Negotiation Journal April 2005 171 10.1111/j.0748-4526.2005.00055.x © 2005 Blackwell Publishing Israeli Settlement Activity in the West Bank and Gaza: A Brief History Karen Tenenbaum and Ehud Eiran The impetus to claim and settle the areas known as the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) originated in the aftermath of Israel’s surprising victory over Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the Six-Day War in 1967 (Gazit 2003: 241). Before this war, there was virtually no domestic political pressure within Israel to expand the boundaries of the state. Herut, a right-wing party and the Likud party’s predecessor, held to a traditional aspiration that the Jewish state should extend to “both banks” of the Jordan River, but by the mid-1960s only a small minority of Israelis held this view. The Six-Day War’s outcome surprised and elated Israelis, and laid the foundation for a fundamental change in attitude. Israel suddenly found itself with a vastly, unexpectedly enlarged territory, and various political and reli- gious movements developed ideological, political, and financial resources to fill it. Immediately after the war, Israel annexed East Jerusalem, and there was a broad consensus that Jerusalem should become the undivided capital of Israel. Steps were taken to encourage Jews to move to these newly annexed neighborhoods of Jerusalem. However, our focus is on settlements activities in the West Bank and Gaza, not the new Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem proper. 1 One way to understand the history of the settlements is to distinguish two broad time periods: the period between 1967 and 1977, when the Labor party was in power, and the period since 1977, when Likud formed its first government. Karen Tenenbaum is a student at Harvard Law School. She worked as a researcher at the Program on Negotiation from 2003 to 2004. Her e-mail address is ktenenba@law.harvard.edu. Ehud Eiran is a senior visiting fellow at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. candidate in politics at Brandeis University. He previously served as an assistant to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s foreign policy advisor. His e-mail address is eeiran@law.harvard.edu.