Summary
The 1978 settlement plan by Mattiyahu Drobles that, in Makdisi’s account, revised the Allon Plan and guided Israeli government settlement policy through the 1980s and into the 1990s: where Allon had avoided the densely inhabited Palestinian mountain ridge, Drobles proposed settling it, implanting settlements as a belt around and within the Palestinian population — whom the plan calls a “minority” in their own majority territory — precisely so that population “will find it hard to create unification and territorial contiguity” (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.171-172).
Details
- The plan’s second phase of settlement, spearheaded by Gush Emunim and accelerated after Menachem Begin’s Likud came to power in 1977, emphasised the mountain ridge bisecting the West Bank, in and around the Palestinian cities there (PDF p.171).
- Drobles wrote: “settlement throughout the whole Land of Israel is for security and by right”; “A belt of settlements in strategic locations increases both internal and external security”; “therefore, the proposed settlement blocs are spread out as a belt surrounding the mountains, starting along the western slopes from north to south, and along the eastern slopes from south to north, within the minority population as well as surrounding it” (PDF p.171-172).
- Makdisi notes Drobles calls the Palestinians a “minority” even though they compose the majority of the West Bank’s population — their minoritization as a disenfranchised group within a greater Israel surrounding them on all sides (PDF p.172).
- Drobles on another occasion: “Being bisected by Jewish settlements,” “the minority population will find it hard to create unification and territorial contiguity.” Jewish settlements were thus to be implanted in order to maximise damage to the preexisting Palestinian communities, squeezing them ever inward (PDF p.172).
- Incorporating the plan’s suggestions, Israeli planning determined settlement locations and the linking road network partly to maximise that damage; the 1980s Master Plan points to the settlements along Road 60 as a way to contain the Arab population and create “a psychological wedge regarding the mountain ridge” (PDF p.173-174).
Related pages
Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, Allon Plan, Gush Emunim, Menachem Begin, Demographic problem