Legal Structure
Legally, a community settlement operates as a cooperative in which all residents must be members. To enforce the restrictions on reselling property, property on a community settlement is formally not sold, but rather leased. The land of the entire settlement is owned by one entity (usually the Jewish National Fund through the Israel Land Administration), which leases out individual plots only to members of the cooperative. In that sense, a community settlement is much like a town-sized housing cooperative.
The residents cooperative may also own and operate property and businesses, and this is often used for keeping certain public facilities, such as preschool, synagogues, grocery stores, sport facilities, youth clubs, swimming pools, etc., in the hands of the entire community. However, unlike a kibbutz or a moshav, the economic cooperation between residents is very loose - most residents work outside the settlement, and residents only pay minimal property taxes to the cooperative to help maintain the town and its public facilities.
Note that despite a popular misconception, the mere existence of community-owned facilities is not what differentiates community settlements from ordinary towns, as most ordinary towns also have the same types of facilities - preschool, synagogues, sport centers and sometimes even swimming pools - owned and operated by the town. Likewise, the mere existence of a democratic body of residents which makes decisions and organizes events for the whole community is not a defining feature of community settlements: Ordinary towns also have their own local governments which are democratically elected by their residents.
Most community settlements are small, with no more than several hundred residents, and are therefore too small to form their own separate formal municipalities. Instead, the residents' cooperative is recognized by the state of Israel as a local committee. Several such local committees can, for example, form together a regional council, which is one of the three types of local government in Israel. In practice, the regional council often has more impact on the resident's life than the cooperative of their own settlement: It is the regional council which will normally run schools, build roads, collect property taxes, and even run its own screening process.
Read more about this topic: Community Settlement (Israel)
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