Sharon Laments 'Occupation' and Israeli Settlers Shudder It has been, for Israel's settlers, a most unsettling week. First the Israeli government endorsed the idea of eventually creating a Palestinian state, giving qualified backing to an American-backed peace plan. Then Mr. Sharon criticized what he called Israel's "occupation" in the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, captured in the 1967 war. This is a right-wing Israeli government, and Mr. Sharon is a visionary and engineer of the settlement movement, which since the war has moved more than 200,000 Israelis into the West Bank and Gaza. Yet in a conflict in which every word can be inspected for political freight, in which names for everything from the city streets to the violence itself are contested, Mr. Sharon has adopted a term � "occupation" � that is central to the lexicon of Israeli doves and Palestinians. For settlers, it was almost as though President Bush had described Texas as American-occupied territory.� Sharon Laments 'Occupation' and Israeli Settlers Shudder