Israel Is Delusional If It Thinks Violence Will End During Its Occupation of Palestine

“The notion that there will ever be quiet and stability in the context of Israel’s ongoing domination of the Palestinians with no diplomatic horizon is a delusion,” writes Mairav Zonszein for The Guardian.

Zonszein explains how the recent increase in violence between Israel and Palestine—Israelis have killed 21 Palestinians in just 11 days and Palestinians have wounded at least 20 Israelis—is a direct result of “the Israeli right’s failed vision of Greater Israel.”

From The Guardian:

In the past week there has been an onslaught of Palestinian stabbing attacks across Israel and the West Bank, several each day – so many it is hard to keep track. In the span of just a few days, at least 20 Israelis have been wounded in over a dozen incidents, in addition to four Israelis killed at the start of the month. The violence is targeting both civilians and soldiers on both sides of the “green line”, the old pre-1967 boundary, with no distinction between far-off settlements or cities in the heart of Israel. There have also been increasing incidents of Israeli Jews attacking Palestinian citizens of Israel. The geography of the violence is beginning to take on the character of a civil war between Israelis and Palestinians.

This current round of violence may seem shocking but it is no anomaly: it is a direct result of government policy determined to normalise Israel’s occupation, now nearly 50 years old. Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving prime minister since David Ben-Gurion, was re-elected last March on a ticket that promised to preserve the status quo: tightening Israel’s hold on the West Bank while dismissing any possibility of a Palestinian state.

He has continued to entrench a reality in which Palestinians and Israelis who live side by side are subject to different laws and courts, use separate roads and have unequal access to basic necessities such as water and housing; where settler violence goes unchecked and discrimination is increasingly institutionalised; and where not only is there no recognition of the Palestinian right to statehood, but next to no recognition of Palestinian rights, period. Palestinians are under constant daily threat of losing their lives, homes, income, lands and dignity. Yet this reality is barely mentioned in the current Israeli rhetoric about “unrest” and a “wave of terror”. … Israelis have lived in perpetual conflict since the state was established, with fleeting periods of calm, some longer than others. The relative quiet experienced by Israelis in the last decade since the second intifada convinced many that the status quo could continue without consequences. But the notion that there will ever be quiet and stability in the context of Israel’s ongoing domination of the Palestinians with no diplomatic horizon is a delusion. The critical question, then, is how much more violence will it take for Israelis to realise the path they are going on promises them a bleak future?