Abstract
The article provides an historical analysis of the considerations that informed planners in designing non-agricultural villages, termed 'urban' by planners and geographers, as the chief instruments for dispersing the Jewish population in the West Bank after the 1967 War. Since the beginning of Zionist colonization, agricultural communities, particularly the kibbutz and the moshav, were the preferred instruments of settlement. Arriving at the concept of the rurban village was a consequence of how Zionist planners interpreted the transformations and problems confronting rural settlements within the pre-1967 borders and the problems they anticipated they would encounter on the West Bank. In formulating a new model, planners had to take into account the economic basis for colonization which influenced plans for community structure and physical design. Moreover, they had to address strategic and defensive concerns which dictated the location of settlements and contributed to physical design as well. Security conceptions remained unchanged and continued to dictate the location of settlements; the proposed social and economic structure of colonization required innovative experimentation.
The rurban villages distributed across Judea and Samaria have become contemporary Israel's 'spearheads of the frontier'. The term, borrowed from the history of the American westward movement, designates urban settlements placed in advance of anticipated further colonization to hold the region until the arrival of additional population.