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Settlements

Jewish communities built in the West Bank since 1967, home to roughly half a million Israelis. Their legality and wisdom are fiercely argued, inside Israel as much as outside, and they are a central knot in any two-state map.

The word

Section titled “The word”

The Hebrew is hitnachalut (התנחלות), from the root nachal, “to inherit” or “take possession,” the root behind nachala, a tribal land inheritance in the Hebrew Bible. It is a different word from yishuv, the term for the pre-1948 Jewish community: yishuv describes a whole society, hitnachalut a specific act of building on land taken in 1967. In English, “settlement” refers narrowly to Israeli towns, villages and outposts in the West Bank beyond the pre-1967 armistice line, sometimes loosely extended to Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, though those are administered as part of the municipality, not as settlements under Israeli law.

History of the term’s usage

Section titled “History of the term’s usage”

The first settlements went up within months of the Six-Day War of June 1967, when Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan. Kfar Etzion, resettled that September, had been a Jewish community destroyed in 1948; its return was framed as restoration, not conquest. The 1967 Allon Plan proposed settling strategic corridors while leaving populated Palestinian areas alone, but after the Likud government of Menachem Begin took power in 1977, settlement expanded on ideological grounds too, tied to the biblical names Judea and Samaria. By the 1993 to 1995 Oslo Accords, the West Bank was split into Areas A, B and C, with nearly all settlements in Area C, the roughly 60% of the territory left under full Israeli control pending a final agreement that never came. In 2005, the Sharon government’s disengagement plan dismantled every settlement in Gaza and four in the northern West Bank, proof removal is politically possible, and also, to critics, proof it bought no peace dividend.

Section titled “The legal argument”

The core dispute is whether the Fourth Geneva Convention’s Article 49, which bars an occupying power from transferring its own civilians into occupied territory, applies to land with no recognized prior sovereign. Jordan’s 1950 annexation of the West Bank was recognized by only two countries and never accepted by the UN, so Israel’s government has long argued the territory is disputed rather than definitively “occupied,” a position most other states and the International Court of Justice reject. The ICJ’s July 2024 advisory opinion found the settlements illegal and called for their evacuation, but an advisory opinion is not a binding judgment, and Israel was not a party to the case. The UN Security Council took the same view in Resolution 2334 (2016, passed 14 to 0 with a US abstention), which Israel rejects as one-sided. This is the wiki’s hardest open question, covered in full at Are the settlements legal, and are they wise?

How the term gets misused

Section titled “How the term gets misused”

Activist usage often blurs three distinct things into one word: authorized settlements built under Israeli law, unauthorized outposts that violate Israeli law too and are periodically demolished by Israeli courts, and Jewish neighborhoods inside Jerusalem’s municipal boundary, which Israel does not classify as settlements at all. The same blur feeds the broader settler colonialism charge, which recasts a territorial dispute over land captured in a defensive war as an ideological colonization project; see the dedicated treatment of that claim and how Wikipedia frames “settler” itself. Accurate usage keeps the categories separate: legal status, location relative to the Green Line, and which authority governs the ground are three different questions, not one.

Section titled “Related pages”

Sources

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