Erez Maggor, an Israeli social scientist who specializes in the history and the political economics of the West Bank settlement, says that the impetus for the West Bank settlement policies of the Likud government in the late 1970s and 1980s is largely misunderstood.

What chiefly pushed the Israeli government to build across the Green Line, he says, was not an ideological Greater Israel zeal but rather a demand by the Likud’s low-income electoral base for affordable housing.

Maggor is a doctoral candidate at New York University’s Department of Sociology.

His article on this subject was recently published in Israel’s Hazman Hazeh magazine (Hebrew) 

Maggor co-edited the book Normalizing Occupation, The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements (2017)

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