Israeli settlements currently exist in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), claimed by the State of Palestine
Palestine
Palestine is a geographic region in Western Asia usually considered to include Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and in some definitions, parts of western Jordan.
Golan Heights
The Golan Heights, or simply the Golan, is a region in the Levant, spanning about 1,800 square kilometres. The region defined as the Golan Heights differs between disciplines: as a geological and biogeographical region, the Golan Heights is a basaltic plateau bordered by the Yar…
Full Answer
Where are the settlements in Israel located?
Israeli settlements are civilian communities inhabited by Israeli citizens, almost exclusively of Jewish ethnicity, built on lands occupied by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. Israeli settlements currently exist in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and in the Syrian territory of the Golan Heights, ...
How many Israelis live in the West Bank settlements?
About 500,000 Israelis live in the settlements, of which there are about 130 scattered around the West Bank. Roughly 75 percent of settlers live on or near the West Bank border with Israel. Some of the settlements are vast communities that house tens of thousands...
What is the meaning of scattered settlement?
in a scattered settlement dwellings are spaced over an extensive area. found in hilly tracks, thick forests and regions of extreme climate. What does 60 percent chance of scattered thunderstorms mean?
Why are settlements bad for Israel?
Critics of settlements also accuse settlers of frequent violence toward Palestinians and their property. They say settlements are stolen land — physical entrenchments of Israel’s illegal and unjust control over what they see as rightful Palestinian territory. Why do Israelis choose to live in settlements?
What are Jewish settlements called?
Israeli settlements, or Israeli colonies, are civilian communities inhabited by Israeli citizens, overwhelmingly of Jewish ethnicity, built on lands occupied by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.
Where are the Jewish settlements?
Israeli settlement, any of the communities of Israeli Jews built after 1967 in the territories occupied by Israel after the Six-Day War—the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. Most, but not all, were authorized and supported by the Israeli government.
How many Jewish settlements are there?
Today they total around 400,000 and live in about 130 separate settlements (this doesn't include East Jerusalem, which we'll address in a moment). They have grown under every Israeli government over the past half-century despite consistent international opposition.
Why are Jewish settlements so important in the West Bank?
Settlements are communities of Jews that have been moving to the West Bank since it came under Israeli occupation in 1967. Some of the settlers move there for religious reasons, some because they want to claim the West Bank territory as Israeli land, and some because the housing there tends to be cheap and subsidized.
What land has Israel taken from Palestine?
More than 50 years ago, the state of Israel shocked the world when it seized the remaining Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, as well as the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, in a matter of six days.
Why is Israel entitled to the land?
Jewish religious belief defines the land as where Jewish religious law prevailed and excludes territory where it was not applied. It holds that the area is a God-given inheritance of the Jewish people based on the Torah, particularly the books of Genesis and Exodus, as well as on the later Prophets.
Who owns the Gaza Strip?
Israel'sThe West Bank and the Gaza Strip are territories that have been under Israel's occupation since 1967. A look at the issues surrounding the two regions.
Is Jerusalem in Israel or Palestine?
Israel claims the whole of Jerusalem as its capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. The US is one of only a handful of countries to recognise the city as Israel's capital.
Why did Israel occupy Palestine?
Israel says the occupation is necessary for security given its tiny size: to protect Israelis from Palestinian attacks and to provide a buffer from foreign invasions.
Does Israel Own West Bank?
Presently, most of the West Bank is administered by Israel though 42% of it is under varying degrees of autonomous rule by the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority. The Gaza Strip is currently under the control of Hamas.
Who were the first settlers in Israel?
3,000 to 2,500 B.C. — The city on the hills separating the fertile Mediterranean coastline of present-day Israel from the arid deserts of Arabia was first settled by pagan tribes in what was later known as the land of Canaan. The Bible says the last Canaanites to rule the city were the Jebusites.
What was Israel before 1948?
The region was ruled under the British Mandate for Palestine until 1948, when the Jewish State of Israel was proclaimed in part of the ancient land of Israel. This was made possible by the Zionist movement and its promotion of mass Jewish immigration.
Introduction
The Land of Israel/Palestine again became an actor in world affairs and a focus of wide interest with Zionism’s successful effort to ensure for Jews a place among the nations of the world with a Jewish state. Ottoman Palestine was a woefully underdeveloped country with but 250,000 inhabitants in 1800 and only 500,000 in 1900.
Rural Pioneering
Zionist agriculture was dominated by two models – the moshav and the kibbutz.
Changing Preferences in Rural Settlement
The earliest Zionist villages, or moshavoth, from the 1880s to World War I, proved economically unsustainable. Only external subsides, primarily from France’s Baron Rothschild, enabled them to be maintained. A consequence of financial dependence was that they could not expand fast enough to absorb the pioneers who wanted or needed to immigrate.
Urban Settlements
Another significant development one can see in the table above is a decline in the number of new agricultural settlements. Few are established after the first decade of Israeli independence. There are many reasons for this.
Post 1967 Settlements
Between the War of Independence and the 1967 June War, settlements continued to be planned along the lines established earlier.
The Legitimacy of Zionist Settlement in International Discourse
World opinion concerning Jewish settlement has undergone a significant shift.
Housing costs and state subventions
Settlement has an economic dimension, much of it driven by the significantly lower costs of housing for Israeli citizens living in Israeli settlements compared to the cost of housing and living in Israel proper.
Number of settlements and inhabitants
On 30 June 2014, according to the Yesha Council, 382,031 Israeli citizens lived in the 121 officially recognised Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Character: rural and urban
Settlements range in character from farming communities and frontier villages to urban suburbs and neighborhoods. The four largest settlements, Modi'in Illit, Ma'ale Adumim, Beitar Illit and Ariel, have achieved city status. Ariel has 18,000 residents, while the rest have around 37,000 to 55,500 each.
History
Following the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel occupied a number of territories. It took over the remainder of the Palestinian Mandate territories of the West Bank including East Jerusalem, from Jordan which had controlled the territories since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, which had held Gaza under occupation since 1949.
Resettlement of former Jewish communities
Some settlements were established on sites where Jewish communities had existed during the British Mandate of Palestine or even since the First Aliyah or ancient times.
Demographics
At the end of 2010, 534,224 Jewish Israeli lived in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. 314,132 of them lived in the 121 authorised settlements and 102 unauthorised settlement outposts on the West Bank, 198,629 were living in East Jerusalem, and almost 20,000 lived in settlements in the Golan Heights.
Administration and local government
The Israeli settlements in the West Bank fall under the administrative district of Judea and Samaria Area. Since December 2007, approval by both the Israeli Prime Minister and Israeli Defense Minister of all settlement activities (including planning) in the West Bank is required.
Where are the settlements?
Settlements are located in three places: the West Bank The West Bank is the territory captured from Jordan by Israel in 1967.
Why are settlements so controversial?
In short, because they are Jewish communities on a land that many want to become part of a future Palestinian state.
Why do Israelis choose to live in settlements?
For some, it’s for ideological/religious reasons (which we’ll get into below); for others, it’s simply cheaper housing.
How many settlements are there?
In 1967, there were about 1,500 settlers. By 2017, that number had risen to 413,400. As of writing this in 2019, over 3 million people live in the West Bank; 87% are Palestinians and 13% are settlers.
What do you mean by ideological settlers?
Ideological settlers are people who choose to live in the West Bank because they believe it is part of the land that God promised to Abraham and his descendants in the Bible.
Where did this belief come from?
The ideology of the religious settler movement draws significantly from the messianic beliefs of religious Zionism — specifically, the teachings of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook and his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook about active redemption.
Origins and uses of the terms
Diaspora has been a common phenomenon for many peoples since antiquity, but what is particular about the Jewish instance is the pronounced negative, religious, indeed metaphysical connotations traditionally attached to dispersion and exile ( galut ), two conditions which were conflated.
Pre-Roman diaspora
In 722 BCE, the Assyrians, under Sargon II, successor to Shalmaneser V, conquered the Kingdom of Israel, and many Israelites were deported to Mesopotamia. The Jewish proper diaspora began with the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE.
Under the Roman Empire
The 13th-century author Bar Hebraeus gave a figure of 6,944,000 Jews in the Roman world. Salo Wittmayer Baron considered the figure convincing. The figure of seven million within and one million outside the Roman world in the mid-first century became widely accepted, including by Louis Feldman.
Destruction of Judea
Copy of relief panel from the Arch of Titus in the Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish People, depicting the triumphal parade of Roman soldiers celebrating Judaea Capta ("Judaea is enslaved/conquered") and leading newly enslaved Jews, while displaying spoils of the siege of Jerusalem.
Byzantine, Islamic, and Crusader era
In the 4th century, the Roman Empire split and Palestine came under the control of the Byzantine Empire. There was still a significant Jewish population there, and Jews probably constituted a majority of the population until some time after Constantine converted to Christianity in the 4th century.
Post-Roman period Jewish diaspora populations
During the Middle Ages, due to increasing geographical dispersion and re-settlement, Jews divided into distinct regional groups which today are generally addressed according to two primary geographical groupings: the Ashkenazi of Northern and Eastern Europe, and the Sephardic Jews of Iberia (Spain and Portugal), North Africa and the Middle East.
Genetic studies
Y DNA studies tend to imply a small number of founders in an old population whose members parted and followed different migration paths. In most Jewish populations, these male line ancestors appear to have been mainly Middle Eastern.
Overview
Israeli settlements, or Israeli colonies, are civilian communities inhabited by Israeli citizens, overwhelmingly of Jewish ethnicity, built on lands occupied by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. The international community considers Israeli settlements to be illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.
Israeli settlements currently exist in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), claimed by the St…
Housing costs and state subventions
Settlement has an economic dimension, much of it driven by the significantly lower costs of housing for Israeli citizens living in Israeli settlements compared to the cost of housing and living in Israel proper. Government spending per citizen in the settlements is double that spent per Israeli citizen in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, while government spending for settlers in isolated Israeli settlements is three times the Israeli national average. Most of the spending goes to the securit…
Number of settlements and inhabitants
As of 2022, there are 140 Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including 12 in East Jerusalem. In addition, there are over 100 Israeli illegal outposts in the West Bank. In total, over 450,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank excluding East Jerusalem, with an additional 220,000 Jewish settlers residing in East Jerusalem.
Additionally, over 20,000 Israeli citizens live in settlements in the Golan Heights.
Character: rural and urban
Settlements range in character from farming communities and frontier villages to urban suburbs and neighborhoods. The four largest settlements, Modi'in Illit, Ma'ale Adumim, Beitar Illit and Ariel, have achieved city status. Ariel has 18,000 residents, while the rest have around 37,000 to 55,500 each.
History
Following the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel occupied a number of territories. It took over the remainder of the Palestinian Mandate territories of the West Bank including East Jerusalem, from Jordan which had controlled the territories since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, which had held Gaza under occupation since 1949. From Egypt, it also captured the Sinai Peninsula a…
Geography and municipal status
Some settlements are self-contained cities with a stable population in the tens of thousands, infrastructure, and all other features of permanence. Examples are Beitar Illit (a city of close to 45,000 residents), Ma'ale Adumim, Modi'in Illit, and Ariel (almost 20,000 residents). Some are towns with a local council status with populations of 2,000–20,0000, such as Alfei Menashe, Eli, Elkana, Efrat and Kirya…
Types of settlement
• Cities/towns: Ariel, Betar Illit, Modi'in Illit and Ma'ale Adumim.
• Urban suburbs, such as Har Gilo.
• Block settlements, such as Gush Etzion and settlements in the Nablus area.
• Frontier villages, such as those along the Jordan River.
Resettlement of former Jewish communities
Some settlements were established on sites where Jewish communities had existed during the British Mandate of Palestine or even since the First Aliyah or ancient times.
• Golan Heights – Bnei Yehuda, founded in 1890, abandoned because of Arab attacks in 1920, rebuilt near the original site in 1972.
• Jerusalem – Jewish presence alongside other peoples since biblical times, various surrounding communities and neighborhoods, including Kfar Shiloah, als…