This day in history 1977 - President Jimmy Carter's administration
denounced as illegal Israel's decision to establish three new settlements on the West Bank.
http://www.fmep.org/reports/special-reports/a-guide-to-israeli-settlements-in-the-occupied-territories/israeli-settlements-in-the-occupied-territories-a-guide
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Settlement--scores, almost one hundred years ago, in areas of the Land of Israel populated by Arabs and sometimes solely by Arabs--was it moral or immoral: Permitted or forbidden? One of the two. If it was moral then settlement near Nablus is moral. . . . There is no third way.
For Menachem Begin, who spoke these words in an address before the Israeli Knesset in May 1982, Jewish settlement throughout the "Land of Israel" was and remains an expression of the enduring vitality of Zionism and its moral vision. For Begin and many Israelis, there is no vital distinction between the Jewish settlements before the state was created in 1948 and those Israel has established in violation of international law in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem after the 1967 war. All Israeli governments, Labor and Likud, pursued settlements after 1967 in order to consolidate Israeli control over the occupied territories and prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state.
Settlements under Likud were designed to bring about a "demographic transformation" of the territories and a Jewish majority there. The co-chairman of the World Zionist Organization's Settlement Department, Mattityahu Drobless, noted that the Likud plan "will enable us to bring about the dispersion of the [Jewish] population from the densely populated urban strip of the coastal plain eastward to the presently empty [of Jews] areas of Judea and Samaria."
The Government of Israel has used legal ruses to confiscate Palestinian land for settlements. It has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars annually for the development and expansion of settlements in occupied territories. Settlement construction fluctuates between 2,000 and 5,000 housing units each year. By the end of 1985, the settler population in the West Bank and Gaza stood at 42,000, a 100 percent increase since 1982. By 1990, it stood at 76,000. In addition, 120,000 Israelis had settled in East Jerusalem, 10,000 more were in the Golan Heights, and 3,000 lived in Gaza.
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