Life And Times - Political History

When Jordan conquered the territory in 1948, King Abdallah angered most Palestinians by annexing the region instead of creating a separate state as the UN partition resolution stipulated. Occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War, the West Bank today is neither autonomous nor officially annexed by Israel, but under Israeli military administration.

Israeli civilian law does not apply to non-Israeli citizens, but it does apply to some 110,000 Israeli Jews who have settled in the West Bank since its seizure in 1967- Launched by Labor governments eager to establish Israeli presence in areas of strategic importance such as the Jordan valley, the settlement project became an ideological cornerstone for right-wing Likud governments since 1977; motivated not only by security considerations, but also by a nationalist claim to an area they see as the heart of Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel), the settlement movement expanded greatly under government ideological and financial auspice to include a wide array of settlements, from large suburban towns near Jerusalem to minuscule mobile-home communities tucked between Arab villages.