Afrasianet - Zaid Slim - On the afternoon of July 11, 1948, Lod, the city between Jaffa and Ramle, at a vital node of Palestine's roads and railways, was burdened with fear and refugees. Over the course of a few weeks, thousands of Palestinians poured into the city from neighboring villages that were emptied under the pressure of Zionist attacks, filling the houses with those uprooted from their homes, and the alleys were crowded with families carrying what was light and heavy of bereavement, while the city awaited its fate under a sky charged with bombardment and warnings.
Lod entered that moment surrounded by the accumulations of previous weeks. Jaffa and its villages fell, and the area of Lod and Ramle was cut off from the Palestinian perimeter, which opened the door to "Operation Danny", the Zionist plan that aimed to control Lod, Ramle, and Latrun and secure the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road. In the calculations of the Zionist leadership, Lod was a transportation node, an airport, a train station, and a geographical key to control the heart of Palestine. As for its people and refugees, it was the last remaining shelter before the open.
"In the Zionist leadership's calculations, Lod was a transportation node, an airport, a train station, and a geographical key to control the heart of Palestine."
As the offensive began, an armored force led by Officer Moshe Dayan, later the Israeli Minister of Defense, rushed into the streets of Lod in a lightning strike. The vehicles advanced amid bullets and dust, and panic spread from house to house, in the absence of organized military protection for the city and the interruption of supply to it under the Zionist siege. In that deadly vacuum, a final scattered and besieged resistance emerged, with little weapons and a will that knew it was fighting at the last edge of the city.
On July 12, Lod had practically fallen. Zionist forces were positioned around the heart of the city, a curfew was imposed, and men were invited to gather in the Great Mosque, Dahmash Mosque, and churches, while soldiers searched houses and threw bombs inside each other under the pretext of snipers. Hundreds of Palestinians took refuge in the Dahmash Mosque, thinking that the place was forbidden at the time of the collapse.
The courtyard and its surroundings turned into one of the most painful chapters of the Nakba, survivors testified of gunfire in and around the mosque, and sources indicated It is historical to the killing of dozens of people in it, and then the burning of the bodies of victims in the city's cemetery, in addition to hundreds of dead in the streets and neighborhoods of Lod.
At that moment, the order was issued that turned the fall of Lod and Ramle into one of the largest ethnic cleansing operations in the Palestine War. According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, Yigal Allon, commander of the Palmach forces and one of the leaders of the left-wing Ahdut Ha'Avoda party, asked David Ben-Gurion what should be done with the residents of the two cities, to which the leader of Labor Zionism and the founder of the occupation state later replied with a firm gesture from his hand: "Expel them." Afterwards, Yitzhak Rabin, a young Haganah officer and director of operations in Operation Dani, signed a military order stating, "The residents of Lod must be expelled quickly without regard to age."
Tens of thousands of Palestinians came out of Lod, Ramleh and their environs under the scorching July sun. They marched east toward Ramallah and the West Bank, carrying their children, their few belongings and the keys to houses they would never return. On the way, money and jewelry were snatched from those fleeing at checkpoints, and children, the elderly and women fell from thirst, exhaustion and heat. An Israeli military plane flew over their heads at a low altitude to push them to continue leaving, while the human line stretched over a rough road that turned into a march in Palestinian memory To die.
Forty-five years later (in 1993), Rabin himself stood on the threshold of the White House as Israel's prime minister, reaching out to shake hands with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in front of the world's lenses.
The scene was presented as the birth of a new era, and the leftist man who signed the order to expel the residents of Lod became a "man of peace" in the Western imagination, and then won the Nobel Prize alongside Arafat and Shimon Peres. Oslo was wrapped in the language of peace, and the major Palestinian issues were left out of the doorway: refugees, Jerusalem, sovereignty, borders, and the right of return.
The scene moved from the bullet to the document, and the Palestinian remained within the same equation, an incomplete land, a deferred right, and sovereignty that hinged on the will of the power that uprooted him.
Rabin's biography, from Lod to Oslo, serves as an entry point for a deeper understanding of Israeli politics. The Zionist left, which presented itself to the world in the language of socialism and modernity, led the Nakba, planned the displacements, built the first tools of control, and imposed military rule on Palestinians who remained within the borders of the occupying state.
The Zionist right, which later inherited the project, continued the same path in a more crude language, calling for religion, nationalism, supremacy, and historical right. The hard-right parties were not satisfied with Rabin's political moves and he was assassinated by a Jew of his own race Eventually in 1995.
The repeated talk of a moderate Israeli left and a far-right becomes a misleading entry point into understanding the essence of the Palestinian question. Differences within Israeli politics are real on the issues of governance, economy, religion, and the form of the state, but they narrow to a great extent when it comes to the Palestinians.
The right of return is rejected, full Palestinian sovereignty is postponed or denied, Jerusalem is pushed out of any serious negotiations, and the settlements move like a reality on the ground before becoming an item on the table.
Today, in the wake of the events of October 7, 2023 and the subsequent war of extermination on Gaza, the Israeli occupation is entering a new electoral moment that is marketed as a confrontation between the right wing of Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and a more rational and moderate opposition as presented to world public opinion.
The Palestinian question goes beyond the names of the candidates and the shape of the next coalition. From Lod in 1948 to Gaza today, from Ben-Gurion to Netanyahu, and from Rabin to the current opposition leaders, there is one thread in the structure of the project Zionism, and a broad consensus on the denial of Palestinian rights, its facades change from one election to another, and its pillars remain stronger than the ballot boxes.
While some are waiting for the election results as if they are able to turn a different page, Palestinian memory says something harsher and clear: faces are changing, while the wound that began in Lod is still open in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and the refugee camps to this day.
The Zionist Left. From Ben-Gurion to the Nakba.
On July 7, 1937, the British Royal Peel Commission, a commission of inquiry formed by London in the aftermath of the Great Palestinian Revolt, recommended the partition of Palestine between Arabs and Jews.
The recommendation opened a heated debate within the Zionist movement, between those who saw the proposed state as a part of Palestine and those who preferred to wait for a broader moment. Less than three months later, on October 5 of the same year, David Ben-Gurion, then chairman of the Executive Committee of the Jewish Agency, sat down and sat down with the most prominent faces of Zionism Labor writes a letter to his son Amos, who lives in a kibbutzim, in which Ben-Gurion seemed clearer than many in locating the division within the Zionist strategy.
He wrote to his son that a Jewish state on a part of Palestine was a beginning, not an end, and that any increase in power helped to acquire the entire land. On the face of it, the letter seemed to be a private family letter, but it clearly showed the vision of the man who would later lead the establishment of the occupying state. Ben-Gurion's acceptance of partition was a stage in a longer path, not a final settlement with the Palestinian people, the land that was gained was given power, power opened the way to a wider land, and the emerging state was transformed from An entity is limited to a tool to complete the project.
This letter provides us with an important entry point for deconstructing one of the most entrenched images of Western discourse about Israel: the image of the Zionist left as a moderate, rational, and pragmatic current in the face of a more extreme religious and nationalist right. Labor Zionism, represented by the Workers of the Land of Israel Party (Mabay), the Labor Party, the Histadrut – a labor union founded by socialist movements in 1920 – and the kibbutzim, has been presented as the current that built the modern state, its institutions, its unions, and its socialist model. However, this image hides the fact that it is the current He led the settlement project, planned the displacement, built the tools of control, and transformed the Nakba from a military incident into a permanent political and legal structure.
The Mapai Party (and its successor, the Labor Party), founded by Ben-Gurion in 1930 from a merger of Zionist labor currents, was the dominant force in the Jewish community in Palestine before 1948, and then in the occupation state until the rise of the Likud in 1977. Under his leadership, labor Zionism transformed into an integrated system of political, economic, and military institutions.
The Histadrut (Federation of Trade Unions) managed the economy and labor, while the kibbutzim (cooperative settlements) established settlement in the land, the Jewish National Fund collected and guarded the land in the name of the Jewish people, while the military organizations protected this expansion and turned it into a reality by force when needed.
Slogans such as "conquest of the land" and "conquest of labor" were at the heart of this experiment. On the surface, slogans of construction, production, and collective labor seemed to be in practice, but in practice, they meant an orderly replacement of the Palestinian by the Jewish settler, the exclusion of the Arab worker from the labor market, and the construction of a Jewish economy separate from the original society.
The Histadrut, celebrated by a progressive labor union, practiced a policy of "Hebrew labor" that pushed for the expulsion of Palestinian workers from Jewish workplaces, and limited organization, protection, and privileges within Jewish society. Thus Socialist Zionism took place. Its special meaning is equality within the settler community, and the exclusion of indigenous people outside it.
In this context, the idea of "transfer" or organized displacement of Palestinians was part of the intellectual and political structure of the settlement project. Palestinian historian and academic Nour Masalha, in his book "The Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Thought and Planning," documented the presence of this idea within various Zionist currents, including the labor movement that later led the state, and that the ideas of displacement had accompanied the Zionist project since its inception, and were at the heart of the Zionist doctrine itself.
In the late 1930s, Ben-Gurion was linking war to opportunity The occasion to push the Arabs to leave. In this vision, the Palestinian represented a demographic and political obstacle to the establishment of a Jewish state with a clear majority and stable control.
"Zionist socialism has taken on its own meaning, equality within the settler community, and the exclusion of the indigenous people outside it."
Since the early 1940s, the Jewish Agency has begun to develop deeper tools of knowledge and control.
Between 1940 and 1947, work was carried out on the "Village Files" project, a broad intelligence project that collected accurate information about Palestinian villages, from their maps, water sources, agricultural lands, and livestock to their families, leaders, political relations, and the attitudes of their sons towards the Palestinian revolution between 1936 and 1939.
In the last updates before the 1948 war, lists of wanted persons, influencers and participants in national action were included, and the information was later used in searches, arrests and expulsions.
The "village files" reveal the degree of planning that preceded the Nakba. The Zionist forces entered Palestinian villages knowing the names of the mukhtars, the areas of land, the locations of wells, the structure of families, the directions of the roads, and the weaknesses.
As the war progressed, archival knowledge turned into a military tool, and the invasion of Palestinian villages was not an impromptu act in the chaos of the war, but was preceded by years of monitoring, classification, and sorting, years supervised by the institutions of the Zionist Left and its civil and military leaders.
In March 1948, the Dalet Plan, a military operation by which Zionist guerrillas displaced Palestinians during the Nakba, was completed, including instructions to take control of Arab villages and centers, destroy some of them and expel their inhabitants out of the areas that the Zionist leadership wanted to establish within the nascent Jewish state.
With its implementation, expulsions became a broad approach, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were uprooted, hundreds of villages were destroyed and entire civilian neighborhoods emptied, and the refugee issue was born as one of the greatest outcomes of the Palestine War.
All of this was led by a current known in the West as the Left. Ben-Gurion was the head of the Jewish Agency and then the first head of the occupation government, and Mabay was the central political force, and the cadres from the kibbutzim and the labor movements constituted a balanced part of the military and political elite.
The Nakba, with all its tragedies, was the daughter of this project, which was led by Labor Zionism, with all its socialist and modernist language, and with all the uprooting, displacement, confiscation and reshaping of the place.
After the declaration of statehood, control moved from the war phase to the stage of law and administration. Ben-Gurion refused to return Palestinian refugees, many villages were destroyed to prevent their residents from returning, and then the Palestinian space within the new state was rearranged with legislative and bureaucratic tools.
The Absentee Property Law, passed in 1950, was one of the major pillars of this transformation. In a broad way, it included refugees who were expelled or fled outside Palestine, as well as Palestinians who remained within Israel's borders but left their villages during the war to nearby towns.
Thus emerged the category of "absent attendees", citizens who live within the country and hold its citizenship, but who are legally classified as absent from their property. With this mechanism, the lands of refugees and internally displaced persons were transferred to the "Custodian of Absentee Property," and then to governmental and semi-governmental authorities and bodies, before being integrated into the "Lands of Israel" system.
Palestinians who remained within the occupying state's borders after 1948 entered another phase of subjugation. Between 1948 and 1966, they lived under strict military rule, despite being officially granted "Israeli citizenship." Scholar Shira Robinson describes this situation as "alien citizens": they were citizens of a state that presented itself as liberal, but in reality they were subjects of a colonial regime that restricted their movement, work, and civil rights at the same time.
The Kafr Qasim massacre in 1956 exposed the naked face of this regime. Under the Ben-Gurion government, and before the tripartite aggression against Egypt, a curfew was imposed on the villages of the "border triangle" that stretches from um al-Fahm in the north to Kafr Qasim in the south, without informing the workers and peasants returning from their fields, and then those who violated the ban were shot unawares, killing 49 of them and seriously wounding dozens, and some officers were later prosecuted, but the supreme political responsibility remained unaccountable.
In this sense, the structure of Israeli control over the Palestinians was completed before Likud came to power. The right inherited an army built by Ben-Gurion, expropriation laws drafted by left-wing governments, military rule implemented by the Mapai administrations, agricultural settlements established by kibbutzim and labor movements, and a separate Jewish economy that the Histadrut helped to consolidate. When Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, it was the Labor government that began settlement in the occupied territories, a natural extension of a logic that was tested on Palestinians within the borders 1948.
The Right and the Doctrine of the "Iron Wall"
In 1923, Ze'ev Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of Revisionist Zionism, the ideological rival of Socialist Zionism, laid the most explicit theoretical basis for the Zionist right's doctrine in his famous essay "The Iron Wall." The article stripped the Zionist project of the language of reassurance used by some of its leaders and from the promises that tried to present settlement as a path to prosperity. Jabotinsky went straight to the heart of the conflict, asserting that every indigenous people resists colonizers as long as they have hope of preventing the colonization of their homeland, and that the Palestinians will be no exception This rule.
Jabotinsky was aware that the Arabs in Palestine knew the nature of the Zionist project, and that they were defending their homeland as any people would do when they saw their land becoming a national project of another people. Hence, he formulated his conclusion that the Zionist settlement would not advance with the consent of the natives, but would be under the protection of a solid force independent of their will, behind an "iron wall" that they would not be able to penetrate.
"Jabotinsky asserted that the Zionist settlement would not advance with the consent of the natives, but under the protection of a force independent of their will, and behind an iron wall that they could not penetrate."
This foundational station reveals the difference between the right and the left in language and style rather than the difference in purpose. The workers' left formulated its project through labor, land, unionism, kibbutz, the modern state, and institutional hierarchy.
The corrective right, founded by Jabotinsky, went straight to the heart of the conflict, arguing that the Palestinians would not voluntarily accept the Zionist project, that the Arabs would not accept it, and that what was needed was a force that would make resistance out of sight. and solidity, based on Jewish sovereignty over the entire historic "Land of Israel" by force of arms, politics and international alliances.
Jabotinsky was not an isolated ideologue on the fringes of the Zionist movement, he founded a current that would later become the backbone of the Israeli right. Later, Beitar emerged as a youth movement that mobilized generations on solid Jewish nationalist foundations, and corrective Zionism took root as a political current that refused to settle for the workers' hierarchy, and then the Irgun emerged as the military arm that translated this spirit into direct violence in Palestine. In contrast to the image of the "working Jew" created by Labor Zionism, the corrective right presented the image of the "fighting Jew" which snatches, imposes, and besieges the indigenous people using the logic of force.
The disagreement between the left and the right within the Zionist movement was intense over questions of leadership, style, social class, relationship with the British, and the position of religion and nationalism. However, Palestine, as an indigenous land and people, remained the center of deep consensus between the two currents. The left wanted to build a Jewish majority through institutions, immigration, Hebrew labor, land purchase, and then war.
The right wanted an early recognition that the project would clash with the Palestinian people, and that control needed a naked force that would convince the Palestinians and Arabs that defeating the project was impossible. The first wrapped the conflict in the language of construction. The second called it a struggle for sovereignty from the beginning.
"In contrast to the image of the working Jew created by Labor Zionism, the corrective right presented the image of the militant Jew who usurped, imposed, and besieged the indigenous population with the logic of force."
From this school emerged Menachem Begin, the de facto heir of Jabotinsky. Begin came from the world of Beitar, imbibed corrective Zionism in Eastern Europe, and then arrived in Palestine in the 1940s to become the leader of the Irgun organization.
The Irgun embodied a perception that force makes politics, that military operation is a message, and that terror is a tool to reshape the human map. The organization carried out the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, in an operation in which dozens of British, Arabs, and Jews were killed. It then participated with the Lehi gang in the storming of the village of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, weeks before the declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel.
The village had signed a non-aggression agreement with the Haganah, and its residents lived relatively far away from the village. The battle lines, however, turned within hours into the scene of a massacre that killed more than 100 Palestinians, including women, children and the elderly.
The significance of Deir Yassin lies in its political and psychological impact as much as in its atrocity itself. Begin understood the value of terror as a weapon in the war of displacement. In his memoirs, he spoke of the spread of fear after the massacre, and of Arabs fleeing from several areas as a result of what they heard. Begin treated what happened as a military and psychological act that served the project. In the dictionary of the Zionist right, the massacre became part of the management of the war, not a departure from it.
More importantly, Deir Yassin exposed the fluidity of the border between the official establishment and extremist gangs. The Haganah, which was associated with the labor movement and the central Zionist establishment, provided some forms of support or coordination for the operation in the context of the war on Jerusalem and its environs. The armed right and the institutional left met at the same moment of expulsion and terror, despite the different signs and rhetoric.
After the establishment of the state, Begin founded the Herut movement, and the Irgun entered parliament in party garb, carrying its militant memory to the heart of Israeli politics as a mobilizing and symbolic capital. Herut's rise alarmed prominent Jewish intellectuals, including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, who, along with others, warned in a famous 1948 letter to the New York Times against the new Irgun party. Still, the path came to an end. The movement, which in the early days of the state was considered a fascist menace, became, decades later, the leader of the government In the name of Likud.
In 1977, Begin came to power in a transformation known within Israel as a "political coup." The long domination of Mapai and the Labor Party came to an end, and Likud rose as a representative of the corrective right, marginalized Mizrahi Jews, settlers, nationalists, and broad sectors resentful of the Ashkenazi working elite's monopoly on the state.
The transformation was social and political, but it did not start the policy of controlling the Palestinians from scratch, as the right took over a ready state with its army, its own confiscation laws, its settlements, and its security perspective, which the Palestinian sees as a constant threat. The right has given this structure a clearer language than before, based on the historical right and the Land of Israel, and the rejection of withdrawal and settlement expansion as a national duty.
"The right hand over a ready state with its army, its confiscation laws, its settlements, and its security perspective, which sees the Palestinian as a constant danger."
Begin signed the peace agreement with Egypt, but he stuck to the occupied West Bank. In the dictionary of the right, the West Bank does not appear as occupied territory, but as "Judea and Samaria," the heart of the biblical and nationalist narrative. Therefore, peace on the right was based on removing Arab parties from the circle of conflict, not on real recognition of the Palestinians' right to their land.
The withdrawal from Sinai was made because it was outside the biblical center of the Zionist imagination, while the West Bank and Jerusalem remained within the area of faith, identity, and sovereignty. Thus, Begin's peace with Egypt separated the official Arab track from the Palestinian track, opening the way for the consolidation of control over the Palestinians under a new cover.
Yitzhak Shamir, who came from the more radical Lehi organization, came to embody another face of the right. Shamir was less rhetorical than Begin and more expressive of the mentality of the security state, which sees negotiation as a way to buy time.
During his tenure and afterwards, settlement became a permanent policy, and the right learned that control did not require a formal annexation declaration, it was enough to build bypass roads, settlement councils, military bases, a permit system, designated areas, and a severed Palestinian life.
With Ariel Sharon, the right entered the stage of the settler general. Sharon was the son of the army, the raids, the massacres and the wars, from the Qibiya to Lebanon, from sponsoring the settlements to re-engineering control of Gaza. Sharon embodied the idea of a harsh pragmatic right that uses force to change reality, and then rearranges the occupation when some of its forms become costly.
Under Netanyahu, the Israeli right has reached its longest-lived form and is the most capable of combining Jabotinsky's legacy, the image making of the American media, the use of security fear, a market economy, and nationalist populism. Netanyahu has worked to disrupt the Palestinian national project and dismantle any political horizon that could lead to a state or sovereignty.
He has managed the conflict as a perennial and controllable condition, fueled the Palestinian division, and marketed to the world the possibility of normalizing relations with Arabs without compromising Palestinian rights. Politically, he knows the cost of words, and uses the language of security, terrorism, deterrence, the Iranian threat, military superiority, and regional partnerships, while the newer generation of the right, represented by Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, has shed many of these masks.
When Smotrich said in 2023 that the town of Huwara should be wiped out, he was translating the history of the Iron Wall into a contemporary settler religious dictionary. Jabotinsky framed the issue as a cold colonial inevitability, based on the idea that the indigenous population is resisting and that the project needs a force to break their hope. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir add to this coldness a biblical, populist and racist charge: the land is ours alone and the state is required to do what the settlers were doing outside the law.
This is the most prominent shift in the Israeli right, as it has moved from the political heir to the political heir to the direct representative of settlement violence within the institutions of government.
In the Begin phase, the Irgun needed to become a party in order to enter the state. In the Netanyahu era, Kahanism needed electoral alliances to enter the government. After October 7, 2023, the borders between the state, the settlers, the army, and religious currents became more fluid.
The armed settler in the West Bank, the minister who is asking for more weapons and powers, and the army that It protects it, and the government that finances it; all of them work within a single logic based on turning the Palestinian presence into a state that can be broken continuously.
Israel is looking for someone to run the war
A few days after the Knesset voted on a bill to dissolve itself in early June, Netanyahu chose to address his audience from a settlement in the occupied West Bank. In front of an audience that understands the meaning of land in the Zionist dictionary, the Israeli prime minister spoke in the language of maps and control, saying that his army controls more than 60% of the Gaza Strip, and that military directives are aimed at raising this percentage to 70%.
The beleaguered prime minister, with his declining popularity, the anger of the families of the dead, and the cracks in his right-wing coalition, wanted to turn military control into an electoral credit, turn the devastation in Gaza into a sign of strength, and turn the continuation of the war into a program of survival. From this angle, the Israeli elections are emerging as a struggle to manage the war, not to end it.
The battle within the entity revolves around who is best able to restore the image of the army, restore deterrence, and convince the inside and outside that control over the Palestinians It can go with more efficient and less expensive tools.
Since October 7, the Israeli occupying state has been experiencing a complex crisis of confidence. The image of the political leadership has been damaged, the prestige of the military has been shaken, and the myth of borders fortified by technology, intelligence, and walls has been cracked.
As the war on Gaza has expanded, and tensions have spilled over into Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, the Israeli electoral debate has become more attached to risk management, and away from its roots of occupation, blockade, settlements, and the system of extended control over the Palestinians.
For Netanyahu and his opponents, Israeli discourse is therefore focused on failure, management, accountability, and preparedness. For its part, the opposition attacks the prime minister for failing on October 7, prolonging the war, and weakening the state's image in front of its allies, but it keeps the origin of the Palestinian tragedy out of the spotlight. Each camp has a different recipe for managing the "Palestinian question," while the original premise remains the same: the Palestinian is a danger that should be broken, isolated, or kept under control.
After October 7, this perception became more entrenched. Israeli opinion polls showed growing rejection of the Palestinian state among the Israeli Jewish public, and a growing belief that a withdrawal from the West Bank would make it another version of Gaza.
This language has moved beyond the boundaries of the religious and nationalist right, and has infiltrated the heart of society, and even into the remnants of the Zionist left itself, and into former generals who present themselves as a rational alternative to Netanyahu. Rationality here means managing the occupation with greater discipline, reducing its international cost, and reordering it militarily Politically, nothing more.
A man like Bennett is an outspoken right-winger, with a political history close to the discourse of settlement and control, while Lapid presents himself as a centrist leader capable of repairing relations with the West and easing internal divisions, while Eisenkot comes from the military and carries the image of a general capable of fixing what politicians have corrupted. The competition between all of them revolves around restoring the "functioning state" after the shock.
The election becomes a test of the most convincing narrative within Israeli society after the shock. Netanyahu presents himself as the man who fought on multiple fronts, expanded Israel's areas of control, and reformulated deterrence, while his opponents present him as the man who led the country to the greatest security failure in its history, prolonged the war, deepened its isolation, and managed institutions for its survival.
Yet, in most election speeches, the Palestinian remains a military target, a negotiating card, a security threat, a demographic burden, and an adversary that should be prevented from turning any space into a base of resistance. There is not much difference here between the "extremist" right and the "sane" left, which created the settlement project itself more than 80 years ago, before the right received it and formulated it in more crude and clear language.
