Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Netanyahu Aide Pushing Plan To Avert Diplomatic Pressure on Settlements

Gabi Kadosh, the prime minister’s adviser on settlement issues, is advancing a plan to exempt officially urban settlements from being obliged to publicize tenders for marketing lands. The goal is to reduce the diplomatic pressures that results from publicizing such tenders.

In the West Bank, as in Israel, there are two types of communities – urban and rural. The 33 urban communities in the West Bank include the large cities, of course, but also smaller towns with only a few thousand residents. Some of these were meant to be small towns from the start, while others were planned as larger cities but failed to grow. Thus, for example, the settlements of Eli and Har Adar both have 3,500 residents, but Eli is classified as a rural community while Har Adar is an urban one.

One of the differences between the two types of towns is the way the land is managed. In rural settlements, the land is allocated to the World Zionist Organization, which in turn allocates it to an NGO engaged in settlement activity like Amana, or to the relevant community’s cooperative association. The NGO privately selects residents, avoiding the need to issue a tender. In contrast, in urban settlements, the Israel Lands Administration must publish a tender for the plots, whether they be for individual construction or for multi-family units.

Read more at Haaretz.com.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.