Community settlement

A community settlement (Hebrew: יישוב קהילתי, Yishuv Kehilati) is a type of town or village in Israel and in the West Bank.

In an ordinary town, anyone may buy property, but in a community settlement, the village's residents are organized in a cooperative and have the power to approve or to veto a sale of a house or a business to any buyer.

Residents of a community settlement may have a particular shared ideology, religious perspective or desired lifestyle, which they wish to perpetuate by accepting only like-minded individuals.

[1] However, it essentially took shape as a new typology for settling the West Bank and the Galilee as part of the goal of establishing a "demographic balance" between Jews and Arabs.

[5] According to Gershom Gorenberg, the term was adopted for a type of West Bank Israeli settlement by a 'maverick planner' in the Gush Emunim movement.

[6] A seminal role in the extension of the model into the Palestinian territories was played by the World Zionist Organization (WZO) and Amanah, Gush Emunim's settlement branch in the West Bank.

[1] Gush Emunim pushed this type of settlement, designed in dense networks, because it was best suited to hilly terrain, where agricultural and water resources were poor, and where the density of Palestinian habitation high.

[7] According to Elisha Efrat, Gush Emunim intended to establish Israeli Jewish settlement as an irreversible reality in the Palestinian territories.

[7] The concept was institutionalized in the Drobless Plan (1978) drawn up by the WZO, which set down the guidelines for thwarting the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank.

[1] The reevaluation and recognition of such settlements as cooperative associations was based on the ascendancy to government of the Likud party, which seconded the rapid growth of closed exurbs in which religious nationalists played a dominant role.

[citation needed] Each community settlement has its own selection process for admitting residents, together with mechanisms for monitoring all aspects of communal life, from religious observance and ideological rigour, to how one uses the land outside one's home.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel has claimed that this screening process is designed to deny membership to Arabs, and that sometimes Jews of specific ethnic or socio-economic groups are also discriminated against.

Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel issued a press release:[9] On 6 January 2009, the Supreme Court of Israel issued an order nisi (order to show cause) that compels the state to respond within 60 days to a petition filed by Adalah demanding the cancellation of admission committees in "community towns", which select among candidates who wish to live in these village.