It is unlikely that Dresdner and her husband knew before their visit the contentious history of the settlement where they were to spend the summer. Kedumim was one of the first two communities in the West Bank outside of the Gush Etzion and its establishment emerged as in important part of the history and mythology of the native Israeli settler movement. In recent decades, Kedumim has been considered one of the more radical settlements
in the West Bank and is home to firebrand Israeli settler activist (and former mayor) Daniella Weiss and the Maale Levana girl’s academy.75 When the Dresners arrived in the summer of 1983, however, the settlement was still in its infancy. She described Kedumim as a “town” with a small population of 200 families, 1.5 hours from Tel-Aviv. She acknowledged that it was in the West Bank and that the family would live in a “Yishuv”, which is
sympathetic to the terminology and discourse used by settlers themselves.76 “That’s all that we asked for,” she wrote of the couple’s expectations for the summer.77