Jerusalem - Nearly half a million of Israel's 7.5-million population live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, but they live there for vastly different reasons. Although under international law all settlements are illegal, in Israel many people delineate different kinds:
Almost 200,000 Israelis live in Jewish neighbourhoods of Jerusalem such as Gilo, built within the city limits, but over the "green line" separating Israel from the West Bank and therefore on occupied land.
Israel claims these neighbourhoods as an integral part of its self-declared capital. The international community regards them as being the same as other settlements.
Most of their inhabitants do not live there for ideological reasons, but rather because they offer somewhat cheaper apartments in a city plagued by rising rents and a housing shortage. For the residents, there is no feeling of living in a settlement, because no physical demarcation separates them from the rest of the city, whose centre is only a short urban bus ride away.
Even cheaper housing can be found in the settlement blocks near the city. These blocks, such as Ma'aleh Adumim and Gush Etzion, are outside the municipal boundaries, but also an easy commute.
Israel wants to keep the blocks as part of a future peace deal and previous premiers have offered a land swap as compensation.
But Palestinians complain the settlements in and around the city are continuing to expand and are slowly eating away at the East Jerusalem they want as the capital of their future state, more so since building permits in Jerusalem's Arab neighbourhoods are hard to come by.
The settlements in and near Jerusalem include also immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who are oblivious to the political ramifications, but live there for financial reasons.
The most ideological, hardline settlers do not live near Jerusalem and the green line, but in settlements deeper in the West Bank.
To the most extreme among these West Bank settlers, the previous government of centrist politician Ehud Olmert was "Bolshevik," the Israeli police were "Nazis" and Israel's supreme court a "left-wing stronghold."
Since it captured the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 war, Israel has built some 121 "formal" settlements in the occupied territory, claiming a historical link to the land.
The last formal settlement, Modi'in Illit south-west of Jerusalem, was built by the Israeli government in 1996, a few years after the Oslo accords, which launched the current, stalled, peace process supposed to culminate in a two-state solution to the conflict.
Since then, settlers have independently - without formal government approval - established dozens more improvised settlements, known as unauthorized outposts. Currently, some 100 of them are spread on hilltops throughout the West Bank.
Despite a pledge in 2003 to uproot most of the outposts, Israel has removed only a handful. Israel's attempts to remove them triggers a cat and mouse game of radical settler youths resisting the Israeli military and returning the very next day to rebuild the outpost.
Most settlers are religious nationalists, who vote for parties ranging from Premier Benjamin Netanyahu's hardline but mainstream Likud, to more radical parties, including the National Union, the Jewish Home, and Israel Our Home of Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister who himself lives in a settlement.
According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, the number of Jewish settlers (excluding East Jerusalem) in the West Bank has more than doubled from 140,000 in 1996, to almost 300,000 today.
They live among 2.4 million Palestinians, whose movement is severely restricted because of hundreds of military obstacles set up to protect the settlers against attacks by Palestinian militants.
