Israel’s settlement policies and their archival record
On June 11th 1967 Israel suddenly controlled tracts of territory five times its size. Much of this was the desert of Sinai, arid, remote and inhospitable to large-scale settlement. The rest could potentially be populated by Israelis, whether alongside and among the local Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, in the sparsely settled coastal regions of the Sinai and the semi-desert of the Jordan Valley, or in the largely empty fields of the Golan Heights. Discussion began even before the guns of the Six Day War went silent, and the policy of settling continues to this day. Establishment of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories has been the largest national undertaking of the last half century but has attracted very little scholarly research. The purpose of the Settlement Research Project is to facilitate access to official records so that this lacuna can be corrected.
Since 2018 TCIS has been pressuring the Israel State Archives (ISA) and the Israel Defense Forces Archives (IDFA) to abide by the Israeli Law of Archives (1955), and open the thousands of files in their collections which record the settlement-related activity of Israel’s government. The ISA has partially complied. By May 2023 it opened some 8,000 of the 12,000 ordered files. The IDFA opened a meager 126 files. The Knesset, unlike the archives, has put protocols of all plenary sessions online, but with no index. The project has examined every Knesset session since June 1967 and identified the circa 2,000 occasions where settlement policy was discussed, as well as relevant protocols of about 500 committee meetings and documents from the Knesset Research Center.
Almost all these files have been cataloged so they can be retrieved by content as well as provenance, and the work of cataloging continues.
TCIS has also employed legal researchers to identify court documents and other legal files in the Nevo Legal Database and on the website of Israel's Supreme Court.