I recall reading a while back that one of the stick points between the israeli and palestinian governments is Israel’s ongoing settlement of areas they’d ceded (in treaty) to Palestine.
Politics aside, why would an Israeli citizen move to what’s effectively a low-level battleground?
Apparently, the housing there is very cheap compared to the real Israel. Government subsidies mainly but also future risk of displacement(?), and the risks from Palestinians who object (although that’s a lo less nowadays). Plus it’s relatively new, relatively modern buildings. Some “unapproved” settlements are started by people who fanatically(?) believe that the land belongs to Jews.
Why/what do we think about our American West, settlers, Cowboys, Marshall’s and Sherrifs protecting settlers? For the vast consciousness of US citizens and culture/art, how it is taught as part of American history, certainly to younger people as part of core American values?
Many similarities. True.
Not going into the historiography/cultural use of that history, nor into the ‘real’ history enough to fuck up this thread.
Also remember the government is typically Likud, the more right-wing party. As a minority, its puppet string are usually pulled by a collection of minor religious parties who believe for rligious reasons that all of the historical Holy Land belongs to the tribes of israel.
The old city of Jerusalem was on the Jordainian(Palestinian) side of the line before 1967 and certainly given its significance, no Israeli government is going to cede it. The Palestinians, oddly, are equally reluctant to compromise. The Israelis have implemented a series of policies to make Jerusalem and its environs de facto part of israel - ringing it with Israeli settlements, subsidizing people to move there… and making continued occupation of Arab areas difficult. (building permits and land sales or inheritances, especially to non-resident Arabs, is pretty much impossible).
From what I read… So if the real owner fled in 1967 and cannot get back into Israel, when he dies his property is considered “abandoned” if the heir is not resident in Israel, and they cannot sell the land to another Arab. Abandoned property can be claimed by an Israeli organization. Arabs born in occupied Jerusalem are not considered Israeli citizens, even though Israel has claimed Jerusalem is Israeli territory. To be balanced in describing the situation, any Arab who sells to an Israeli is murdered by Arab fanatics, so it’s not a fun place to be in.
The short answer though, is that the government subsidizes the cost of settlement housing. In Israel proper, land is at a premium and housing is out of the reach of many, especially less well off immigrants from places like Russia.
I don’t think this can really be discussed without getting into politics. Moving to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
We used to (maybe still do?) have a poster here who is a settler - I believe he or she did an “Ask the…” thread awhile ago.
That the process made the West American. But settlement will never make the West Bank Israeli, that is, Jews will never be a majority there or anywhere near a majority, there are just not enough of them relative to the Palestinians.
I suppose the first wave of settlers, back in the '60s and '70s, might have had illusions to the contrary. Maybe they hoped the Pals would get disgusted and leave. And no doubt some did, but it changed nothing.
As said, if you don’t pay anything for the land, housing is cheap.
Despite what you see on the news, the vast majority of Israelis go about daily life without living in a low-level battleground. Many parts of the disputed areas are political hot potatoes, so you hear about them a lot on the news, but they are not dangerous. Many of these “settlements” are small cities, which are located a few miles (or sometimes just a few hundred yards) beyond the “green line” (the ceasefire line of 1967) but are an easy commute to larger cities nearby. Housing prices are signficantly cheaper, and the suburban lifestyle can be pretty good.
As a very very rough analogy… compare the OP to asking why New Yorkers back in the 1980s liked to live in a “low level battleground”. The answer is that things look different from up close.
Crime and violence was a serious issue in NY of the 80’s.
But some problems that seem -to an outsider- impossible to live with , are actually–for the locals— easier to deal with, because they know a lot more than you see in 60-second news clips.
(on edit: when I started typing this, this thread was still in GQ, so I kept all politics out of my post. Too bad it can’t stay that way. 
)
Because people are greedy and want what doesn’t belong to them.
I’m not particularly interested in what makes Israeli settlers park themselves on Arab land, all I care about is that they stop doing it, and that the Israeli government comes in to bulldoze their houses.
What land has been “ceded” by Israel to “Palestine”?
Israel doesn’t even recognize “Palestine” and still proclaims the West Bank to be “Judea and Samaria”.
Also, keep in mind what you may view as a “settler” and what others may view as one are quite different. To many if not most Palestinians all the Israelis are “settlers”.
It’s an extraordinarily complicated subject in which both sides have been victims and victimizers as well as pawns by outsiders who pretend to care about them but neither care nor know much about them, their conflict or their causes.
How could they have? A state can only make a treaty with a state, and Palestine is recognized as such by nobody.
But states can make agreements with non-governmental organizations. Israel holds negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. Any agreements coming from such negotiations would have force very similar to a treaty. It might not be a “treaty” in the most formal definition, but it can still be a valid contract between two entities.
That’s the idea, anyway, of the roadmap to peace. Get some kind of agreement with somebody, and hope it works for a while.
And is there such an agreement where Israel “ceded” parts of the WB to Palestine? And, since then, have settlers moved into those areas?
And I suspect that one day Israel will feel as much remorse and embarrassment as we feel towards the American Indians
Where did you hear that Arabs born in a East Jerusalem weren’t considered Israeli citizens?
Also Israel annexed East Jerusalem a while ago so there’s no need for them to make it “de facto” part of Israel.
The Arabs of East Jerusalem have all been offered citizenship but have, almost to the man, refused for understandable reasons.
That would only work if Israelis believed the Palestinians were there first. They don’t. They think, rightly wrongly it’s the homeland of the Jews and they were there first.
Beyond that, when half of all Israelis were descendants of people treated vastly worse by Muslims for centuries such beliefs are unlikely.
In his Strangers from a Different Shore, Professor Ron Takaki discussed how Korean American leaders were some of the most ardent supporters of the “detention” of Japanese Americans, to the point of organizing demonstrations cheering as they were hauled off to the camps.
I’ve yet to meet any Korean Americans remotely upset or even aware of that and suspect we’re as likely to find Sephardis in Israel have fairly similar attitudes.
The political power in both Israel and Palestine lies with maintaining the fundamental struggle for dominance. Israelis settle in the disputed region because they can, and they see it as an advantage for their side.
To a certain extent, but it’s largely about blackmailing the dovish Israelis.
Yitzhak Shamir was once famously asked in the early 90s if he regretted putting settlers on the West Bank and he said(quoting from memory) “absolutely not. If we’d done it right, by now we’d have a million Jews in Judea and Samaria and there would be no talk of a Palestinian State.”
The Israelis will never allow any Israeli citizens to be ruled by Palestinian authorities because neither side has any illusions what would happen to them.
Yitzhak Shamir must have been tripping balls, with the serious cough syrup, if ever he said that.