ABSTRACT
From the War of 1948 until the Six Day War in 1967, Judea and Samaria were cut off from Israel by the Israel-Jordanian armistice lines. The two regions forming an integral part of cis-Jordanian Palestine have thus been deprived of their contacts with the adjacent Coastal Plain and Gaza Strip as well of their outlet to the Mediterranean. Their sole remaining contacts were with the Kingdom of Jordan (Fig. I). To adapt to these enforced and unnatural political conditions, both the rural and urban settlement structure had to undergo far-reaching changes, which it is intended in this article to describe and analyse against the physical, economic and social background of the area.
