Cracks in the Israeli Consensus | by David Shulman | The New York Review of Books

Cracks in the Israeli Consensus | by David Shulman | The New York Review of Books

David Shulman is the author of Freedom and Despair: Notes from the South Hebron Hills, among other books. He is a Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was awarded the Israel Prize for Religious Studies in 2016. (July 2021)

Looking back on the latest round of fighting in Gaza, one can’t escape the grim sense of déjà vu. How many such rounds have there been? I can’t remember. Worse, eerie and compulsive repetition suits the way many, perhaps most, Israelis—including, it seems, the higher echelons of the army and intelligence services—tend to think about Gaza and Hamas. On the surface, the primitive logic goes like this: Hamas is a murderous, barbaric organization that wants only to kill as many Israelis as possible and is continuously building up its military capabilities to that end. In practice, the only useful way of dealing with Hamas is therefore to pound it to pieces once every few years (or months), thus reestablishing what the Israeli army and government fondly call “deterrence” (it’s their favorite word).

The trouble with this approach is that it never works. To revert to the army lingo, which Israelis hear every night on TV during episodes of fighting: deterrence is inherently entropic; the passage of time inevitably erodes it. Hence the need for that periodic pounding. Moreover, the time lag can be remarkably short. The army is already saying that another round of warfare in Gaza could break out soon.

If we go a little deeper, a more deadly vision emerges. As several astute commentators have suggested in the last weeks, Benjamin Netanyahu’s grand strategic plan, shared, implicitly, with sections of the Israeli right, was to keep Hamas alive as a constant threat to Israel.

 Ensuring that the Palestinians remain divided between the ineffectual remnants of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and the extreme Islamicists of Gaza is one way, possibly the only way, to allow the Israeli program of annexation, domination, and expulsion on the West Bank to go forward.

This policy has worked, to a point, as anyone who drives through the West Bank today can see. Roughly half of the available land reserves in Area C (over 60 percent of the West Bank, where all the settlements are located) have by now been allocated to Israeli colonies and their continuous, violent expansion. I experience the ever more intrusive tentacles of the occupation, in the form of vicious settlers and mostly hostile soldiers and police, nearly every week when my fellow activists and I are in the Palestinian territories to protect, as best we can, Bedouin shepherds and the small-scale farmers and herders of the South Hebron hills. Levels of settler violence against Palestinians and human rights activists have increased exponentially over the last several months.

 In the occupation system, settlers are above the law.