Israeli Settlements

Summary: The issue of Jewish residents living in the West Bank and Gaza, a territory occupied by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, has long been at the heart of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. The Palestinian Authority insists that the entire West Bank and Gaza are part of a future state of Palestine. In 2005, Israel forcibly removed all settlers from the Gaza Strip but left settlements on the West Bank with a population that, by the end of 2007, rose to just under 500,000. In 2009, the Obama administration pressured Israel to freeze the expansion of existing settlements, including "natural growth" to accommodate settlers' children, as part of the "two-state solution." The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu resisted this demand. The Jewish settlements are not only an issue between Palestinians and Israel but an internal political issue in Israel, where some fundamentalists insist on calling the West Bank by its Biblical name and assert Israel's historic right to the territory.

A group of settlements established by Jewish residents, situated in the West Bank and ranging from suburbs of Jerusalem to highly fortified outposts deep inside the West Bank, has long been at the heart of efforts to negotiate a permanent peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Palestinians insist the entire territory of the West Bank, captured from Jordan by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, belongs to a future state of Palestine alongside Gaza. Successive Israeli governments have resisted demands to disband the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, although former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government forcibly dismantled Jewish settlements in Gaza in August 2005.

The settlements are not just an issue in the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority; they are also a political hot-button in Israeli politics. In 2009, for example, in assembling a coalition government of generally conservative parties, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu named as his foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, himself a resident of a settlement and strong opponent of dismantling, or even restricting the growth, of the West Bank communities. The construction of a security barrier along the border between Israel and the West Bank that puts some disputed settlements on the Israeli side has further complicated peace negotiations. The conflict between the Netanyahu government and the Obama administration over the settlements issue emerged in the spring of 2009 as one of the greatest sources of tension between the two countries since Israel's founding in 1948. After a widely hailed appeal to Muslims, delivered by Obama in Cairo in June 2009, Palestinians and their Arab allies expressed expectations that Washington would lean on Israel to take action on the issue.

Background: The 1967 War. The June 1967 Six-Day War marked a major turning point in the ongoing conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors, including Palestinians living in what was once Jordanian territory on the West Bank of the Jordan River and in the Gaza Strip, which was once Egyptian territory in Sinai. By defeating the national armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, Israel, in practice, settled the issue of its right to exist as a Jewish state in what had been the British Palestine Mandate.

Although formal peace agreements came years later (and, in the case of Egypt, required another conflict in 1973, launched to regain land in the Sinai), Egypt agreed, in the Camp David Accords of 1977, to surrender the Gaza Strip to a future Palestinian state. Jordan formally renounced its claims to the West Bank in June 1988 when the Arab League effectively recognized the PLO and Yasser Arafat as the legitimate government of that region. East Jerusalem is generally regarded as a distinct part of the occupied territories and is claimed by the Palestinians as a future capital. The Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967, remains disputed. There are Israeli settlers there, but the Palestinian Authority does not claim the area.

The exact boundary between Israel and the future state of Palestine was not agreed on. Palestinians insist the border should be the former Green Line, the 1948 cease-fire line between Israel and Jordan. Palestinians who have accepted a two-state solution insist that the pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza Strip comprise Palestine. Other Palestinians, notably the Hamas party in Gaza, insist that Israel has no right to exist. On the other side are some Israelis who insist that biblical Israel comprises all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean—including all the West Bank.

The number of Israelis living on territory captured in 1967 has increased steadily.

Peace negotiations and the settlers. The status of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has been addressed as part of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations since 1993. Palestinians have never conceded any of the territory to Israel. Israelis have long insisted that at least some settlements, covering under ten percent of the land occupied in 1967, must be incorporated into Israel. An offer by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000, including dismantling some settlements deep in the West Bank but not others, was rejected by the Palestinians but was blamed for Barak's defeat in Israeli elections and the rise to power of the more conservative Likud Party led by Ariel Sharon. Sharon eventually ordered the army to dismantle settlements in Gaza in 2005. In January 2006, Sharon suffered a debilitating stroke and was succeeded by Ehud Olmert, who held that at least some settlements must remain part of Israel in any future division between Israel and Palestine. By the 2010s, violence was increasing in the settlements, which continued into the early 2020s.

Where are the settlements? Israelis have established settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, often in housing subdivisions. (Settlements in the Golan Heights, home to 20,000 settlers, are not part of the negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.)

• West Bank. Most Israeli settlers live in towns or housing developments. Most of these settlements are on land purchased from Palestinians, although the Israeli government declared the land "abandoned" in some cases. More than 450,000 settlers lived in these settlements in 2023. The settlements have the appearance of housing subdivisions, including some gated communities built for well-to-do Israeli professionals and apartment complexes built to house large, relatively poor families of Orthodox Jews. Commercial housing developers have played an essential role in building several settlements. Government policies, such as housing subsidies, have also enabled the growth of some settlements in this area.
• East Jerusalem. The second largest concentration of settlers, about 190,000 Israelis, is in East Jerusalem, which Palestinians claim as the future capital of Arab Palestine. East Jerusalem is effectively a Jewish suburb of Jerusalem, providing housing for Israel's growing population while playing a role in the political-diplomatic policies of the Israeli government. Jerusalem has religious significance for both Jews and Muslims, as well as Christians, further complicating its status.
• Gaza. In August 2005, Israeli police and soldiers removed the last of an estimated 8,500 Israeli settlers living in twenty-one communities in the Gaza Strip. The removal was part of Israel's decision to withdraw entirely from Gaza, handing control to the Palestinian Authority as part of a gradual handover of responsibility to the PA. The forced removal of the last settlers in Gaza—about half the settlers had moved peacefully before an August 2005 deadline—was resisted by the settlers and about 5,000 supporters from inside Israel.

Who are the settlers? Israelis living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem fall into three main categories: upper-middle-class, largely secular Israelis who moved into new housing subdivisions including gated communities; large, relatively poor families of Orthodox Jews in search of affordable housing (sometimes subsidized by the government); and Israelis motivated to occupy their vision of biblical Israel, i.e., the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

The settlements range in nature from all-Jewish neighborhoods of permanent housing to tents and trailers established on hilltops. Some settlements include Israelis and Arabs living side-by-side. Many settlements are close to the Green Line; others are far inside the West Bank. Some have been established in the past five years; others comprise neighborhoods in East Jerusalem occupied by Jews for over a century. The exact number of separate settlements (as opposed to the number of settlers) is disputed. In 2004, CBS News estimated the number of settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank at 134. By 2023, there were 144.

Demographics. Inside the territory granted to Israel by the United Nations in 1948, the population was about 80 percent Jewish, in line with Israel's self-image as a Jewish state. If Israel were to expand to include the Gaza Strip and West Bank, Jews would make up barely half the population, and projections at the time warned that by 2020, Jews would be a distinct minority. Thus, efforts to expand Israeli territory by settling Jews in the disputed West Bank created a situation where Palestinians could outnumber Jews within a relatively short time.

Religion. Some, but not all, settlers are motivated to populate what they view as land given to the Jews by divine right in the biblical era. The so-called "ultranationalist" settlers quote the Book of Genesis as saying, "Now the Lord said to Abraham, get out of the country, and from the kindred, and from the father's house, to the land that I will show you, I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you." The land of biblical Israel is believed to extend from the Jordan River in the east to the Mediterranean in the west.

Settlements and the Security Barrier. In 2002, Israel approved the construction of a network of security fences, including trenches to block vehicles, to prevent terrorists from crossing into Israel from the West Bank. At several key points, the fence has been routed to include West Bank settlements on the Israeli side. Palestinians have protested that the fence is being built to create a new set of "facts on the ground" even while peace talks move ahead at a snail's pace. Israel insists that continued attacks by Palestinians on Israeli territory have slowed the pace of negotiations and that the fence is necessary since the Palestinian Authority has failed to stop such attacks. In some cases, including Jewish settlements on the Israeli side of the fence has required splitting Palestinian villages or effectively enclosing Palestinian-occupied territory that is not, strictly speaking, part of settlements.

Settlers and Israeli Politics. Jewish settlers play a role in domestic Israeli politics, partly by voting for minority parties that have long been part of ruling conservative coalitions assembled by Ariel Sharon's Kadima Party in 2005 and later by Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party in 2009. Among smaller parties that joined Netanyahu's coalition to form a government after elections in February 2009 was Yisrael Beitenu, led by Lieberman, an outspoken conservative opponent of the two-state solution, a resident of a West Bank settlement, and in 2009, Israel's foreign minister. By the early 2020s, the two-state solution seemed impossible, as Israel's government announced an order permitting citizens to establish permanent residence in the Homesh in the northern West Bank.

Settlements and US-Israeli Relations. After the Palestine Liberation Organization declared its willingness to accept the existence of Israel in exchange for recognition of an Arab state of Palestine (in 1988), the United States tried to mediate a permanent peace agreement. For two decades, the status of the settlements has been a sticking point (one among several). In the prolonged negotiations, there have been three separate issues: whether Israel should dismantle or give up claims to all settlements; whether Israel should freeze expansion of settlements, including "natural growth;" and whether Palestinians should accept a map of a future state of Palestine that included some, but not all, Israeli settlements. Through three administrations—George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush—the United States urged Israel to be flexible, with limited success. In June 2009, the issue arose as a point of contention when the Obama Administration insisted Israel freeze the growth of the settlements as a first step towards resuming peace negotiations. The government resisted, insisting that the preceding administration of President George W. Bush had agreed—orally but not in writing—to the "natural expansion" of existing settlements. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denied any such agreements and said the United States would not be restrained by the Israeli claims while continuing to insist that all settlement expansion be halted. Though the Trump Administration reportedly implemented counter-productive policies to end the dispute, the Biden Administration began supplying Palestinian aid and stated its support for the two-state solution.

Israeli Settler Population 1972-2012

Source: "Comprehensive Settlement Population 1972-2011." Foundation for Middle East Peace, 13 Jan. 2012, fmep.org/resource/comprehensive-settlement-population-1972-2010.

Bibliography

Aronson, Geoffrey. "Living Without a Solution: Forty Years of Occupation and Settlement." Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 36, no. 4, 2007, p. 4. search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tsh&AN=27594043&site=isc-live

Blecher, Martin. Israeli Settlements: Land Politics Beyond the Geneva Convention. Hamilton Books, 2018.

Cairo, Michael F. American Presidents and Israeli Settlements Since 1967. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2023.

"Israel Approves Plans for Thousands of Illegal Settlement Homes." Aljazeera, 26 June 2023, www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/6/26/israel-approves-plans-for-thousands-of-illegal-settlement-homes. Accessed 5 Oct. 2023.

"Settlement & Annexation Report." Foundation for Middle East Peace, 10 Aug. 2023, fmep.org/resource/settlement-annexation-report-august-10-2023. Accessed 5 Oct. 2023.

"Update on Israeli Settlement and Wall Activity." Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 36, no. 2, Winter 2007, p. 4. search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tsh&AN=26390081&site=isc-live

Wilson, Scott. "War Turns the Tide For Israeli Settlers." Washington Post, 25 Sept. 2006, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/24/AR2006092400757.html.