Word: lands
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...wasn't always so. After the Six-Day War in 1967, two groups of then rare (now commonplace) religious nationalists settled one small site each in the Galilee and Efrat. At the time, the Israeli government had no intention of settling seized Arab land and sheepishly described the settlements as military bases. Over the years, though, Israeli governments of all political persuasions have supported colonizing the West Bank - providing money, building permits and water and sewage services, as well as constructing special settlers-only roads. The number of settlers has grown fast in the past 15 years, as Israeli troops...
...Palestinian control, ceding major settlements for the first time in 30 years. For the settlers, who frequently justify their presence as sanctioned by God, that act was a benchmark provocation and - in the view of religious nationalists - a divine repudiation of Israel's failure to settle yet more land. The government compensated each of the Gaza families with up to $400,000, but the money is of little interest to Sharon Katz and others in Efrat. They intend to stay...
...Nablus, settler Itay Zar, 33, lives in a two-room shanty with his wife and their five children, above a stretch of road at risk from Palestinian snipers. Zar's father, Moshe Zar, is one of the biggest - and therefore most despised by Palestinians - Jewish buyers of Arab land in the West Bank. Zar grew up in the West Bank. His outpost - named Havat Gilad after an elder brother killed by Palestinians - consists of a dozen shabby metal shacks and trailers inhabited by 20 families, with 40 to 50 children among them. A plastic slide and swing set stand...
...miles from the Katz home, Naim Sarras, 49, a Christian Palestinian farmer, vehemently disputes the claim that Arabs arrived only in the 1970s. He displays a long row of grapevines with thick trunks, and papers from the Ottoman era that he says prove his family has farmed the land for 150 years. He can no longer sell much of his produce because the Israeli government requires him to label it PRODUCT OF ISRAEL and the Palestinian Authority forbids that. But he can't afford to leave the fields fallow - and open to Israeli confiscation. Three Sarras brothers and a cousin...
...national narrative sounds rather familiar. "I would love it that the little outposts someday have their own playgrounds and Little League," Sharon Katz says. "Israel shouldn't leave any hilltop! How did communities start out in the American West? With one log cabin. When we bought this land, it was a rocky hillside. Look what it looks like today...