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Settlement Summer Camp

In the West Bank, not the Berkshires

by
Liel Leibovitz
July 28, 2009

Forget bug juice, ball games, and dips in the lake: the new trend in summer camps, in Israel at least, is settlement-building. “Youth for the Land of Israel,” a new non-profit affiliated with the Yesha Council, the leadership organ of the West Bank settlers’ movement, is offering Israeli youth a summery stint at camp on the hills of Judea and Samaria. There, the would-be settlers build new—and questionably legal—outposts, help expand existing ones, and attend lectures by some of the settler movement’s luminaries, like right-wing extremist Daniella Weiss. Shlomit Amitai, a 16-year-old counselor, said she told her campers that they should treat the land of Israel like their own mother. “Just like you would dress your mother’s wounds,” she said, “empty land is a wound we need to dress by settlement.”

Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One. He is the editor of Zionism: The Tablet Guide.