in the West Bank, and an estimated 8,000 in the Gaza Strip. (Israel dismantled its
settlements in Gaza in 2005.) Israel unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 and
the Golan Heights in 1981, but the United Nations does not acknowledge these
annexations as legitimate and considers these lands, in addition to the rest of the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip, as occupied territory.
The Israeli government approved the first settlement in the West Bank three
months after the June 1967 War. Called Gush Etzion and located south of Jerusalem
between Bethlehem and Hebron, this community represents the reestablishment of the
Kfar Etzion settlement, which Jews had built decades earlier but Jordan had disman-
tled after it conquered the West Bank in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Gush Etzion sub-
sequently grew into a collection of more than a dozen settlements and by 2004 had a
total population of around 15,000 settlers. Israel argued that many of the post-1967
settlements in East Jerusalem also were not new, but instead were restorations of Jewish
neighborhoods that had existed in the area before the 1948 war, some for hundreds
of years.
In the first few years after the 1967 war, the Israeli government focused on plac-
ing settlements in the Jordan Valley, immediately to the west of the Jordan River. It
justified these settlements as part of security measures to thwart any future attack by
Jordan, to the east of the river. The government used this same reasoning to establish
Jewish settlements on the Golan Heights, the strategic plateau captured from Syria in
1967 that offers commanding views of northeastern Israel.
Starting in 1971, however, senior government officials put forth the broader
rationale that the settlements demonstrated Israel’s determination to hold onto the ter-
ritories, despite the UN Security Council’s call for Israel to return them to the Arabs
in exchange for peace. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan made one of the boldest such
statements in an August 19, 1971, speech, asserting that Israel must “create facts” in
what the government called the “administered territories.” Said Dayan, “We should
regard our role also in the administered territories as that of the established govern-
ment—to plan and implement whatever can be done without leaving ‘options open’
for the day of peace, which may be distant.”
In July 1967, Yigal Allon, a minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol,
put forth the closest thing to a “master” settlement plan in the early years of Israeli
occupation. Allon proposed to divide the West Bank between Israel and Jordan: Israel
would control most of the Jordan Valley (except for an enclave centering around the
Palestinian town of Jericho) and the midsection of the West Bank neighboring Jeru-
salem; Jordan would control the rest of the West Bank, including the Arab-majority
cities of Bethlehem, Hebron, Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, and Tulkarm. Officials of the
ruling Labor Party endorsed Allon’s plan and several subsequent modifications of it,
but the full cabinet never did.
The Allon plan influenced government policy for two decades, as successive gov-
ernments adopted key elements, notably retaining control of the Jordan Valley and all
of the area around Jerusalem. Allon’s idea of sharing parts of the West Bank, how-
ever, lost all validity after 1988, when Jordan’s King Hussein renounced his country’s
claim to the West Bank. Even so, the essential idea of Allon’s plan—Israel keeping
some of the West Bank and returning the rest to Arab control—has become the foun-
dation of policy for some Israeli governments over the years and of many international
plans for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS 179