While a small number of Israelis want their country to hold on to Judea and Samaria at all costs, and another minority want to cede these territories as quickly as possible, the majority, according to Haviv Rettig Gur, are themselves of two minds over what seems to be an intractable problem. The internal tensions go back to the very strategy that created the West Bank settlements in the first place:
The new settlements [founded after the Six-Day War] ran roughly along the contours of the “Allon Plan,” developed by [the Israeli general Yigal] Allon, who had urged the conquest of the West Bank in 1948. The plan sought to strike a balance between the two incompatible aims with which the Israeli cabinet had wrestled twenty years earlier: to claim areas that would mitigate the perpetual threat to Israel’s narrow north-south corridor while leaving intact and unclaimed a large, contiguous Arab-majority territory that could someday become a Palestinian state.
In practice, that meant relatively modest steps, such as establishing well-defended hamlets along the Jordan River whose reservists-turned-farmers could hold an enemy army at bay in an emergency, or expanding the most vulnerable and precious of Israel’s cities, Jerusalem, to encompass the hills that before the war had threatened it on all sides. Even today, most of the settlers live in a circle around Jerusalem or in towns placed as buffers around the main highways leading to the capital. . . .
When diplomats in Washington, London, or elsewhere wonder about Israel’s intentions—when they complain that Netanyahu is lying either about his support for Palestinian statehood or about his support for settlements, because how can he support both?—they are overlooking the most important fact of Israel’s position. Since Israel’s earliest days, the West Bank has meant both secure boundaries and mortal danger, a homecoming to the landscapes of Jewish and biblical history and a potentially disastrous intertwining with a foreign people.
Read more on Times of Israel: http://www.timesofisrael.com/as-trump-era-begins-what-does-israel-actually-want-in-the-west-bank/