A community settlement (, Yishuv Kehilati) is a type of village in Israel and the West Bank. While in an ordinary town anyone may buy property, in a community settlement the village's residents are organized in a cooperative. They have the power to approve or veto a sale of a house or a business to any buyer. Residents of a community settlement may have a particular shared ideology, religious perspective, or desired lifestyle which they wish to perpetuate by accepting only like-minded individuals. For example, a family-oriented community settlement that wishes to avoid becoming a retirement community may choose to accept only young married couples as new residents. As distinct from the traditional Israeli development village, typified by the kibbutz and moshav, the community settlement emerged in the 1970s as a non-political movement for new urban settlements in Israel. But it essentially took shape as a new typology for settling the West Bank and the Galilee as part of the goal of establishing a 'demographic balance' between Jews and Arabs. In practice this means establishing Jewish-only settlements, who have the right to refuse Arabs from moving to them. Israeli courts have approved this policy in its ruling as well. Though the law explicitly prohibits explicit discrimination against members of other social groups, it permits the admissions committees to reject candidates on such vague grounds as “unsuitability to the community’s social life” or its “social-cultural fabric” or to “unique characteristics of the community as defined in its bylaws.” An attorney of Adalah, described the ruling and its implications as the following In 2013, there were 118 community settlements with total population of 84,800 residents. History The first community settlement in Israel was Neve Monosson, in the Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area, which was established in 1953. From 1977, the Likud led government supported expansion of Israeli Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Within a few years, community settlements were the most common localities in those regions. In 1981, the first such town, Timrat was established in the Galilee region. According to Gershom Gorenberg, the term was adopted for a type of West Bank Israeli settlement by a 'maverick planner' in the Gush Emunim movement. The settlement of Ofra was to form the model for later community settlements, whose founders wished to create a community that broke with the socialist model, one where people could farm privately, run businesses, or