Communal settlement (Israel)

A community settlement (Hebrew: יישוב קהילתי‎‎, Yishuv Kehilati) is a type of village in Israel and the West Bank. While in an ordinary town anyone may buy property, in a community settlement the village's residents, who are organized in a cooperative, can veto a sale of a house or a business to an undesirable buyer. By this selection process, residents of a community settlement may have a particular shared ideology, religious perspective, or desired lifestyle which they wish to perpetuate by accepting only like-minded individuals. For example, a family-oriented community settlement that wishes to avoid becoming a retirement community may choose to accept only young married couples as new residents.

As distinct from the traditional Israeli development village typified by the kibbutz and moshav, the community settlement, though emerging in the 1970s as a non-political movement for new urban settlements in Israel, essentially took shape as a new typology for settling the West Bank and the Galilee as part of the aim of establishing a 'demographic balance' between Jews and Arabs.

In 2013, there were 118 community settlements with total population of 84,800 residents.

The first community settlement in Israel was Neve Monosson, in the Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area which was established in 1953. From 1977, the Likud led government supported expansion in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and in a few years, community settlements were the most common localities in those regions. In 1981, the first such town, Timrat was established in the Galilee region.

According to Gershom Gorenberg, the term was adopted for a type of West Bank Israeli settlement by a 'maverick planner' in the Gush Emunim movement with regard to the settlement of Ofra, which was to form the model for later community settlements, whose founders wished to create a community that broke with the socialist model, one where people could farm privately, run businesses, or use the exclusive exurb village to commute to work in the metropolis. All residents were to share an "ideological-social background", and planning envisaged nuclear family housing in an amenable natural ambiance. The sum total of people in any such community was envisaged as being restricted to no more than a few hundred families. A seminal role in the extension of the model into the Palestinian territories was played by the World Zionist Organization (WZO) and Amanah, Gush Emunim's settlement branch in the West Bank. Recognition of these exurbs as community settlements developed only gradually, since they differed from the standard establishmentarian norms of being 'cooperative' and 'productive'. Gush Emunim pushed this type of settlement, designed in dense networks, because it was best suited to hilly terrain, where agricultural and water resources were poor, and the density of Palestinian habitation high. Life was based on family networks and partial cooperation, adapted to housing white-collar people with jobs in Israel.

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