The New York Times · 20 September 1991

CP-1991-055

Settlements, Born of War, Seen as Barrier to Peace

By DENNIS HEVESI

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What began as a Passover seder in occupied territory, less than a year after the 1967 Middle East war, would soon evolve into the Jewish settlement movement. It has been a contentious issue in Israeli-American relations for years, with President Bush only the latest American leader to be incensed by the settlements and to call them an obstacle to a possible Middle East peace.

On the eve of Passover in 1968, 73 religious Jews checked into the Park Hotel in the West Bank city of Hebron and announced that their seder, the ritual meal celebrating the exodus from slavery in Egypt, symbolized the return of Jews to the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria, their term for the West Bank.

There had been Jews in the West Bank for thousands of years — even after the Diaspora. But also, for centuries, there had been Palestinian Arabs. Conflict would come. “The true struggle between Palestinian Arabs and Jews started after World War I,” said Merle Thorpe Jr., president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace in Washington.

“At that point, 10 percent of the population of Palestine was Jewish,” Mr. Thorpe said, “and between 1920 and 1947, when the partition of Palestine was proposed by the United Nations, the Jewish population increased to about 31 percent.”

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