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.