excavate in their midst at the beginning of the 1980s was a formative moment that led to the settlers’ embrace of the field of archeology. The findings of the surveys and excavations that were conducted in the region, however, raised new insights regarding the early years of the Jewish People and the historical reliability of some of the biblical texts, forcing the settlers to face a complicated reality. Except for their selective adoption of researchers and of conclusions they viewed as supporting the biblical narrative, the settlers accused researchers who presented new conclusions of nontopical deviation and presented an alternative paradigm of their own that does not stand up to criticism. In contrast, researchers from the second generation of West Bank settlers have employed a more professional approach to archeology and do not see themselves as using it to prove identity or ownership. It appears that, in addition to academic influences and their sense of “indigenousness,” this reality is the product of a fundamental crisis that has befallen the religious-ideological public, the thrust of which has been a deconstruction of the harmony of the messianic vision, one expression of which has been the changing intergenerational approach to the role of archeology.