Jewish Settlements Archival Project

Establishment of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories has been Israel’s largest national undertaking of the last half century but has attracted little scholarly research. The purpose of the Settlement Archival Research Project is to facilitate access to official records. The Taub Center for Israel Studies (TCIS) has identified almost 12,000 relevant files held by the Israel State Archives (ISA), the Israel Defense Forces Archives (IDFA), Knesset plenary debates and committee records, and records of the Israeli Supreme Court and lower courts. Over 8,000 of these files have already been catalogued, and the cataloguing continues.

The following research options offer different perspectives into the collection. None is perfect; together, the three offer powerful access to some 1,500,000 pages of archival documentation. With the exception of the Nevo legal files, the scanned records can also be viewed and downloaded on the websites of origin.

1. The Faculty Digital Archive. The catalogue includes descriptive metadata for each file, including a list of keywords. Users of the TCIS catalogue will be searching on this metadata, and can see the full scanned files.

2. The TCIS Google Pinpoint database is an Artificial Intelligence-enabled tool which seeks to identify entities such as people organizations and places throughout the entire content of the archival files. Users will be searching the entire content of almost all the files.

3. The full lists of files and agencies included in the project can be seen on the Taub Center Website. These lists offer an overview of the collection, with little metadata and none of the documents themselves.