The council was founded in the 1980s[1] as the successor to Gush Emunim ("Bloc of the Faithful"),[2] a religious Zionist movement advocating Jewish settlement in territories captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.
Yisrael Harel [he] was active in this movement, and was a co-founder of the Yesha Foundation as well as founder editor of Nekuda, a monthly journal for Israeli settlers.
The report found that settlers had constructed 105 illegal outposts, over half of which were built on land that did not belong to the state, in collusion with government ministries and other public bodies.
This met with opposition from a group of young religious Zionist activists called Dor Hemshech, ("the Continuing Generation"), who lay down in front of bulldozers sent to do the work in protest.
The secretary-general of Israeli pacifist organization Peace Now, Yariv Oppenheimer, said that Wallerstein was no moderate, having been a major force behind the illegal expansion of settlements.
[7] In May 2023, Yesha reported that by October 2022 over half a million Israeli settlers were living in the West Bank, which comprised 5.2 percent of the total population of Israel.
[17] The stated aims of the Yesha Council are "to promote Israeli communities in Judea, Samaria[b] and the Jordan Valley as the heart of the Bible Land and the birthplace of the Jewish people and its heritage".
[21] In July 2005, when Ariel Sharon was prime minister, the Knesset voted against delaying its withdrawal of troops and settlers from all 21 Gaza settlements, as well as four of the 120 in the West Bank, due to start the following month.
[31][33] The project organiser, Ayelet Shaked, of Israel Sheli, said in a radio interview that the information had to be reliable and meet Wikipedia rules.
[35] At a speech at Tel Aviv University, when accepting his Dan David Prize in May 2015, Wales insisted to avoid conflicts of interest is to provide as many facts as possible while maintaining neutrality, aiming to overwhelm any chance of bias and imbuing political ideology.