About 300,000 Israelis are living in the areas conquered by Israel
in 1967, nearly 28 years ago. However, not all the Israeli
settlements over the Green Line (the pre-1967 border) are conceived
by the Israelis as identical. Residents of the Jewish neighborhoods
of East Jerusalem, for instance, are not considered in Israel to be
settlers. We are referring to eight large neighborhoods (Ramot,
Ramat Eshkol, French Hill, Shuafat Heights, Neveh Ya'akov, Pisgat
Ze'ev, East Talpiot and Gilo), all of which are situated in the
municipal area annexed to Jerusalem after 1967, where 150,000 Jews
are living today. Nearly 50,000 additional Israelis living in urban
settlements in the West Bank area around Jerusalem and close to the
border with west¬ern Samaria are not considered settlers in
the usual meaning of the term ¬people settling in the
territories for ideological, political or religious
rea¬sons.
The Israeli public also distinguishes between different sorts of
settle¬ments over the 1967 lines, according to both
geographical location and more importantly - to the character of
those motivations which induced people to make the choice of
building their homes there.
At the beginning of 1995, about 300,000 people were living, as
noted, in all the Israeli neighborhoods and settlements over the
Green Line. Since the interest to trace the types of settlements
and their status schematically over the years, as seen by the
Israeli public. In this survey, I have tried to pro¬vide the
data and political image of five categories of Jewish settlement in
the territories conquered in 1967, more or less according to the
chronolog¬ical order of the various waves of
settlements.
Nostalgic Settlement
The beginning of Israeli settlement in the territories, as far back
as the sum¬mer of 1967, had to a large extent a
nostalgic-romantic character. The ref¬erence is mainly to two
places: Gush Etzion and the Jewish Quarter of Old Jerusalem.
In Gush Etzion, before 1948, there were four small kibbutzim (Kfar
Etzion, Mesuot Yitzhak, Ein Tsurim and Revadim), three of which
belonged to the religious kibbutz movement, Hakibbutz Hadati, and
one to Hashomer Hatza'ir. Straight after the war (in June 1967), a
group of sons of Kfar Etzion came to settle in the abandoned
buildings of the Jordanian army camp on the kibbutz land. Shortly
afterwards they won the blessing of the government and began to
receive help from the authorities.
The Israeli decision to rehabilitate the Jewish Quarter in the Old
City of Jerusalem also, of course, had political significance.
However, it was first and foremost motivated by national
romanticism - a return to "the cis¬terns, the city and the
square" as Naomi Shemer wrote in her famous song "Jerusalem of
Gold," which became a sort of anthem of the Six Day War. There were
other Jewish settlements of a similar character in different
places, such as Kfar Darom in the suburbs of Deir al-Balah in the
Gaza Strip, near the site of a pre-1948 kibbutz, of that name, or
the establishment of the settlement of B'nei Yehuda on the Golan
Heights near the site of a small Jewish settlement with the same
name, which had been abandoned in 1920.
Security Settlement
However, the nostalgic motivation was quickly forgotten. It served
in the course of time as a stimulus for a new development, the
establishment of great settlement centers which had no connection
with Jewish settlements which had existed before 1948 and were
abandoned. In Gush Etzion of the 1990s there are twenty settlements
stretching along the whole southern mountain ridge of the West Bank
and westward to the border of the Judean Desert on the east. It has
kibbutzim, moshavim and two urban centers, the town of Ephrat and
the neighborhood of Alon Shvut.
The restored Jewish Quarter is also twice as large as it was before
1948.
Its residents were not even satisfied with the new and enlarged
area but sent out extensions in the form of Yeshiva students who
bought and took over assets in the Muslim and Christian Quarters of
Old Jerusalem.
These are settlements mainly established after the 1967 war,
usually in accordance with the security doctrine of the Labor
Alignment govern¬ments. Most of this settlement was in the
Jordan Valley and was carried out according to the
political-security plan conceived at the time by Deputy Prime
Minister Yigal Allan and called the Allan Plan.
The framework of security settlements includes another two large
settle¬ment blocs. The first is in the Golan Heights and
includes nearly thirty set¬tlements with a population of over
10,000. The Golan settlement is consid¬ered in Israel as a
security barrier serving to defend the Upper Galilee
set¬tlements, even though during the October 1973 war these
settlements were evacuated immediately on the outbreak of the
fighting; the IDF comman¬ders admitted afterwards that
evacuating civilians from the Golan was one of the great
difficulties of the first hours of the war. The second bloc was of
the settlements which were established in the Sinai Peninsula,
mainly in its northern section in the area called Pithat Rafiah.
This was defined in Israel in the 1970s as the creation of a
security barrier on Israel's southern border. However, this
argument was generally forgot¬ten in face of the adamant
Egyptian demand for its evacuation of all the Israeli settlements
from sovereign Egyptian territory. From the point of view of those
supporting Israeli settlement in the territories, the
settle¬ments established on a security background were the
greatest failures.
The isolated settlements in southern Sinai were evacuated with the
start of the application of the peace agreement between Israel and
Egypt in 1979.
The largest bloc at Pithat Rafiah, which included the urban
neighborhood of Yamit, was also evacuated in 1982, and according to
a decision of the Likud government under Begin, confirmed by
Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, all the houses in these settlements
were blown up. Most of the Israelis living there were evacuated
into Israel proper and some settled in the area of the Gaza
Strip.
The Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip ceased long ago to be
considered as having security value and the whole attitude to them
has been reversed. Military commanders and ministers in the Rabin
government now define the settlements in the Gaza Strip (or at
least, most of them) as a special security burden, "a pain in the
arse." Only in order to preserve the princi¬ple that
settlements will not be evacuated in the intermediary negotiation
period, is the Rabin government compelled to invest millions on a
complex military set-up to guard the Gaza settlements. In another
case, that of the settlement of Netzarim in the suburbs of Gaza,
the government invested about NIS 15 million in military
infrastructure and large military forces to permanently guard the
few Israeli families living in the settlement.
Neither was the fate of the relatively big security bloc of Jordan
Valley settlements much better. Most of the settlements there are
agricultural and each one has about twenty families. Some of these
settlements, especially the kibbutzim, have failed from the social
and economic points of view and their populations are unstable. The
one urban neighborhood estab¬lished in the Jordan Valley,
Ma'aleh Ephraim, is also regarded as a small and weak
settlement.
East Jerusalem
The establishment of the Israeli neighborhoods in East Jerusalem
can be considered the most impressive Jewish settlement operation
by the Israeli government over the Green Line since 1967. Since
East Jerusalem was annexed to the State of Israel, the Israeli
public had almost no reservations about buying apartments in the
new neighborhoods in the eastern part of the city. Therefore,
settlement there enjoyed full legitimacy in Israeli pub¬lic
opinion. Since the 1970s all Israeli governments built tens of
thousands of housing units for Jews in these neighborhoods and
those who purchased the apartments constitute a representative
cross-section of the Israeli pubIn other words, in the Jewish
neighborhoods of East Jerusalem one can find voters for leftist
parties supporting Israeli retreat from the territories and the
establishment of a Palestinian state.
As most of these Israelis see it, the establishment of Jewish
neighbor¬hoods in the east of the city will not damage the
prospects of dividing the country between the two peoples, for in
the course of time a special solution will be found to the problem
of Jerusalem. The only controversy sur¬rounding this question
arose over attempts by Israelis to buy land and housing assets in
Arab neighborhoods.
The great majority of the 150,000 Israelis who purchased apartments
over the Green Line did so without any political intentions. Almost
all building in Jerusalem since 1967 was carried out in the eastern
part of the city. Young couples and other Israelis who insisted on
trying to buy an apart¬ment in the west of the city found the
supply was almost non-existent and the prices of apartments and of
houses there almost twice as high as those over the Green Line. In
practice, the authorities created a situation in which people were
given no alternative.
Political Settlements
It was Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin who coined the phrase
"political set¬tlements" during the Israeli election campaign
in the spring of 1992. He was referring to the well-known
settlements of the Greater Israel support¬ers, led by the
activists of the religious-nationalist Gush Emunim (Bloc of the
Faithful) movement. Even though this sort of settlement started
after the 1967 war, its scope was' at first extremely restricted,
mainly compris¬ing the small Jewish community of Hebron led by
Rabbi Moshe Levinger. It was only later, in the second part of the
1970s, that this settlement move¬ment gained great impetus.
The subject was accompanied by stormy demonstrations and wide
public discussion in Israel.
Especially in the late 1980s, the Likud government most vigorously
encouraged and assisted these settlements, and most were indeed
estab¬lished at that time. The political settlements account
for most of the set¬tlements on the West Bank and in the Gaza
Strip and their numbers reach over a hundred. They are scattered
over every corner of the territories and in the heart of
Palestinian population concentrations, but the number of Israelis
living in them is relatively small.
This is the hard core of the settlers, mostly Orthodox and living
in the ter¬ritories out of political-ideological convictions
founded on the religious and political ideology of the National
Religious movement in Israel. These settlers are organized in
bodies like the Judea and Samaria Council and lead a political
campaign for the full annexation of the Occupied Territories into
the State of Israel, along with restrictions and punishment for the
Palestinian population. Their intention is to preserve the latter's
under- privileged status as against the superior status of the
Israeli settlers. They enjoy efficient organization, highly
developed information and publicity services and the political
ability to act effectively within the political insti¬tutions
of Israeli society.
Economic Settlement
From a chronological point of view, this is the latest stage of
settlement and the only one which still retains impetus. It
includes a series of settlements established in the West Bank near
the old Green Line border, particularly in the Jerusalem and West
Samaria areas. In the past it was customary to call these
settlements "five minutes from Kfar Saba" or "ten minutes from
Jerusalem's Zion Square," since these phrases were included in the
public¬ity campaigns of the various contractor firms selling
apartments there. These were urban neighborhoods, "dormitory towns"
near Israeli popula¬tion centers where it was possible (and
still is) to purchase apartments and houses at low prices. The
prospect of improving their quality of life induced tens of
thousands of Israelis to invest in these settlements. The main
moti¬vation was indeed economic, but in the course of time,
many of them also adopted political positions favorable to the
rightist parties in order to justi¬fy their moving over to
live in territories beyond the Green Line. In this cat¬egory
there are also a series of neighborhoods and settlements which were
built on the borderline itself, for example Modi'in in the Latrun
area.
This schematic distribution of settlements leads to several
conclusions. If we refrain from taking into account the first
category of nostalgic settlement along general lines, we will find
the following numerical distribution of settlers:
In what is defined as "security settlements," the population is
about 25,000, mainly in the Golan Heights and the Jordan
Valley.
In East Jerusalem neighborhoods there are about 150,000 Jewish
residents. In the "ideological settlements" there are some 25,000
settlers (including places like Kiryat Arba and a certain
percentage of people in urban settle¬ments in Samaria, like
Ariel).
About 100,000 people are concentrated in the economic settlements,
about half in the Jerusalem area over the Green Line and the rest
mainly in West Samaria. The Ultra-Orthodox population in the two
concentrations of Emmanuel and Betar are included in this
category.
From a political point of view, the ideological settlers constitute
a minor¬ity of the settlers in the territories, only about
eight percent. At first sight, therefore, they do not appear to
constitute a problem. Their great strength, and the danger
emanating from them, stem from the rest of the 90 percent of
settlers constituting a sort of political hinterland for them. The
great majority of the settlers do not, as stated, identify with the
ideological motives of the settler movement but they will be a
source of support and of activism in the hour of trial. The
cardinal problem of the settlements is not, therefore, ideological
but lies in the fact that Israeli governments cre¬ated massive
backing and support among a large sector of the public for living
in the West Bank, for other non-ideological reasons. It is this
which may constitute the main obstacle to a future solution.