STUDENTWASHING: A NEW TERRITORIAL STRATEGY IN ISRAEL/PALESTINE

ABSTRACT

The suffix “washing” refers to the practice of portraying controversial actions in a positive light by leveraging progressive principles, often used by economic corporations, organizations, political parties, or governments. This paper introduces and develops the term “studentwashing” to define the deliberate effort to present Israeli territorial development as an attractive, youthful, and unique experience. This portrayal aims to engage larger segments of society in the national geopolitical project while normalizing its settler-colonial aspects as a means to ensure its continuation. While the constant development of new territorial settlements is dependent either on the right-wing religious sector or on the “quality-of-life” settlers, studentwashing is reserved for areas that are not ideological enough for the first nor sufficiently attractive to the latter. Analyzing “student villages” in the Negev, this paper depicts a new territorial strategy meant to enhance the state’s spatial control over the predominantly Arab periphery inside official Israeli borders. Accordingly, this paper offers a new perspective on Israel’s territorial strategies and enhances the general study of geopolitical and geo-economic spatial development.

Keywords:

• Ayalim, Israel/Palestine
• neo-Zionism
• territorial strategies
• studentwashing
• settlement

A promotion video for a new student community in Israel shows a group of young students, wearing fashionable sunglasses, patterned flannel shirts, and hand-cut jeans, with plastic beer cups in their hands, dancing around a hip indie band. The group, the epitome of a young, vibrant, alternative community, includes a few young couples living in recreational vehicles (RVs). The RVs, the music, and the desert landscape seem to echo the scenery of the famous annual Burning Man festival in Nevada. The “most comfortable conditions,” promises by the spokesperson from Ayalim, the student association in charge of the project of this “student village” (kfar studentim), followed by statements made by the new members, mentioning that the project, which include “living together with young people” in “subsidized RV’s,” is “something extraordinary, fun, and cool,” and “the next hot thing.” A hipster-looking couple then concludes that by this act they “determine that we will settle, and from there it is clear that we will remain in the Negev” (Ayalim 2018d). The couple’s statement, echoing the spokesperson’s promise of “the best life, with plenty of meaning for the future of the State of Israel,” reveals the real objectives of this project, which is to enhance Israeli “territorial control” of the country’s “internal frontiers”—that is, areas with insufficient Jewish presence like the southern Negev (Yiftachel 1996, 493).

In this paper, we use the term “studentwashing” to describe the traits of certain contemporary settlement practices in Israel/Palestine through the case of Ayalim’s student villages. This paper shows how Ayalim’s settlement practices connect with key traits of traditional Zionist political culture, while at the same time adapting it to the current cultural climate. Ayalim’s student villages maintain the Zionist ethos of settling the wilderness and the idea of “a land without a people” that has animated socialist pioneers in the pre-and early-statehood years and the national religious settlers that moved to the occupied Palestinian territories after 1967; they do so, however, by “washing off” the more controversial elements of Israel’s settlement practices—namely, by catering to a student audience and producing a new settlement discourse founded on the appeal of modern, up-to-date, vibrant, and engaging communities.

The paper begins with locating the case of Israel/Palestine against the background of the literature on territorial strategies and argues that the naturalization of any given territorial configuration represents the litmus test for the success of the strategies that have produced it. The paper then focuses on the case study of Ayalim. Through analyzing the organization’s own reports, marketing strategies, promotion campaigns, and urban planning schemes (as well as policy documents, ministerial correspondences, and governmental reports), the paper shows how Ayalim’s practices reinvent the Zionist settlement enterprise, attracting new members, mobilizing wide public and ministerial support, and eventually rebranding peripheral areas—all in order to enhance the state’s control over space. Accordingly, the paper illustrates the way in which students and academic institutions can be mobilized to ensure the continuation of longstanding geopolitical agendas, while at the same time adapting them to a new sociocultural reality marked by diminished ideological intensity and thriving privatization and individualism.

Territory, Territorial Strategies, and Normalization

Ayalim’s settlement practices should be looked at in the broader historical trajectory of Israel’s territorial strategies. The idea of “territory”—in very basic and conventional terms—is “a unit of contiguous space that is used, organized and managed by a social group, individual person or institution to restrict and control access to people and places” (Gregory 2009, 746). Building on the work of Henri Lefebvre on the production of space, different scholars have investigated the dynamic of the “production of territory” through “territorial strategies” (Brenner and Elden 2009), deployed by different actors to “regulate, produce and reproduce configurations of social space” (Brenner 1997, 280), and consolidate the legitimacy of existing power relations (Purcell 2014).

Without the constant deployment, and periodical updating, of these strategies, any existing territorial configuration would tend to “fall to the level of folklore and sooner or later disappear altogether” (Lefebvre 1991, 53). In his comparative analysis of the expansion and contraction of state borders, Ian Lustick further suggests that, on the contrary, “[a] particular territory … is fully ‘institutionalized’ only when its status as an integral part of the state becomes part of the natural order of things for the overwhelming majority of the population” (Lustick 1993, 44), and the robustness of territorial configuration can be measured by the depths of its roots in the collective psyche. The litmus test for successful territorial strategies would be their ability to produce what we could call hegemonic territorial configurations—i.e., to portray as natural and inevitable what is inherently artificial and open to contestation. While the state remains a central player in the game of territory, a variety of actors’ practices concur with the production of any given territorial configuration (Brenner and Elden 2009; Ballvé 2012; Allegra and Maggor 2022). As Teo Ballvé argues, “[s]tate territory is produced … by both the strategic projects of political society (government) and their dialectical articulations with various elements operating in civil society, whether NGOs, communities, corporations, oppositional struggles, etc” (2012, 606).

The history of Israel/Palestine since the late-nineteenth century offers a particularly broad and varied catalog of territorial arrangements and dynamics, spanning from the last decades of Ottoman Rule to the present debate on Jewish colonization and Palestinian statehood. Throughout this period, some of the territorial arrangements promoted by the different Zionist organizations and, later on, the state of Israel, can be understood in the light of Patrick Wolfe’s definition of “settler-colonialism,” that is, a land-centered political project whose primary aim is to reshape the existing territorial landscape to the advantage of one group over another (2006). Nevertheless, throughout the past century and a half, Zionist and Israeli settlement practices and strategies have significantly changed, corresponding with cultural, political, economic, and societal trends.

Our discussion of the transformations of Israel’s settlement practices is informed by the idea of “normalization”—that is, a process of banalization and naturalization of Jewish presence. In the last decade, this perspective has been developed by scholars working on Israel’s settlement policy in the West Bank (Weiss 2011; Handel and others 2015; Allegra and others 2017; Newman 2017; Braverman 2020; Schwake 2020). While the main emphasis is on the occupied Palestinian territories, similar settler-colonial dynamics have been also observed inside the so-called Israel proper (pre-1967 borders); on the country’s internal frontiers such as the Negev (Newman 1984; Falah 1991; Yiftachel 2003; Schwake 2020c), which is the object of this paper.

Normalization can be understood as a factor in Israel’s territorial strategies in three ways. First, it is the perspective that sees settlements as “normal” (as opposed to “exceptional” or “peripheral” in relation to Israel). Settlement practices are rooted in Israel’s broader societal dynamics, and have always involved large sectors of Israeli society; in that sense, settlements “have always been normal,” to the extent that their development reflects not only the trajectory of Zionism’s political history or the workings of committed activists, but also the impact of mundane factors—such as prevailing juridical and administrative practices; demographic and lifestyle trends; housing preferences; conceptual shifts in the paradigms of economic policy and territorial development (Segal and Weizman 2003; Schwake 2022b).

Second, normalization can be understood in temporal and cumulative terms. In this sense, settlements “become more normal” as time passes, and territorial policies gradually reshape the inherited physical, demographic, and administrative landscape through the logic of facts on the ground. For example, in the decade that followed the conquest of the West Bank, key political and administrative decisions and large investments created significant housing opportunities and a network of infrastructures, which thoroughly reshaped the economic and infrastructural landscape of Israel/Palestine (Benvenisti 1987; Allegra and Maggor 2022), allowing for the steady growth of the settlements’ demographic weight vis-à-vis the total Israeli population since the mid-1970s (Schwake 2022a).

Third, normalization can describe how deliberate strategies may be deployed to obscure the political natures of colonization and/or minimize controversies over settlements. Settlements should thus “look normal” because, to some extent, their success depends on it—for example on the possibility to muster large, nonpartisan coalitions in support of their establishment and expansion, or on their appeal on the local housing market. These strategies of obfuscation can sometimes be deployed by the state in a top-down fashion and be explicitly political in nature (Abu-Lughod 1982), yet they do not necessarily require such powerful and explicit statements on the part of the center of sovereign power. In Israel, settlement practices of various natures have been deployed not only by the central state, but also by lower grades of the public administration, by NGOs and third sector parties, as well as by private actors, and through a variety of channels, including political activism and lobbying, environmental regulations, marketing and branding strategies, education policies, and through planning and architectural design (Handel and others 2015; Kratsman and Ginsburg 2017; Schwake 2022a).

Our investigation of Ayalim’s student villages mainly falls into this latter perspective, one focusing on how territorial strategies can deliberately obscure settler-colonial practices, making them palatable and uncontroversial for the largest possible audience. Our study shows how Ayalim has been able to create a recognizable model of settlement practice, one that blends traditional and modern elements into an attractive package designed to mobilize support from large sectors of the Israeli Jewish establishment and society at large. By investigating Ayalim’s activities, we wish to understand how deliberate strategies of normalization are deployed in the context of settlement within Israel’s official borders. We have dubbed the end result of these practices studentwashing in order to underline how Ayalim’s promotion of new student communities is designed to produce settlements that “look normal” (and even “cool”), but also reaffirm Israel’s control and territorial agenda over space.

Studentwashing

The fact that Ayalim’s model keeps together seemingly contradictory objectives (i.e. depoliticizing what remains a highly political endeavor through rebranding settlement activity as a hip and trendy enterprise, yet without denying its national value) is the starting point for our reflection on the idea of studentwashing. The current use of the suffix “—washing” derives from the semantics of the English noun “whitewash,” which indicates white paint, and from the metaphorical meaning of the verb whitewashing, which means, quite literally, “to gloss over or cover up” (Merriam-Webster) but, more broadly, also defines “an attempt to stop people finding out the true facts about a situation” (Cambridge). In the last two decades, the suffix has originated expressions such as “greenwashing,” “pinkwashing,” “sportswashing,” and so forth, which have been applied across a variety of geographic contexts and phenomena.

Academically, the idea of greenwashing is perhaps the most established as a topic (Laufer 2003; Delmas and Burbano 2011). Greenwashing is understood here as the corporate practice of “combining a poor environmental performance with positive communication about environmental performance” (Delmas and Burbano 2011, 84). Similarly, pinkwashing has also been used in relation to Israel/Palestine (Ritchie 2015)—as “a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life” (Schulman 2011). The same goes for the accusation of sportswashing that has been leveled in recent years against the huge investments by countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates in international sporting events—as well as in major European football clubs such as Manchester City, Paris St. Germain, and, lately, Newcastle.

In these three cases, -washing is a synonym of covering up or glossing over, in the form of either lying about performance or minimizing controversies by shifting attention elsewhere. The practice of studentwashing, however, adds yet another, more creative dimension to the simple act of covering up: territorial strategies themselves are washed by the development of student villages—not so much through moving the attention away from it, but rather by offering a compelling, alternative account of its genealogy, and of how this is reflected in a specific hierarchy in collective rights to the land.

Closer to our use of studentwashing is the notion of “winewashing” (Handel and others 2015) and, more broadly, the approach of several studies that have investigated the nexus between branding strategies in the field of tourism and leisure, on the one side, and the production of territory on the other (Mcgonigle 2019). Indeed, Handel and others have observed the concept of terroir, a crucial reference for winemaking, alluding to a specific combination of soil, weather, and traditional production techniques, which “permits one to speak about territory in mystical and naturalistic terms in a manner considered unacceptable, at least since World War II and the terms of lebensraum and grossraum […]. The concept of terroir not only strengthens this aspect of land belonging to its cultivators but also permits identifying the ‘true owners’ through signs of a mystical connection” (Ritchie 2015, 1364), demonstrated by the quality of the wine they produce.

In the same fashion, studentwashing as a practice does not aim at moving away the attention from Israel’s territorial strategies, but rather at rebranding and validating them, while at the same time adapting to new sociocultural realities—thus “making Zionism cool again” for a Jewish Israeli audience much larger than the politicized minority.

Making Zionism Cool Again

It is possible to trace several attempts to legitimize Israel’s policies by appealing to students and younger crowds. Historically, it is worth mentioning the inflow of international volunteers in Israeli kibbutzim, which began in the 1960s and turned into a globally popular phenomenon during the 1970s–80s, attracting thousands of young Western Europeans and Americans annually to communal rural settlements in Israel (Bowes 1980). The decline of the kibbutzim movement on the one hand, and the growing international criticism of Israel caused a slight decrease in kibbutz volunteers during the 1990s. Concurrently, the State of Israel endorsed several programs to improve its connection with Jewish youth worldwide, such as Taglit, Massa, and Birth-right, which include organized guided trips in Israel, student exchanges, and other forms of volunteer work. Besides the intentions of convincing participants to eventually immigrate to Israel, these programs see their alumni as potential future promoters of Israel in their home countries (Israel Experience 2021), joining its international public diplomacy campaign.

Ayalim is part of a more recent, larger effort intended to update the Zionist ethos and to adapt its pioneering discourse to the twenty-first century. Historically, it was the halutz, the pioneer, who formed the main executor of Zionist ideology, through agriculture and the establishment of new rural settlements, before and after the foundation of the State of Israel. As Adriana Kemp shows (1999, 78), despite the continuous decline in the relevance of rural settlement since the late 1960s, the pioneer ethos continued to form an integral part of the state’s territorial agenda, with suburban settlers embracing the pioneer discourse and even some of its spatial and communal frameworks. While this was an attempt to highlight the national importance of seemingly individualistic endeavors, the past two decades witnessed the attempts to bind contemporary concerns to nationalistic deeds, granting them a trendy and popular façade while sugarcoating their settler-colonial aspects.

Since the early 2000s, a series of new young Zionist organizations were established, achieving significant influence on mainstream discourse (Jamal 2018). Perhaps the most known organization is Im-Tirtzu (“if you will it”), which refers to the famous quote of Zionist thinker Theodor Herzl, “If you will it, it is no dream.” Established in 2006, Im-Tirzu is a student-based Zionist academic organization, active in Israeli universities and colleges, with the objective of modernizing “Zionist discourse, Zionist thinking and Zionist ideology [and] to ensure the future of the Jewish nation and the State of Israel” (Perugini and Gordon 2015, 59). In the same year that Im-Tirzu was founded, Regavim was also born, promoting a prosettler policy by limiting the construction of Palestinian houses or infrastructure, through environmentalist pretenses of protecting “Israel’s national lands and resources,” as explained in its English webpage, or preserving “the lands of the Jewish people and the natural and scenic treasures of the Land of Israel” and preventing “foreign elements from taking over these resources,” as stated in the Hebrew version (Regavim NGO 2020). HaShomer HaChadash (The New Watchman) is yet another example of the new wave of Zionist organizations. Founded in 2007, and named after the historic HaShomer organization that guarded Jewish settlements in prestatehood Palestine, HaShomer HaChadash puts an emphasis on strengthening Israel’s control over its lands by fighting agricultural crime, which one might get the impression that it is directed only toward Jewish farmers, and by developing foresting educational projects intended to highlight the “love of the land as a relevant and thriving value” (HaShomer HaChadash 2021).

It is in this neo-Zionist climate that Ayalim was born. Indeed, having been established in 2002, before all aforementioned organizations, it is possible to see Ayalim as the forerunner. As an association that promotes the development of new student communities, Ayalim merges Zionism and territoriality with an up-to-date discourse of self-achievement, experience, and entrepreneurialism, with the intention “to stimulate an Israeli mode of settlement, which is driven by youngsters, while creating an ideological climate and reviving the Zionist idea—in a model suitable for the 21st century” (Ayalim 2018b, 2). Therefore, Ayalim constitutes the practical embodiment and the spatial manifestation of studentwashing.

The Ayalim Model

Ayalim’s main settlement tool is its “student village” model, which, according to the association, came to the mind of its founders when they chose to move to the Negev after their military service, buying a trailer from their discharge grant and placing it in moshav Ashalim (Ayalim 2017b, 4). Accordingly, Ayalim draws a continuous line from the decision of Ben Gurion (first Israeli Prime Minister) to move to the Negev in 1953, to Ayalim’s first trailer in Ashalim in 2002 (Ayalim 2021). This became the base for the first, largest, and most successful student village, named Adiel, which since then has turned into a well-planned complex, with permanent units and adequate facilities, housing around 200 students, with smaller satellite communities, and smaller organizations in impoverished localities and ethnically mixed cities, with plans for at least a dozen more (Ayalim 2005b).

The student focus functions as a territorial technique intended to strengthen the “settlement enterprise” (Ayalim 2018b, 2), in a manner that appeals to the greater (Jewish) Israeli consensus. Consistently, the profile of its founders as ideological, military veterans, and pioneering youngsters who are an integral part of mainstream Zionism, is repeatedly mentioned by the association, as well as the different ministries and public institutions that supported it (Hermesh 2003; ILA Council 2004; Ayalim 2005c; Cohen 2005; Office of Deputy Prime Minister 2007).

Being part of the consensus is also mentioned frequently in internal reports (Shilat 2004; Ayalim 2005c; Segev 2005), explaining the support of both secular left and right-wing religious Zionist officials, and even the highly positive coverage in Haaretz, Israel’s main leftist, antisettlements newspaper (Levi-Barzilai 2004; Sheleg 2008; Solomon 2008; Rozenblum 2013). Appropriately, Ayalim touches on patriotic sentiments yet avoids any nationalistic affiliations, and even when it operates in ethnically mixed cities, such as Ramle, Acco, and Nazareth-Illit, it hardly receives the criticism that religious settlement groups (gari’nim toranim) carrying out similar initiatives do (Desille and Sa’di-Ibraheem 2021, 35).

Ayalim and its student members constitute the ideal protagonists in ensuring that Israel’s internal frontiers are settled by a strong sociocultural group of “good boys” (Ayalim 2005, 1), washing them off their peripheral connotations and stigmas. No wonder that the governmental support Ayalim received went beyond mere funding (CEO of Prime Minister’s Office 2009; Ayalim 2005a; 2008; 2007b) and benefited instead from a well-coordinated interministerial effort intended to bypass bureaucracy and accelerate construction (Ministerial Committee concerning the development of the Negev and Galilee 2005). Eventually, Ayalim received the full support of the government for “establishing and expanding student villages in the Negev” (Government of Israel 2013), as well as that of the National Union of Israeli Students, which elected Ayalim as its official settlement organization (Segev 2005d). Accordingly, when the Israel Land Administration—the main institution in charge of managing public lands in Israel as well as promoting territorial settlements—stated that public lands in Ashalim, intended for public uses, could not be handed to Ayalim without a public tender a proper replanning process (Efrati 2003; Sela 2005), the regional council and a variety of ministries endeavored to remove the requirement for a tender, lease the lands for a symbolic fee, and change the legal definition of “public use” in order to include “student housing” (ILA Council 2004; Yardeni 2004). While bending laws and easing regulations have for long formed a tool to promote the development of new territorial settlement, in the case of Ayalim it is clear that the profile of the group (ideological young people with the “right” societal capital) constituted an additional incentive to do so (Koren 2003), making sure that the project’s image and its “public relations” campaign are not harmed (Rifman 2005, 1). Ayalim was well aware of this perception and used it to promote its objectives, seeing its members as entitled as they are those who “carry upon their shoulder (the bourdon) of defending the borders” (Ayalim 2005, 2).

The second aspect of studentwashing in Ayalim’s model is the ability of the group to keep together seemingly contradictory objectives, that is, depoliticizing what remains a highly political endeavor through rebranding Zionist settlement as a hip and trendy enterprise, yet without denying its national value. Suitably, the association deploys two distinct discourses, one directed to receive governmental support and funds from Zionist organizations and the other aimed at recruiting new members. On the one side, in the more official discourse, Ayalim highlights its connection to the “pioneering legacy” and commitment to settle the “desolate” Negev and Galilee, which are “yearning for a new and youthful spirit” (Ayalim 2005c, 2). Its focus on settling areas of “strategical importance for the state” (Ayalim 2005, 1), expresses its wishes to create a new “model of settlement” while “adapting Zionism to the twenty-first century” (Ayalim 2007c, 2). Mentioning that its main task is to “channel current tendencies among young Israelis for individualistic achievements for the sake of social and Zionist work” (Ayalim 2005a, 2), Ayalim depicts its student villages as consistent with Israel’s traditional territorial strategies. Fittingly, it sees its communities as ideological hubs intended to connect the current generation to demographic challenges Israel is facing, with the intention also of hosting workshops for international students, who would later act as “ambassadors of Israel,” aiding in the famous hasbara efforts, and help changing public opinion in campuses abroad (Ayalim 2005a, 11).

On the other side, the depoliticization of Ayalim’s endeavors is evident in its recruitment campaigns, which do not hide their territorial objectives, yet bleach and rebrand them by applying a contemporary jargon of self-fulfillment, cause, and entrepreneurship. The idea of “renewing the concept of Zionism—in a model suitable for the 21st century” (Ayalim 2007b, 1), is repeatedly stated, and Ayalim thus adjusts its discourse to its prospective clientele, with statements such as “we are not a simple settlement movement; we are a new Tinder” (Ayalim 2020b, 17). Ayalim is aware that students are less interested in its national mission: indeed, a study commissioned by the organization shows that only 13 percent of members mention “settlement” as the reason for joining the association, with the vast majority citing “community lifestyle” and the “student-atmosphere” as the main incentive (Ayalim 2020a, 4). The first focus was therefore to create an image of an exclusive group, “a quality community” (Ayalim 2021). To do so, the association began with a “silent campaign” aimed at attracting the “right” material, and even then, this was done with the intention of attracting a large pool of candidates from which it would choose in a 1:10 ratio (Ayalim 2005a, 19). The selective profile continued to guide Ayalim’s outreach—Ayalim itself proudly compared its screening process to that of an elite military unit. The emphasis in this case is on finding socially aware members who would properly blend with the small-scale communities, while also corresponding with Ayalim’s ideological framework. The close-knit and selective profile endorsed by Ayalim forms an updated version of pre- and early-state rural Zionist settlement, and if early recruitment campaigns were quite simple, highlighting the pioneering lifestyle, these would later give way to more fashionable ones, focusing the villages’ alternative lifestyle and attractive social activities. Appropriately, the term “start-up” began emerging in Ayalim’s campaign, a better-branded version of the earlier “young entrepreneurs” focus added in 2003 (Yardeni 2003). This corresponds with Ayalim’s promotion plan, which relies on an internal creative strategy that analyses the needs and aspirations of millennials, overtly stressing their desire for a seemingly alternative lifestyle. Ironically, new marketing strategies include proposing to students to be “part of the herd” of Ayalim (which literally means “dears”), thus avoiding being part of the greater common, banal, and ordinary heard (Ayalim 2020a, 22). Nevertheless, the intention is not to create closed-off communities, but rather, as the association’s strategy explicitly mentions, to turn the student villages into the focal point of student life in the area, with bars, festivals, and music concerts (Ayalim 2005b).

The rebranding of territorial settlement merges with Ayalim’s focus on social engagement. “Doing settlement,” in that sense, is part of “doing … culture, education, and Zionism,” as mentioned in the association’s recruitment campaign, corresponding with the shift from “young entrepreneurs” to “social entrepreneurship” (Ayalim 2021). Fittingly, Ayalim’s different communities are involved in voluntary work focused on empowering the nearby population, granting the student villages an additional layer of moral justification. These activities, which are meant to connect the students with the surrounding community, fall into two broad areas. The first includes cultural and educational activities, for example volunteering in tutoring pupils and at-risk youth, as well as sponsoring cultural events in elderly homes (Ayalim 2018b). The second includes small renovation works such as painting or creating community gardens. Here, it is worth mentioning that Ayalim is overtly engaged with all local communities, Jews and Arabs alike, and it recurrently highlights its contribution to the entire population, without any discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, or race (Ayalim 2017b). In this sense, Ayalim highly differs from the common Israeli settler model of segregated Jewish communities, and rather acts to create bonds with the local Arab population that go beyond mere commerce. Still, the need to be “connected to the area and connected to the people” is understood as part of the “national mission” of “settlement” (Ayalim 2018b, 4), which somehow calls into question the alleged inclusive character of the project.

The third aspect of studentwashing is Ayalim’s long-term plans that use the seemingly neutral façade of students as provisional settlement points, similar to the good old conduct of “putting facts on the ground” (Abu-Lughod 1984, 134), eventually leading to permanent settlements. With the association’s main objective being to settle the so-called social and geographical periphery, its villages form the first step to further enhance Jewish presence in the area. While in the aforementioned study only 13 percent of the members of the student villages mentioned settlement as the reason for joining, the association is convinced that life in its villages would trigger a “change of mind,” and push students to choose to “establish their houses in the area” later on (2018d, 4). Accordingly, Ayalim promotes the formation of alumni communities, which it refers to as Ofarim (young dears, hence young Ayalim). As of 2021, these Ofarim follow the traditional Zionist model of a gar’in (seed)—a small settling group that would form the basis for a new settlement. Appropriately, most of the Ofarim were based in the rural sector, with one new settlement, Shezaf, and other smaller initiatives that merged with moshavim or kibbutzim in the area. Nevertheless, with its focus on strengthening the periphery, Ayalim is keen on contributing to enhance the development towns in the south of the country, which are suffering from negative immigration and economic difficulties, by introducing a group of young university graduates.

Therefore, its current challenge is to establish new gar’inim in towns like Yerucham, Dimona, and Sderot. Still, following the quite segregated gari’n model, the new projects are not fully integrated with the town they intend to enhance, but rather form closed-off compounds that ensure the communal and distinctive aspects of these new communities.

Studentwashing, with its potential for attracting new settlers and bypassing bureaucracy, is thus used as a preliminary stage toward the establishment of permanent settlements. The settlement of Shezaf is a case in point. Established in 2011, Shezaf was first promoted by the regional council as a site for a student campus, and not a new settlement, which would have entailed a much longer process. However, as the original intentions of establishing a settlement became obvious, the District Court in Beer Sheva ruled against the new project in 2013, stating that the law could not approve the establishment of a new settlement under the pretense of an educational project.

The court did acknowledge that “the issue of settlement in the Negev is equally important and there is no dispute about that,” yet argued that “there is no connection, even in a well-developed imagination, between an education campus and a gar’in” (“Verdict 12086/12/13—The Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel against the Ministry of Interior and Others” 2013, 18). Nevertheless, despite the court’s emphasis on the “rule of law,” Minister of Interior Gidon Saar retroactively approved the new settlement (Darel 2014), highlighting how the process could indeed be shortened and accelerated through the use of the student façade. This brings us back to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s speech to Ayalim in 2004, in which he urged them to “never wait until all plans are completed, do today whatever could be done today; if you do, you will receive [our] support” (brought in Ayalim 2011).

Ayalim is currently in the process of developing a comprehensive regional plan, changing its mind-set from sporadic settlement activities that mainly rely on existing settlements, to creating a network of new settlement blocs (Figure 1). Initiating new communities along two horizontal lines in the Negev, one in its northern part and one in its center, Ayalim’s plan intends to create a continuous streak of settlements along them, which would later be connected to the existing Jewish settlements between both lines, creating a territorial sequence in the area (Ayalim 2017a, 2018c). This will be the first step in Ayalim’s new approach, which it intends to implement later in Galilee as well (Ayalim 2017a). While Ayalim was able to avoid the zero-sum game that usually characterizes most Zionist territorial practices—that is, promoting Jewish presence at the expense of Arab presence—its strategical plans reveal how it is embedded within the settler-colonial mind-set. Ayalim still refers to the Negev as a vacant area that needs to be “densely populated,” yet its plans accurately depict the location of Bedouin localities in the area (colored in red, in contrast to Jewish localities that colored in blue), on whose expense this new territorial sequence will be developed. This emphasizes the settler-colonial aspects of Ayalim’s plan, continuing the years-old territorial Zionist approach based on the concepts of scarcity, interconnections, separation—settling areas with insufficient Jewish presence, creating a territorial sequence between the new settlement points, and disassembling connections between Arab localities (Benvenisti 1984, 29).

Fig. 1. Ayalim’s strategic plan for the Negev area, showing the existing student communities and the new settlement blocs and sequences it aims to create [Illustrated by the other according to (Ayalim 2017a, 2018c)].

Eager to start its plan by doing “what could be done today” Ayalim has developed an updated version of grassroot Zionism. Similar to the prestatehood “tower and stockade” settlements, which were quickly developed provisional strongholds that later became permanent moshavim and kibbutzim, Ayalim is initiating new camping sites that would later turn into new official settlements. Providing its alumni (preferably couples) with well-equipped RVs, Ayalim intends to create groups of 15 vehicles that would be stationed on the settling spot initially as a camping site, with the intention of later becoming a permanent settlement (Ayalim 2017a). These new “Ofarim on Wheels” (Ayalim 2017c, 2018b, 2018a), as the association branded them, are now Ayalim’s new avant-garde, developing its strategic territorial plan. Once again, however, this twenty-first century avant-garde turns its territorial practices into “something extraordinary, fun, and cool,” granting these new tower and stockade settlements a hip image of alternative RV communities in the desert. While these plans might seem rather ambitious, Ayalim is promoting them quite seriously, approaching real estate investors as partners who will cofund the project, and conducting targeted profile-raising campaigns that would attract future settlers (Ayalim 2017c, 2017d, 2017e, 2018a, 2018d).

Ayalim’s success in appealing to the larger Israeli public (testified by the endorsement received by both left and right-wing politicians and by the national student union) is due to its ability to keep together two distinct agendas, for both of which a strong consensus exists in Israeli Jewish politics and society-one focusing on youth, education, and culture, and one focusing on settlement activities in the Negev. The wide public support that led to positive coverage in Haaretz, praising the association’s founders who “with their own hands are building the first student villages in the Negev” (Levi-Barzilai 2004), was not hindered even when Dahan, Ayalim’s CEO, was convicted of bribery for hiring people and acquiring services from suppliers connected to Yisrael Beiteinu party, who then controlled the Ministry of Interior, in exchange for donations and ministerial support. Sympathizing with Dahan, and seeing him as a scapegoat, the judge found it important to mention that the former had acted to “promote the goals of the association he headed,” which “are of great interest to the state.” Dahan was thus given a suspended sentence, with the verdict stating that there should be no reason why he could not retain his position in Ayalim as “there is no doubt that the continuation of his service will further promote the blessed goals for which the association was established,” contributing “to the development of the Negev and Galilee” (“Verdict 16563/08/17—The State of Israel against N. Alinson and Others” 2018, 9). The verdict thus shows that it is the great interest of the state that had always been the end, and that the students were simply the means, physically settling the national frontiers while also settling in the national mainstream.

Conclusions

As happens with other territorial strategies of this kind (Handel and others 2015), studentwashing retains core elements of Zionist political traditions. As we have seen, to be perceived as fulfilling a recognized national goal is effective in gathering public support, and even in bending legal and administrative practices. The activities of Ayalim are rooted in Israel’s Zionist political culture, as well as in a set of established practices and organizational tools that have been forged by over 100 years of settlement history. Indeed, the case of Ayalim’s operations in the Negev further shows how territorial strategies are rooted in a common political and operational logic on both sides of the Green Line: Ariel Sharon’s speech to Ayalim members (“Do today whatever could be done today … ”) has probably been delivered tens of times to gari’inim of West Bank settlers.

Studentwashing, however, updates the modus operandi of past generations of settlers and rebrands the whole settlement enterprise. Today, selling the model of a socialist kibbutz to any numerically significant audience, inside and outside Israel, would be a desperate effort, while certain areas of the Israel/Palestine can hardly be marketed to “quality of life settlers” looking for housing opportunities in the more central areas of the country. A successful settlement strategy (one able to create hegemonic territorial configurations), needs to appeal to a different segment of the society, mobilize up-to-date organizational paradigms and technologies, and touch the right spots of the collective psyche. Maintaining the Zionist ethos of settling the wilderness, Ayalim’s villages offer an updated settlement practice, tailored to harness the demographic power of the student population while washing off any negative colonial connotations associated with Israel’s territorial strategies. Creating alternative and appealing communities, relying on the up-to-date discourse of experience, meaning, self-fulfillment, and ecology, the Ayalim model represents an ideal match between the contemporary societal and cultural climate and Israel’s longstanding territorial agenda.

The popular and transversal appeal of settler-colonial practices is a key element in yet another trait of the process of normalization—that is, the ability to muster large and diverse coalitions in support of settlement policy. In this respect, the historical trend of depoliticizing colonization has been a crucial political factor in substituting what the late Meron Benvenisti called the “depleted pool of the ideologically motivated” (1984, 59). In the last 40 years, this has been done by systematically tapping into the demographic potential of the (growing) portion of Israeli society that was not ideologically interested in settlement activities per se, but was willing to get on board because of what was offered on the side: housing, welfare, business opportunities, lifestyle, and the like. The almost universal consensus surrounding Ayalim’s activities in Israel represents yet another example of the political appeal of depoliticization maneuvers: since it would be impossible to find someone opposing young students who are interested in promoting the social and geographical periphery of the country, Ayalim’s villages became the antonym of NIMBY—a project accepted by all, making territorial expansion legit, as long as it is carried out by a young and hip group of settlers. Not surprisingly, in 2013 Kedma was established, a new association that imported the Ayalim model to the occupied West Bank by initiating student villages on both sides of the Green Line; demonstrating the effectiveness and adaptability of studentwashing as a new mode of twenty-first-century Zionist territorial strategies.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).