A Rupture in Israeli Security Politics: Can the Palestinians Exploit It? by Jeff Halper

 “President Trump and I often say: peace through strength – first comes strength then comes peace.”

– PM Benjamin Netanyahu, 22/06/2025

Settler colonialism is a fairly common phenomenon, both ancient and modern, as the unhappy history of the indigenous people of Palestine testifies. The first Israelite settler invasion of their country occurred some 3500 years ago.[1] “When you have crossed the Jordan into the land of Canaan,” God commands Moses to instruct the people of Israel, “you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you…; you shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land and dwell in it, for I have given you the land to possess” (Numbers 33-50-53). The latest invasion, Zionists would claim by the same people “returning home,” began at the turn of the twentieth century and is ongoing.

Nonetheless, settler colonialism is not an easy enterprise to pursue, justify or maintain, let alone to normalize permanently. Native populations always resist their colonization, their very physical and cultural erasure. The ancient Israelites and modern Zionists shared a common goal: to transform Canaanite/Arab Palestine into the Jewish Land of Israel. They both conquered and settled Palestine, and each established state-level governance. But each also faced prolonged resistance from local peoples and never succeeded in eliminating them altogether.[2] Israelite/Judean/Jewish rule lasted only about 450 of the roughly 5000 years since the emergence of Canaanite civilization. True, the pervasiveness of the biblical account of God’s “giving” the Land of Israel to Abraham in the Western and wider Christian worlds makes the claim of Zionist Jews to reasonable if not self-evident, and that has proven a great boon for promoting Zionist colonization. But Zionism’s end-game, to “establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English, or America American,” as Chaim Weizmann told the Versailles Conference in 1919, has proven elusive.

And this is the problem that preoccupies Israel today. Zionism achieved its national goal: establishing a Jewish state in a de-Arabized Palestine. It failed, however, to normalize that achievement, making the Jewish state of Israel “as Jewish as England is English” in the words of Chaim Weizmann, thus foreclosing a Palestinian liberation struggle and securing its status as a legitimate state, regionally as well as internationally. The Israeli authorities had three opportunities to do so. First, by taking advantage of their secret contacts with the Egyptians in the mid-1950s, including an agreement by Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954 to hold high-level talks, perhaps even a face-to-face meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, which Sharett called off.[3] Second, during the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991 and the Oslo peace process, both preceded by the PLO’s acceptance of the two-state solution and its recognition of “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security,” which Israel never negotiated in good faith, doubling its settlements during the course of the negotiations.

From 1967 on, but particularly during the Oslo process when a “Jewish” state of Israel could have won universal recognition in return for a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories and the return of a limited number of refugees by mutual consent – an offer repeated in the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 to which the Sharon government never even deigned to reply, the third lost opportunity – it became clear that the Zionist project required all of historic Palestine.

The question of how to normalize a “Greater” Israel receives the same answer as did the efforts to normalize the pre-1967 Israel or normalizing Zionism’s pre-state colonization itself: “normalization through strength” combined with a security politics based on “serving the hegemons.” In terms of the Palestinians, to erect an “Iron Wall” as Ze’ev Jabotinsky described it in his seminal essay of 1923.[4] As the concept has evolved until today, the doctrine contends that an Iron Wall comprised of political, military, economic and technological domination will so overwhelm and exhaust the Palestinians that they will despair of an Arab Palestine and submit. As for the Arab world, the Iron Wall has catapulted Israel into the role of the region’s military hegemon, leaving the Arab states with no choice but to normalize relations, informally if not officially.[5]

This paper examines Israeli security politics but with an agenda: not only to evaluate its effectiveness over time, its limitations and perhaps, since the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, its counter-productivity, but to ask whether Israel’s reliance on hard military power opens opportunities for the Palestinians to resist and ultimately overcome Zionist colonization. Recent events, combined with longer-term geopolitical developments and emerging political and economic realignments in the region, have led to circumstances potentially more favorable to their struggle, if strategically exploited.

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