219 REVIEW ARTICLE Representing Settlers Joyce Dalsheim University of North Carolina at Charlotte Assaf Harel Rutgers University In their own eyes, the(y)…are reasonable people. –Emmanuel Sivan S ince the late 1980s scholars have often represented religious settlers in Israeli occupied territories as irrational, violent, dangerous to Is- raeli democracy, and threatening to the future of peace in the region. Most striking, though, is a rupture that runs through much of this literature: on the one hand, the beliefs of religious settlers have been depicted as a break from Judaism, and on the other hand, their political project portrayed as a perversion of Zionism. These representations of settlers not only portray religious settlers as categorically different from “ordinary” or “mainstream” Israelis, they also project a sense of moral legitimacy for those writing against the settlers. They reaffirm a moral high ground for Israelis by inscribing a deep division between Israel inside its internationally recognized borders and its settlements in the post-1967 occupied territories. Scholarly representations echo those found in popular media. They help construct hegemonic categories of difference, marginalizing religiously motivated settlers while creating a sense of moral legitimacy for broader state projects through denouncing religiously motivated settlers and the settlement project as a whole. This review considers the importance of representation in the case of religiously motivated settlers. While it does not purport to be an encompassing review of all the literature, it will take a historical perspective, including some of the most influential writings in the field. We begin with some of the older ground breaking work by Ian Lustick and Emmanuel Sivan, which established a framework for representing