The Settlements

Ken Taranto had been visiting Israel once or twice a year for seven years when he decided to visit

the settlement, Ma’ale Adumim, the first he had ever been to. He had seen the signs for it on the

highway from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea and could see clusters of apartment buildings on the

hilltops. Six months later Taranto and his family moved to Israel and he printed out a map of all the

settlements and began to research them. He learned there were six distinct regions of settlements

in the West Bank—Shomron, Binyamin, Gush Etzion, East Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley and the

Hebron Hills. They were of various densities and ages. There were small settlements with a few

hundred residents, some with a few thousand, and others with over ten or twenty thousand

people. There were also many unofficial settlements, called outposts, with populations made up of

a small number of families.