“Jewish Settlements”
“Palestinian Settlements”
What does this mean? What makes them settlements as opposed to towns/villages or whatever?
It seems strange to me that people would have “settlements” in their own country. Can anyone help explain this phraseology for me?
The problem is that it’s not their own country. It’s on occupied land.
Israel controls territory (known as the West Bank and Gaza Strip) that was not part of the 1947 State of Israel, but was acquired by war. Jews living in these territories (often recent immigrants from Russia and elsewhere) are known as settlers. Because their presence is not welcomed by the Palestinian inhabitants of the territories, the settlements they live in must be well fortified and well defended.
I am not aware of the term “settlements” being used for Palestinian towns or for towns inside the borders of pre-1967 Israel.
hibernicus,
So Jewish and Palestinian settlements are all within this territory? That clarifies things some, but there are other lands around the world acquired by war in the last 50-60 years, and I only ever recal the term settlement being used in this specific situation. You never heard about Soviet settlements in Eastern Europe (not to my recollection anyways). What makes this situation different? IIRC, even Jews in Israel talk about Jewish settlements. This seems quite contrary to their own interests in asserting that it’s their land. Is there some sort of deeper political meaning behind “settlements”?
Floater,
Well, I guess that all depends on who you think it does belong to, but I don’t really want to get into that, this is more a semantical question. And besides, you hear about both Jewish and Palestinian settlements from the same sources, and they can’t both be occupying the same land, can they? One of them’s got to have “rights” to it, so you’d think that following your suggestion that depending on who you talked to (and this may be true in Israel, although IIRC I’ve heard Jewish leaders talking about Jewish settlements) people would talk only about one group having settlements.
The big difference is that settlements are new places.
Usually, when one country takes over some territory of another country as a result of a war, the border moves, and the towns in the middle become part of the winning country, and that’s the end of it.
But that’s not how Israel dealt with the land it took over in 1967, except for East Jerusalem, which was incorporated into the Israeli city of Jerusalem, and the state of Israel itself. The rest of the West Bank remained officially part of Jordan, but under Israeli control, so it is referred to as “Israeli-occupied”.
Even after Jordan decided to relinquish their rights to the West Bank (sometime in the '80s), Israel still did not officially change the borders to include that territory as part of Israel proper. (The only explanation I’ve heard of WHY they chose not to do this, is to maintain a Jewish majority in the government, which would have been lost with the sudden addition of arab citizens.)
Nevertheless, for both political reasons (to make it difficult to ever give up the Jewish presence in the West Bank) and also for demographic reasons (expanding populations - both Jewish and Arab - need a place to live), every government since 1967 has sponsored the establishment of both Jewish and Arab settlements in those areas.