On Palestine

by Noam Chomsky

Israel’s relative economic prosperity still promises that the most isolated state in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is regarded by its own Jewish citizens as a thriving state that has ended the Arab-Israeli conflict and has only to struggle with residues of the Western “war against terrorism” in the form of Hamas and Hezbollah (but even that is not deemed a crucial issue in the wake of the “Arab Spring”). Israel does suffer from social and cultural rifts and cracks, but they have been muted for the time being by the invention of a phony threat of an Iranian nuclear war and other such scenarios that also ensure the uninhibited flow of money to the army and security services.

The third paradox is that while specific Israeli policies are severely criticized and condemned, the very nature of the Israeli regime and the ideology that produces these policies are not targeted by the solidarity movement. Activists and supporters demonstrated against the massacre in Gaza in 2009 and the assault on the flotilla in 2010, yet in this arena of open and public protest nobody, it seems, dares to attack the ideology that is behind these aggressions. There is no demonstration against Zionism, because even the European Parliament regards such a demonstration as anti-Semitic. Imagine, in the days of supremacist South Africa, if you were not allowed to demonstrate against the apartheid regime itself, but only against the Soweto massacre or any other particular atrocity committed by the South African government.

The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story—hard to understand and even harder to solve. Indeed, the story of Palestine has been told before: European settlers coming to a foreign land, settling there, and either committing genocide against or expelling the indigenous people. The Zionists have not invented anything new in this respect. But Israel succeeded nonetheless, with the help of its allies everywhere, in building a multilayered explanation that is so complex that only Israel can understand it. Any interference from the outside world is immediately castigated as naïve at best or anti-Semitic at worst.

The reassertion of the “Zionism as colonialism” equation is critical not only because it best explains the Israeli policies of Judaization inside Israel and settlement in the West Bank, but also because it is consistent with the way the early Zionists perceived their project and talked about it. The Hebrew verb le-hitnahel or le-hityashev and the Hebrew nouns hitanchalut and hitayasvut were used ever since 1882 by the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel to describe the takeover of land in Palestine. Their accurate translation into English is “to settle,” “to colonize,” “settlement,” and “colonization,” respectively. Early Zionists used the terms proudly since colonialism was very positively received by the public at the time (and continued to until the end of the First World War). When colonialism’s fortunes changed in the aftermath of the Second World War and colonialism connoted negative European policies and practices, the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel looked for ways of dissociating the Hebrew terminology from the colonialist one and started to use more universal and positive language to describe their policies.

Brave scholars such as Uri Davis used the term quite early on. His analysis in the 1980s was the first to expose Israel’s land regime and legal practices within the Green Line as another form of apartheid. Further research has highlighted both the similarities and dissimilarities. It was the first visitors from post-apartheid South Africa, who together with former US president Jimmy Carter, frequently used the term. Although it seems from very early on that they realized the regime imposed on the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was in many respects far worse than that of the apartheid in South Africa.

The most recent research has noted how uniform Israeli legal, economic, and cultural policies have become on both sides of the Green Line. The de facto and more invisible apartheid has been replaced by racist legislation in the Knesset and open policies of discrimination. It may be a different version of apartheid, but the Israel of 2014 is a state that segregates, separates, and discriminates openly on the basis of ethnicity (which in American parlance would be race), religion, and nationality. Since the reference to apartheid has become common in the corridors of power as well as among activists, one can see why the inventive group of activists in Canada who initiated Israel Apartheid Week on their own university campus inspired so many others in the world to follow suit. The phenomenon has become so widespread (now also in Israel and Palestine) because it resonates with what people knew is happening on the ground due to the growth of the ISM (the international solidarity movement). It has provided an alternative source of information to the distorted reports of the mainstream media in the West, in particular grabbing public attention in the United States when Rachel Corrie, a young activist in the ISM, was brutally killed by the Israeli army.

It clarifies the connection between Zionist ideology and the movement’s polices in the past and Israeli policies in the present: both aim to establish a Jewish state by taking over as much of historical Palestine as possible and leaving in it as few Palestinians as possible. The desire to turn the mixed ethnic Palestine into a pure ethnic space was and is at the heart of the conflict that has raged since 1882. This impulse, never condemned or rebuked by a world that watched by and did nothing, led to the massive expulsion of 750,000 people (half of the region’s population), the destruction of more than five hundred villages, and the demolition of a dozen towns in 1948.

The depiction of Zionism as colonialism, the analysis of Israel as an apartheid state, and the recognition of how deeply imbedded the notion of ethnic cleansing is in Jewish society in Israel is the source of thee key entries in our new dictionary shaping our view of the future: decolonization, regime change, and a one-state solution.

The invalidity of the term peace process in regards to the Israel/Palestine conflict became clear when people started to have access to what was really happening on the ground. Through the work of the ISM, as well as communication via the Internet, satellite TV, and other means, people in the West could see the discrepancy between the various attempts to solve the conflict (such as Geneva 1977, Madrid 1991, Oslo 1993, and Camp David 2000) and what was really taking place on the ground. In this respect Chomsky was the first to observe that the process was never meant to reach a destination but only to perpetuate a situation of no solution. Israel used it as a means to grab more land, build more colonies, and annex more space. The status quo was the solution.

What was particularly annoying and unhelpful was the paradigm of parity on which the peace process was based: it divided the blame between the two parties and treated them as equally responsible for the conflict while offering, allegedly, an equitable solution. The blatant misbalance of power should have discredited this solution a long time ago as a realistic approach to peace. It was based on the wish to appease Israel without irritating it too much. The end result was that the Palestinians were to receive whatever Israel was willing to give them. This had nothing to do with peace; it was a search after a comfortable capitulation by the native people of Palestine who lost it to the Zionists who invaded the region in the nineteenth century.

According to the new movement it is not unthinkable to aspire to a regime change in Israel, nor is it naïve to envision a state where everyone is equal. And it is not unrealistic to work for the unconditional return of the Palestinian refugees to their homes. The principle of regime change was abused by the United States and Britain in their attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan but won a new international legitimacy in the popular revolutions in Tunis and Egypt.

The third milestone was the head-on challenge of one of the most basic assumptions of the peace orthodoxy: that partition of a country is an act of peace and reconciliation. Partition in the history of Palestine is an act of destruction committed within a framework of a UN “peace plan” that drew no international reaction or condemnation whatsoever. Thus the terms in the international dictionary from that formative period that signify positive peaceful values such as partition are a newspeak, to borrow George Orwell’s famous term for such deceptive realities. Partition signifies international complicity in the crime of destruction, not a peace offer.

Consequently, anyone opposing partition became the enemy of peace. The more sinister and pro-Israeli elements of the peace orthodoxy used to blame the Palestinians for being irresponsible, warmongering, and intransigent—beginning with the Palestinian rejection of the partition plan in 1947. In hindsight, we know partition was also an ill-conceived idea from a realpolitik point of view. This may not have been known at the time. But to offer partition now as a solution on the same premise that informed the 1947 resolution—which was that Zionism was a benevolent movement wishing Israelis to coexist as equals with the Palestinian native majority—is an absurdity and a travesty.

They claim, and teach, that a Jewish state reigning over much of Palestine, provided there is a Palestinian entity next to it, is a democratic reality. It is a democracy that is maintained by all means possible to ensure an everlasting Jewish majority in the land. These means could and have included genocidal policies and other brutal strategies to safeguard that the state embodies the ethnic identity of one group alone. Israelis do not find it therefore at all bizarre or unacceptable that determining the results of a democratic process by first determining by force who makes up the electorate gets the desired result: a purely Jewish state in a binational country. This charade is still marketed successfully in the West: Israel is a democracy because the majority decides what it wants, even if the majority is determined by means of colonization, ethnic cleansing, and, recently, by ghettoizing the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, enclaving them in Areas A and B in the West Bank and in isolated villages in the Greater Jerusalem area, the Jordan Valley, and the Bedouin reservations in the Naqab.

The peace process between Israel and the Palestinians is a medical miracle: it died several times, was resuscitated for a while, then collapsed again. It holds on not because there is the slight chance it will succeed but because of the dividends its very existence brings to many involved. The Israeli government understands that without this “peace process” Israel would become a pariah state and would be exposed to international boycott and even sanctions. As long as the process is alive, Israel can continue to expand its settlement project in the West Bank and the dispossession of the Palestinians there (including in the Greater Jerusalem area) and establish facts on the ground that would render any future settlement unfeasible and impossible. Because of the dishonest brokering of the United States and Europe’s impotence in international affairs, Israel continues to enjoy immunity in this process.

Anyone who is still hopeful of such an eventuality underrates the mental process Jewish society in Israel underwent following the creation of the state in 1948. It was put under an indoctrinating steamroller that pressed together old Jewish phobias about hostile Gentiles in Europe with typical colonialist anxieties about the natives into a frightening local version of racism. Deep racist layers like this are not removed easily and definitely do not disappear by themselves as the case of post-apartheid South Africa has so clearly shown us.

You go back a bit further, my father, his generation, they were Zionists, but they were Ahad Ha’Amists. They wanted a cultural center as a place where the diaspora could find a way to live together with the Palestinians. That ended in 1948. From then on, it essentially became a state religion. One that shifted, in terms of policies. It’s interesting to remember this. In the mid-1970s, it was clear that the Arabs were perfectly willing to make a political settlement. Syria, Egypt, and Jordan proposed a two-state settlement at the Security Council; the USA had to veto it. Egypt had already offered a full peace treaty with Israel. It was necessary to raise barriers to block negotiations. So the concept of Zionism changed. Everyone had to accept the “right to exist” of Israel. States do not have a right to exist. Mexico does not accept the right of the USA to exist sitting on half of Mexico. States recognize each other but not their right to exist. There is no such thing. But Israel raised that barrier to require that Palestinians accept that their oppression and expulsion is justified. Not just that it happened, but that it is justified. Of course they are not going to accept that. So it was a nice barrier to stop negotiations. Now it’s harder. The support for a settlement is now so overwhelming that Israel has been forced to raise the barrier still higher. The Palestinians now have to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. That’s the core element of most of the speeches that Ne...

When Netanyahu says, “You have to recognize us as a Jewish state,” he is saying: “You have to recognize us as something that does not exist in the modern world.” There is no such thing. Again, if you are French, a citizen of France, you are French. If you are a citizen of Israel, you are not Jewish. It’s crucial.

FB: What is the role of activists standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people? Should they be pragmatic in terms of their advocacy or should they lead the way and adopt more ethical and radical positions? Should we focus on occupation or on the nature of the state of Israel? NC: If their goals are to help the Palestinians, while they should of course take positions that are ethical, they also must be pragmatic. They have to ask themselves what is going to help and what is going to hurt the Palestinians. Take the antiwar movement about Vietnam for example. There were young people who were properly outraged by the war and thought that the ethical attitude to have was to carry out acts of destruction against US property, corporations, destroy armaments, and so on. That’s ethical, but it was harmful. The Vietnamese were strongly opposed to it. They did not care about the fact that people in the US felt good, they cared about what happened to them, on the ground. And the effects on them were harmful since it provoked a huge backlash and strengthened support for the war. Those are the kind of choices that you always have to make when you are considering acting in the interest of someone. You have to ask what is going to help them, not what is going to make me feel good. Call it pragmatic if you like, but I would call it ethical. You are concerned with the effects of your actions on the people you are standing in solidarity with.

Yes and I think we should also point out that like in any colonialist situation where you have an anticolonialist struggle, there is a lot of violence in the air. When you are brought up in a certain way and the policies and actions of your own government push the other side to take some violent actions as well, then you think that objectively your point of view is correct because you see that there are suicide bombers, violence, missiles sent from Gaza. We also have to understand that this need to get out has been debated and examined within the context of permanent violence. It is very difficult for Israelis to separate between the violence and the experience and the reasons for that violence. One of the most difficult things is to explain to the Israelis what is the cause and what is the effect. What brings that violence about and not to regard this violence as just coming out of the blue and therefore they have no other choice than being where they are.

Zionism had one element that is usually forgotten by historians. This was a wish to secularize Jewish life. If you secularize the Jewish religion, you cannot later use the Bible as a justification for occupying Palestine. It was a bizarre mixture, which I like to call “a movement made by people who do not believe in God but God nonetheless promised them Palestine.” I think this is something that is at the heart of the internal problems of Israeli Jewish society today. It is also important to understand that even before Herzl, there were people who thought about themselves as Zionists but were aware of the existence of Palestinians in Palestine. They were thinking of different kinds of connections to Palestine and solutions for the insecurity of Jews in Europe like Ahad Ha’Am (real name Asher Ginzburg), who said that maybe Palestine would just be a spiritual center and Jews, if they feel insecure in Europe, should settle elsewhere outside Europe or settle in more secure European societies. One important group of people that did not allow them to do this were Christian Zionists that already existed in those days who believed that the return of the Jews to Palestine was part of a divine scheme. They wanted the Jews to return to Palestine because they could precipitate the second coming of the Messiah; they were also anti-Semites. A “two for one” deal as they could also get rid of the Jews in Europe at the same time. I think it is an important period to go back to to understan...

“We don’t know why these people are violent, maybe it is because they are Muslims, maybe it is their political culture.” It is only when you have a historical understanding that you can say, “Wait a minute, I understand where this violence comes from, I understand the source of the violence. Actually settling [in] my house by force is an act of violence. Maybe they were wrong, maybe they were right to try to resist by violence, but it begins by the very invasion of my space, the place where I live. This invasion is accompanied by a wish to get rid of me … what else can I do?” I think the historical dimension is important first for a better understanding of why the conflict continues.

The second reason is that we will never succeed in changing political views about the Palestinian issue if we don’t explain to people how knowledge was manipulated. It is very important because you need to understand how certain phrases are being used like peace process, how certain ideas are being broadcasted like the only democracy in the Middle East, like Palestinian primitivism, and so on. You need to understand how these languages are means of manipulating the knowledge that is there so as to form a certain point of view and prevent another point of view for coming into the space. It’s a twofold issue. You need to understand the history of the place but also the way the narratives have been constructed and how they are being manipulated and used.

The main narrative that the Israelis are still successful in portraying is this idea of a land that even if it was not empty, was full of people who had no real connections to the place and are illegitimate. They lose legitimacy because they are not there, then they lose legitimacy because they are a bit of Bedouins and nomads so they don’t really care, then they lose legitimacy by being violent or being Muslims after 9/11. There is all the time this laundry list of words and ideas that try to convince you that whatever the Israelis are doing, if you are unhappy with this, it doesn’t matter because there is no one on the other side that has anything legitimate to offer—it all depends on the Israelis’ kindness. If you check very carefully the language of peace since Oslo, even before—but it has been more accentuated since Oslo—it is all about Israeli concessions. The language is concession, Israelis will make concessions to Palestinians and then, there is a chance for peace. If this is the departure point, there will ne...

Five minutes on the ground shows you that one state is already there. It’s a non-democratic regime, an apartheid regime. So you just need to think about how to change this regime. You do not need to think about a two-state solution. You need to think about how to change the relations between the communities, how to affect the power structure in place.

Again, it goes back to a rationalist Western way to look at reality. It says that I can only advocate for what I can get, not what I want. At this moment in time it seems that you have such a wide coalition for a two-state solution, so you go for it. You do not evaluate its morality, its ethical dimension, even if it’s likely to change the reality later on. This whole idea that this is a very reasonable approach is of course reasonable to a point. But it’s totally insane because it has nothing to do with the conflict. It has to do with the way Israel wants the world to accept this idea, constructed in 1967, that it needs most of the territory that it occupied then, but that it is willing to allow some autonomy to the Palestinians in that territory. That’s the debate in Israel. It’s never about the principles. The thing that Israel has always needed is international support. They need their policies rubber-stamped by the international community. They also need a Palestinian representative. In 1993 the PLO surprised them when it agreed to have a small autonomous area on a small part of the West Bank and leave all the rest to Israel. That’s the two-state solution that everybody wants to convince us is the only way forward. The problem is that not one Palestinian can live with this, hence the continuation of the conflict.

At 3 a.m. Gaza time, July 9, 2014, in the midst of Israel’s latest exercise in savagery, I received a phone call from a young Palestinian journalist in Gaza. In the background, I could hear his infant child wailing, amid the sounds of explosions and jet planes, targeting any civilian who moves, and homes as well. He just saw a friend of his in a car clearly marked “press” get blown away. And he heard shrieks next door after an explosion but couldn’t go outside or he’d be a likely target. This is a quiet neighborhood, no military targets—except Palestinians who are fair game for Israel’s high-tech US-supplied military machine. He said that 70 percent of the ambulances have been destroyed, and that by then more than seventy had been killed, and of the three hundred or so wounded, about two-thirds were women and children. Few Hamas activists or rocket launching sites have been hit—just the usual victims. It is important to understand what life is like in Gaza when Israel’s behavior is “restrained,” in between the regular manufactured crises like this one. A good sense is given in a report to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) by Mads Gilbert, the courageous and expert Norwegian physician who has worked extensively in Gaza, including throughout the vicious and murderous Cast Lead operation. In every respect, the situation is disastrous. Just keeping to children, Gilbert reports: “Palestinian children in Gaza are suffering immensely. A large proportion are affec...

The recent appeal by Western governments to the prosecutor in the International Court of Justice in The Hague not to look into Israel’s crimes in Gaza is a case in point. Wide sections of the Western media have followed suit and have justified by and large Israel’s actions—including the French media, especially France 24, and the BBC, which continue to shamefully parrot Israeli propaganda. This is not surprising, since pro-Israel lobby groups continue to work tirelessly to press Israel’s case in France and the rest of Europe as they do in the United States. This distorted coverage is also fed by a sense among Western journalists that what happens in Gaza pales in comparison to the atrocities in Iraq and Syria. Comparisons like this are usually provided without a wider historical perspective. A longer view on the history of the Palestinians would be a much more appropriate way to evaluate their suffering vis-à-vis the carnage elsewhere.

Whether it is burning alive a Palestinian youth from Jerusalem, fatally shooting two others just for the fun of it in Beitunia, or slaying whole families in Gaza, these are all acts that can only be perpetrated if the victim is dehumanized. The only chance for a successful struggle against Zionism in Palestine is the one based on a human and civil rights agenda that does not differentiate between one violation and the other and yet identifies clearly the victim and the victimizers. Those who commit atrocities in the Arab world against oppressed minorities and helpless communities, as well as the Israelis who commit these crimes against the Palestinian people, should all be judged by the same moral and ethical standards. They are all war criminals, though in the case of Palestine they have been at work longer than anyone else. It does not really matter what the religious identity is of the people who commit the atrocities or in the name of which religion they purport to speak. Whether they call themselves jihadists, Judaists, or Zionists, they should be treated in the same way. A world that would stop employing double standards in its dealings with Israel is a world that could be far more effective in its response to war crimes elsewhere in the world.

Amid all the horrors unfolding in the latest Israeli offensive in Gaza, Israel’s goal is simple: “quiet for quiet,” a return to the norm. For the West Bank, the norm is that Israel continues its illegal construction of settlements and infrastructure so that it can integrate into Israel whatever might be of value, meanwhile consigning Palestinians to unviable cantons and subjecting them to repression and violence.

For Gaza, the norm is a miserable existence under a cruel and destructive siege that Israel administers to permit bare survival but nothing more.

The norm in Gaza was described in detail by the heroic Norwegian trauma surgeon Mads Gilbert, who has worked in Gaza’s main hospital through Israel’s most grotesque crimes and returned again for the current onslaught. In June 2014 he submitted a report on the Gaza health sector to the UNRWA, the UN agency that tries desperately, on a shoestring, to care for refugees. “At least 57 percent of Gaza households are food insecure and about 80 percent are now aid recipients,” Gilbert reports. “Food insecurity and rising poverty also mean that most residents cannot meet their daily caloric requirements, while over 90 percent of the water in Gaza has been deemed unfit for human consumption,” a situation that is becoming even worse as Israel again attacks water and sewage systems, leaving 1.2 million people with even more severe disruption of the barest necessity of life. In an interview, human rights lawyer Raji Sourani, who has remained in Gaza through years of Israeli brutality and terror, said, “The most common sentence I heard when people began to talk about cease-fire: Everybody says it’s better for all of us to die and not go back to the situation we used to have before this war. We don’t want that again. We have no dignity, no pride; we are just soft targets, and we are very cheap. Either this situation really improves or it is better to just die. I am talking about intellectuals, academics, ordinary people: Everybody is saying that.” Similar sentiments have been widely hear...

Gaza, the plans for the norm were explained forthrightly by Dov Weissglass, the confidant of Ariel Sharon who negotiated the withdrawal of Israeli settlers from Gaza in 2005. Hailed as a grand gesture in Israel and among acolytes and the deluded elsewhere, the withdrawal was in reality a carefully staged “national trauma,” properly ridiculed by informed Israeli commentators, among them Israel’s leading sociologist, the late Baruch Kimmerling. What actually happened is that Israeli hawks, led by Sharon, realized that it made good sense to transfer the illegal settlers from their subsidized communities in devastated Gaza to subsidized settlements in the other occupied territories, which Israel intends to keep. But instead of simply transferring them, as would have been simple enough, it was considered more effective to present the world with images of little children pleading with soldiers not to destroy their homes, amid cries of “Never Again,” with the implication obvious. What made the farce even more transparent was that it was a replica of the staged trauma when Israel had to evacuate the Egyptian Sinai in 1982. But it played very well for the intended audience abroad.

The official story is that after Israel graciously handed Gaza over to the Palestinians, in the hope that they would construct a flourishing state, they revealed their true nature by subjecting Israel to unremitting rocket attack and forcing the captive population to become martyrs, leaving Israel in a bad light for failing to anticipate this scenario. Reality is rather different. In January 2006, Palestinians committed a major crime: they voted the wrong way in a carefully monitored free election, handing control of Parliament to Hamas. The media constantly intone that Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In reality, Hamas leaders have repeatedly made it clear that Hamas would accept a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus that has been blocked by the United States and Israel for forty years. In contrast, Israel is dedicated to the destruction of Palestine, apart from some occasional meaningless words, and is implementing that commitment.

The (unrevised) 1999 platform of Israel’s governing party, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, “flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.” And for those who like to obsess about meaningless charters, the core component of Likud, Menachem Begin’s Herut, has yet to abandon its founding doctrine that the territory on both sides of the Jordan is part of the Land of Israel.

Israeli officials laud the humanity of what it calls “the most moral army in the world,” which informs residents that their homes will be bombed. The practice is “sadism, sanctimoniously disguising itself as mercy,” in the words of Israeli journalist Amira Hass: “A recorded message demanding hundreds of thousands of people leave their already targeted homes, for another place, equally dangerous, 10 kilometers away.” In fact, there is no place in the prison of Gaza safe from Israeli sadism, which may even exceed the terrible crimes of Operation Cast Lead in 2008–2009. The hideous revelations elicited the usual reaction from the most moral president in the world, Barack Obama: great sympathy for Israelis, bitter condemnation of Hamas, and calls for moderation on both sides.

Seen from the perspective of settler colonialism the conflict is a relentless and tireless engagement with the attempt to take over as much of Palestine as possible and leave in it as few Palestinians as possible. Ironically, the wish to de-Arabize the country stemmed from a Zionist aspiration to create a European kind of democracy within the midst of the Arab world with one caveat only: it had to be a Jewish democracy. Hence the colonialist impulse of the settlers was always geographical and demographic. The movement in its early stages was led by pragmatic leaders, such as David Ben-Gurion, who recognized the need to take over Palestine bit by bit and without forgetting the imperative of always having an exclusive Jewish majority in the land. And therefore when the Jews were less than a third of the population during the mandatory period (1918–1948), the movement proposed a partition of Palestine in a way that would ensure the small minority of settlers’ demographic exclusivity in parts of Palestine, with the hope of absorbing more settlers in the future and thus more land. In fact, early on—in the 1930s—the Zionist leaders tried to persuade the British government to help materialize these dreams by transferring Palestinians from future Jewish areas as part of a solution to the emerging conflict; but the empire was not convinced.

All these plausible explanations tend to see the policies as the direct product of the particular and extraordinary circumstances of June 1967. But these decisions were mainly the inevitable outcome of Zionist ideology and history (however one chooses to define this ideology or insist on its shades and innuendoes). The particular circumstances made it easier to remind the politicians of their ideological heritage and reconnected them once more, as they did in 1948, to the Zionist drive to Judaize as much of historical Palestine as possible. The first decision was not to ethnically cleanse the population despite the joy of expanding the Jewish state onto what many Israelis felt were the natural and historical borders of ancient Israel. The ministers played with the idea but eventually ruled it out. They doubted whether the army had the will and mentality to carry it out, as it was unclear whether the army had sufficient means for accomplishing it.7 The second decision was to exclude the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from any future deal based on territories for peace (a principle that, at least in theory, the government accepted for the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights). The prevailing sense in those meetings was that the international immunity for land expansion was guaranteed—not as an endorsement of expansionism per se but more as an unwillingness to confront it. But with one crucial caveat: there could not be a de jure annexation of the territories, only a de facto ...

The third one was not to grant full citizenship to the occupied population so as not to endanger the demographic Jewish majority. There was then, and there is now, a consensual Israeli impulse and overwhelming desire to keep the West Bank forever, while at the same time there was and is the twofold recognition of the undesirability of officially annexing these territories and the inability to expel the population en masse. The aspirations about the Gaza Strip then and now are more ambivalent—the main drive was to see it disappear.

The minutes of the meetings are now open to historians. They expose the impossibility and incompatibility of these two impulses: the appetite for possessing new land on the one hand and the reluctance to either drive out or fully incorporate the people living on them, on the other. But the documents also reveal a self-congratulatory satisfaction from the early discovery of a way out of the ostensible logical deadlock and theoretical impasse. The ministers were convinced, as all the ministers after them would be, that they had found the formula that would enable Israel to keep the territories it coveted, without annexing the people it negated and while safeguarding its international immunity and reputation.9 When those three goals are translated into actual policies they can only produce an inhuman and ruthless reality on the ground. There can be no benign or enlightened version for a policy meant to keep people in citizenless status for a long period of time.

Only one known human invention operates in such a way which robs temporarily, or for longer period of times, the basic human and civil rights of citizens: the modern-day prison.

The official Israeli navigation between impossible nationalist and colonialist ambitions turned a million and half people in 1967 into inmates of such a mega-prison; it was not a prison for a few inmates wrongly or ri...

It was and still is a system of malice that was built due to vile motives, but not only. Some of its architects searched genuinely for the most possible humane model for this prison; probably because they were aware that this was a collective punishment for a crime never committed. Others did not even bother to search for a softer version or more humane one. But the two camps existed and therefore the government offered two versions of the mega-prison to the people in the West Bank and the Gaza Str...

The open-air prison allowed a measure of autonomous life under indirect and direct Israeli control; the maximum security one robbed the Palestinians of all the autonomies and subjected them to a harsh policy of punishments, restriction, and in the worst-case scenario execution. The reality on the ground was that the open-air prison was harsh enough and sufficiently inhuman to trigger resistance from the en...

In Israel and in the West, a huge laundry list of words and a very cooperative media and academia were essential for maintaining the moral and political validity of the open-air prison option as the best solution for the “conflict” and as an ideal vision for normal and healthy life in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. “Autonomy,” “self-determination,” and finally “independence” were used, and mainly abused, as words to describe the best version of an open-air prison model the Israelis could offer the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Israel invented the magic formula of presenting the occupation as temporary. The status of the population will be settled “with the coming of peace.” This mode of operation allows Israel to continue to present itself as a “democratic state” and enjoy the many benefits attached to this status in the international arena.