Off a rough, paved road atop a mountain, on the thin stucco wall of a trailer home, black graffiti proclaims “Private Jewish land.” And underneath, in red, “Migron.” The trailer home is among dozens in Israel’s largest settlement outpost, deep in the central West Bank and not far from the Palestinian metropolis of Ramallah. To reach Migron, cars must exit a main highway and ascend a twisting road that barely has room for two lanes. Founded more than a decade ago, Migron remains …More

A British bank will pay $350 million to a regulator, after illicit dealings with Iran. Standard Chartered was accused by New York’s top banking regulator, the Department of Financial Services, of concealing Iranian transactions in order to gain certain fees. The number amounted to 60,000 instances, and the DFS said the transactions added up to $250 billion between 2001 and 2010. The cover up “left the US financial system vulnerable to terrorists, weapons dealers, drug kingpins and corrupt …More

A European Union document lists parts of central Israel as settlements. Areas of Modi’in are named in the literature, meant as a guide on what settlements are not included in the EU’s free-trade agreement with Israel. Three separate zip codes from the municipality are listed as non-approved settlement locations, even though Modi’in is an undisputed Israeli territory—not a settlement. The city merged with Maccabim-Reut in 2003, and is known as Modi’in-Maccabim-Reut today. It is …More

From an overlooking road, the district of this desert town called Nitzan B seems like a unified mass of identical red-roofed single-family homes, reminiscent of a crowded American postwar Levittown. “From far away it looks nice,” says Galit Kakon, a Nitzan B resident. Like the rest of the district’s 600 families, Kakon used to live in Gush Katif, the bloc of Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip that Israel evacuated seven years ago this week in an operation called "the disengagement." Nitzan …More

Jewish youths from the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar tied up and beat a Palestinian man shot by the settlement's emergency response team, an Israeli military investigation found. The military confiscated the emergency response team's weapons after the incident, according to reports. The incident occurred May 26 during a clash between settlers and Palestinians from a nearby village, as both sides accused the other of setting fire to nearby fields. The Palestinian man was shot by the response team, then captured …More

Five apartment buildings in the Ulpana neighborhood on the outskirts of the Beit El settlement in the West Bank will be relocated under a plan by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The five apartment buildings, home to about 30 families, would be moved several hundred yards to land that is not privately owned by Palestinians, under the plan Netanyahu presented to his Cabinet on Sunday. The plan to relocate the actual buildings, instead of razing them and rebuilding new ones, also would save the …More

Israel's Cabinet will meet in a special session to discuss legalizing the Ulpana outpost in the West Bank, despite a Supreme Court ruling calling for its demolition. The meeting will be held Friday, a day after National Union Party head Yaakov Katz and Zevulun Orlev of the HaBayit-HaYehudi (Jewish Home) Party each said that he would introduce a bill next week to retroactively authorize the apartments. Earlier this week, the Supreme Court rejected the Israeli government's request to delay the razing of the …More

Israel’s Foreign Ministry responded with uncharacteristic harshness to European criticism of the country’s settlement policy Wednesday, saying that European countries are "bound to lose their credibility" and are making themselves "irrelevant.” "Israel calls on the European members of the U.N. Security Council to support the resumption of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians under the Quartet plan, adopted by Israel despite its rejection by the PA," the Foreign Ministry statement …More

The U.S. has asked the Israeli government to initiate another settlement freeze in Judea and Samaria in order to help America's effort to thwart the Palestinian push for independence at the U.N. and expedite the possibility of resuming peace talks, Army Radio reported Thursday. Israel stopped settlement building for 10 months in 2010, the first nine months of which the Palestinian Authority refused to return to talks, calling the freeze "irrelevant." However, as the freeze was entering its final phase, the PA …More

Settlement leader Hanan Porat died on Monday. The 67-year-old cancer sufferer was hospitalized on the eve of the Jewish New Year. In 1974, Porat founded the now defunct movement Gush Emunim, which was committed to settling the entirety of Israel. Porat was a leading figure in the settlement movement ever since its launch following Israel’s conquering of the West Bank, Gaza strip and East Jerusalem in 1967. Porat helped to establish the first settlement in the West bank on the site of a kibbutz captured by …More

Israel's decision was met by a chorus of criticism led by its ally, the United States. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said "we are deeply disappointed" with what she called a "counterproductive" step. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas applied at the U.N. on Friday for full Palestinian membership, a step opposed by Israel and the United States, which urged him to resume peace negotiations. The so-called Quartet of international mediators -- the United States, the European Union, Russia and the …More

The root cause of Middle Eastern turmoil, according to a broadconsensus of the international media and the consideredcerebrations of the deepest-thinking movie stars, is Israelisettlers in what are described as the "occupied territories" on theWest Bank of the Jordan River. Even such celebrated and ferventsupporters of Israel as Alan Dershowitz and Bernard-Henri Lvy putthe settlers beyond the pale of their Zionist sympathies. Removethe settlers, according to these sage analyses of the scene, andthe problems of the …More