A dispatch from the West Bank in the international section of today's New York Times reports on a village of Jews in a place called Hamra. "If you ignore the messages of the barbed wire and the pistols on residents' hips, it is easy to sense the appeal of Hamra, which like other settlements is built on land Palestinians regard as stolen," the Times reports. This understates the Arab claims; it's not just the West Bank "settlements" that many Arabs regard incorrectly as being built on stolen land, but the entire state of Israel.
The same Times article reports, "after occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 war, Israel set about building settlements to give citizens a stake in holding the land." That's a distorted oversimplification of the reason Israel set about building in places like Hamra, which is in the Jordan Valley. It makes it sound as if a land-hungry government manipulated its citizens. In fact, the Israeli citizens who elect the government had a stake in preventing their country from being divided at its narrow waist by an invasion of tanks from Iraq and Jordan. Such a division would be a prelude to Israel's destruction, which was the stated aim of the neighboring Arab states. So the Israelis tried to gain some strategic depth by establishing a line of defense in the Jordan Valley.
The same Times article reports that a spokeswoman for the Jordan Valley Settlers Council "said that about 4,000 Israelis, in 680 families, lived in the valley at the beginning of the conflict." It's unclear what the Times or the spokeswoman mean by "the beginning of the conflict." Is that a reference to the beginning of the Arab-Israeli conflict? To the most recent round of Arab terrorist attacks? There's so much conflict and the reference is so vague that it's not particularly helpful to readers.