Israeli settlement
Based on Wikipedia: Israeli settlement
In 1970, Israeli officials signed military orders to confiscate Palestinian land. The paperwork claimed the land was needed for military purposes. This was a lie. The documents, kept secret for decades and only revealed when the newspaper Haaretz obtained them, show that the land was always intended for civilian settlers. The military censor suppressed any publication of this information throughout the 1970s. This deception—using the language of security to accomplish demographic engineering—would become a template for decades of settlement policy.
Today, more than 700,000 Israeli citizens live in territories that Israel captured during the Six-Day War of 1967. The international community, including the United Nations, the European Union, and the International Court of Justice, considers these settlements illegal under international law. Israel disputes this characterization. In 2024, the International Court of Justice went further than ever before, ruling that Israel must "cease immediately all new settlement activities and evacuate all settlers" from the occupied territories. Whether this ruling will have any practical effect remains to be seen.
What Exactly Is a Settlement?
The word "settlement" might conjure images of frontier outposts—a handful of trailers on a hilltop. Some settlements do look like that. But others are indistinguishable from affluent suburbs, complete with shopping malls, universities, and populations exceeding 50,000 people.
The four largest settlements have achieved official city status in the Israeli administrative system. Modi'in Illit houses roughly 55,000 residents. Ma'ale Adumim, Beitar Illit, and Ariel each contain between 18,000 and 55,000 people. These are not temporary encampments. They have hospitals, schools, industrial zones, and all the infrastructure of permanent urban communities.
As of early 2023, there are 144 officially recognized Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including 12 in East Jerusalem. But that number understates the reality. At least 196 additional "outposts" exist—settlements that even the Israeli government has not authorized, though many receive state funding and infrastructure support anyway. The distinction between legal settlement and illegal outpost often seems more bureaucratic than substantive.
The Geography of Control
To understand the settlements, you need to understand where they are and what that placement accomplishes.
The West Bank is the kidney-shaped territory on the western bank of the Jordan River, bordered by Israel to the west and Jordan to the east. East Jerusalem sits at its heart. When Israel captured this territory from Jordan in 1967, along with the Gaza Strip from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria, the question of what to do with the land—and the people living on it—became the defining issue of Israeli politics.
The Golan Heights, captured from Syria, now hosts over 25,000 Israeli settlers. Israel formally annexed this territory in 1981 through the Golan Heights Law, though no other country recognizes this annexation. The same pattern applies to East Jerusalem, which Israel claims as part of its unified capital but which the international community still considers occupied territory.
The Sinai Peninsula tells a different story. Israel established 18 settlements there after 1967, but dismantled all of them following the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt. This demonstrates that settlements can be removed when political will exists—but also that such removal requires extraordinary circumstances.
Gaza presents the most complicated case. Israel built 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip, but evacuated all of them in 2005 as part of a unilateral disengagement. The settlers were removed, sometimes forcibly, in what some Israelis still call "the Expulsion." Yet despite withdrawing its settlers and military from inside Gaza, Israel maintained control over Gaza's borders, airspace, and coastline—a situation that persists to this day.
Why People Move There
The motivations driving Israelis to settle in the occupied territories vary enormously.
For some, the motivation is religious. The West Bank encompasses the biblical regions of Judea and Samaria, sites sacred in Jewish tradition. The city of Hebron contains the Cave of the Patriarchs, believed to be the burial place of Abraham. These settlers see themselves as reclaiming ancestral land promised by God.
For others, the motivation is baldly economic. Housing in the settlements costs significantly less than comparable housing within Israel proper. The Israeli government subsidizes settlement life heavily—spending per citizen in the settlements runs double the amount spent in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. In isolated settlements, government spending per person runs three times the national average. Most of this money goes to security, but the net effect is to make settlement an economically attractive choice for young families priced out of Israel's expensive housing market.
Still others are motivated by ideology. Gush Emunim, a movement founded in the 1970s, promoted settlement as a way to establish "facts on the ground" that would make any future Palestinian state impossible. Their strategy was explicit: populate the land so thoroughly that withdrawing would become politically unthinkable.
The Legal Architecture
The legal situation is genuinely complex, which is part of why Israel has been able to maintain its position for so long.
The Fourth Geneva Convention, drafted in 1949 after the horrors of World War Two, prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into territory it occupies. The drafters were thinking of Nazi Germany's policies of settling Germans in conquered territories while expelling or exterminating the existing populations. Article 49 states this prohibition clearly.
Israel's legal argument rests on a technical claim: that the Fourth Geneva Convention doesn't apply to the West Bank because Jordan's control of the territory from 1948 to 1967 was itself not internationally recognized. If Jordan wasn't the legitimate sovereign, the argument goes, then Israel isn't an occupying power in the conventional sense, and the Geneva Convention's provisions don't apply.
Almost no one outside Israel accepts this reasoning. The International Court of Justice rejected it in 2004, when it ruled that both the settlements and the West Bank barrier wall violated international law. The court rejected it again in 2024, in even stronger terms. The United Nations has repeatedly stated that the settlements violate the Fourth Geneva Convention. The European Union treats settlement products differently from Israeli products in trade agreements, precisely because it considers the settlements illegal.
Even the United States, Israel's closest ally, designated the settlements as illegal for decades. This policy changed briefly in November 2019, when the first Trump administration declared that "the establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not per se inconsistent with international law." The Biden administration reversed this in February 2024, returning to the longstanding American position that settlements are "inconsistent with international law."
How Settlements Get Built
The mechanisms for establishing settlements have evolved over the decades, but the pattern remains recognizable.
In the early years after 1967, the Labor government of Levi Eshkol developed the Allon Plan, named after cabinet minister Yigal Allon. This plan envisioned Israel annexing strategic areas—East Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley, and the area around Gush Etzion—while leaving the densely populated Palestinian areas for some future resolution. The Allon Plan provided the template for settlement policy under successive Labor governments.
When the right-wing Likud party came to power in 1977 under Menachem Begin, settlement policy expanded dramatically. Begin's government issued a statement declaring that "the entire historic Land of Israel is the inalienable heritage of the Jewish people." Ariel Sharon, then agriculture minister, announced a plan to settle two million Jews in the West Bank by the year 2000. That target was never achieved, but the ambition was clear.
The formal mechanism for most settlement activity runs through the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization. Though technically a non-governmental organization, it receives Israeli government funding and operates as a quasi-governmental body. The Civil Administration—the Israeli military body that governs the West Bank—leases land to the Settlement Division, which then develops and populates new communities.
The methods for acquiring that land have varied. In the 1970s, the most common approach was military requisition—declaring land necessary for security purposes, then transferring it to civilian use. Land was also declared "state land" based on Ottoman-era regulations that Israel claimed to have inherited. Palestinian landowners were sometimes offered compensation, sometimes simply presented with eviction orders. In some documented cases, land was literally poisoned—sprayed with herbicides to destroy crops and make cultivation impossible, after which it could be declared abandoned and seized.
The Outpost Strategy
Since the 1990s, a new category has emerged: the unauthorized outpost.
These begin when settlers, often young religious nationalists, establish a presence on a hilltop or other strategic location without government approval. They might start with a few trailers, perhaps claiming to be a farming operation or a nature observation point. Over time, infrastructure follows—electricity, water, roads. Eventually, the government faces a choice: remove the outpost and confront its own political base, or retroactively authorize what exists.
More often than not, the government chooses the latter. A 2012 investigation by Haaretz revealed that the Civil Administration had covertly designated ten percent of the West Bank for potential future settlement, complete with provisional names for communities that didn't yet exist. The "unauthorized" outposts often turn out to be precisely where the planning documents always indicated settlements would go.
What This Means for Palestinians
For the Palestinian population of the West Bank, the settlements represent something more than a legal abstraction. They shape daily life in concrete and often brutal ways.
The settlement infrastructure fragments Palestinian territory into disconnected enclaves. A network of roads connects settlements to each other and to Israel proper, but Palestinians are prohibited from using many of these roads. Checkpoints control movement between Palestinian areas. A journey that might take fifteen minutes on a settler road can take hours for a Palestinian navigating the system of permits and checkpoints.
Water illustrates the disparity starkly. Settlements have swimming pools and irrigated lawns while neighboring Palestinian villages face severe water restrictions. The Israeli water company Mekorot controls water resources throughout the West Bank, and allocation heavily favors Israeli users.
Violence is also part of the picture. Settlers, sometimes acting with apparent impunity, have attacked Palestinian farmers, destroyed olive groves, vandalized property, and assaulted individuals. The Israeli military, whose official mission includes protecting both populations, has been documented standing by during settler attacks or actively assisting settlers. Human rights organizations have compiled thousands of such incidents.
The separation barrier—a wall in urban areas, a fence elsewhere—was ostensibly built for security following the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings in the early 2000s. But its route doesn't follow the pre-1967 boundary. Instead, it loops deep into the West Bank to encompass major settlement blocs, effectively annexing this territory while separating Palestinian farmers from their fields and workers from their jobs.
The Peace Process and Its Failures
Every serious attempt at Israeli-Palestinian peace has confronted the settlement question.
The Oslo Accords of the 1990s created a framework for negotiations but deliberately deferred the settlement issue to "final status" talks. Meanwhile, the settler population continued growing. When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin presented the Oslo II Accord to the Israeli parliament in 1995, he made clear that Israel intended to keep major settlement blocs including Ma'ale Adumim and Givat Ze'ev. Two months later, a Jewish extremist assassinated Rabin at a peace rally.
The Road Map for Peace in 2002 called for dismantling outposts established after 2001. Instead, new outposts proliferated. The settler population growth rate didn't slow. Israel's formal position was that no new settlements were being established—but existing settlements expanded, and outposts that should have been removed became permanent.
The practical reality is that every year of continued settlement makes any territorial compromise more difficult. The settlers themselves constitute a powerful political constituency. Removing the 8,000 settlers from Gaza in 2005 required massive security forces and generated lasting trauma in Israeli society. Removing 700,000 settlers from the West Bank would be an operation of an entirely different magnitude—if it's even politically conceivable.
The Question of Intent
The most contested question about the settlements may be what they reveal about Israeli intentions.
Palestinian leaders and many international observers argue that the settlement enterprise is designed to make a Palestinian state impossible. The pattern of settlement—establishing communities along the Jordan Valley to separate any future Palestine from Jordan, building ring roads around East Jerusalem to sever it from the West Bank, fragmenting the territory into disconnected cantons—seems calculated rather than accidental.
The 1978 Drobles Plan, drafted by the World Zionist Organization, made this logic explicit. Its full title was "Master Plan for the Development of Settlements in Judea and Samaria, 1979-1983," and it called for dispersed settlement throughout the West Bank specifically to prevent the emergence of a contiguous Palestinian state. The document acknowledged that security was a pretext; the actual goal was demographic.
Israeli defenders of the settlements argue that security concerns are genuine—that the settlements provide strategic depth and early warning capacity. They note that Israel withdrew from Gaza and received rocket fire in return, suggesting that territorial concessions don't bring peace. Some argue that Jews have a historical and religious right to live anywhere in the biblical Land of Israel.
What's undeniable is that the settler population has grown continuously since 1967, under governments of the left and right alike. Whether this reflects a coherent strategy or simply the accumulated momentum of thousands of individual decisions, the result is the same: each passing year makes the status quo harder to reverse.
The Current Moment
The 2024 International Court of Justice ruling represents the strongest international legal condemnation of the settlements to date. The court found not just that the settlements violate international law, but that the entire occupation is illegal and must end. It called for Israel to evacuate all settlers and make reparation for damages caused.
Whether this ruling will have any practical effect is unclear. Israel has rejected it. The United States has indicated it won't support enforcement. No mechanism exists to compel Israeli compliance. Previous ICJ rulings on the same subject, including the 2004 opinion on the separation barrier, produced no change in Israeli policy.
Meanwhile, the settlements continue to expand. New housing units are approved regularly. Outposts continue to appear on hilltops. The settler population grows faster than the Israeli population as a whole, driven by both migration and high birth rates among the religious settler community.
The violence continues too. Settlers attack Palestinians. Palestinians attack settlers. The Israeli military conducts operations throughout the West Bank. The cycle repeats.
Some observers describe this as a frozen conflict, but that metaphor is misleading. Nothing is frozen. The demographic balance shifts. The infrastructure expands. The facts on the ground multiply. The settlement enterprise that began with a few trailers on a Judean hilltop in 1967 has become one of the most consequential and contested colonial projects of the modern era—and one whose ultimate resolution remains entirely unclear.