The issues of the Israeli occupation of the territories of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank of the River Jordan (referred to by Israel as Judea and Samaria), the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights region, and the issue of Jewish settlers since 1967 has been of great relevance in the conflict since 1967. The significance is most easily assessed in judging its relevance in regards to each involved party. These are the Israelis, Palestinian Arabs, non-Palestinian Arabs and the superpowers (USA and USSR).
The significance of teh occupied territories to Israel differs from group to group in Israeli society. From the conquest of the occupied territories by Israel during the Six Day War, small numbers of Israeli settlements began to appear. The settler-movement began for many reasons. The first is that are that the territories, especially those of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, are a part of 'Biblical Israel', allegedly granted to the Israelites by god as their Holy Land (a significant proportion of the Israeli population are termed by historian Thomas Friedman to be Religious Zionists, who feel that the Messiah will come once the Jewish people have earned the Holy Land back). The second is the sheer lack of land inside of the accepted borders of Israel. The third cause of the settler-movement is mass Jewish migration to Israel from the late 1980s onwards as a consequence of the Israeli air-drops in Ethopia, in which the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) conducted missions to that country in order to air-transport Ethopian Jews to Israel (under the 1950 Law of Return anybody who can prove their Jewish descendence to the Israeli government is automatically granted Israeli citizenship), and the 800,000 Soviet Jews who migrated to Israel with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the freedom of movement from the former Soviet states. These new Israelis require a place to settle in Israel, and cheap housing is not in short supply if one is willing to live in the West Bank.
