Land, Not Life: The Deadly Security Paradigm Behind Netanyahu's Gaza Takeover
Dahlia ScheindlinAug 8, 2025
On Friday morning, Israel's security cabinet approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plan for a complete takeover of Gaza City, greatly expanding its war on Gaza and de facto laying the infrastructure for a full future occupation of the Strip, while carefully avoiding the legally loaded word "occupation." IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir opposed the program, but the prime minister promised that this is the plan to defeat Hamas and keep Israelis safe.
Last week, this column recommended a different type of security paradigm that incorporates a holistic view of security, reduces motivations for attacks, opens horizons for diplomacy, political freedom and life improvements, and advances equality of all peoples in the region. That won't be happening.
What then is the actual security logic behind the rapid steps toward a full-blown occupation, in effect an authoritarian military government that will rule over Gaza, to be executed by the Israeli children of today for generations to come? Why do Israel's right-wing supporters of such a plan and the government believe it will provide security?
- Netanyahu's Gaza takeover plan puts Israel firmly on the road to perpetual war
- To Netanyahu, anyone doubting his Gaza plan – even the IDF – is just a leftist
- When will Israel learn that military might won't bring it security?
The basis for the right-wing logic begins with the past. Practically since October 8, prominent right-wing figures and much of Israeli society has been seized by a very simple notion: Dismantling the Gaza settlements in 2005 and the redeployments of the Oslo Accords in the mid-'90s delivered October 7.
Palestinians amid the rubble in Gaza City on Tuesday.Credit: Ebrahim Hajjaj/Reuters
No more negotiations
At a conference entitled "From Expulsion [i.e., from Gaza] to Sovereignty [i.e., in Gaza]" last week organized by the Yesha Council of settlements and the shadowy far-right Tkuma movement, Yesha head Yossi Dagan declared bluntly, "We are here to fix the expulsion, and Oslo."
What are the guiding principles for security going forward?
"It's good for our enemies to die for our country," the bereaved father Eliyahu Libman said at the conference, riffing on Joseph Trumpledor's famous line, "It's good to die for our country." Libman's son was thought to have been taken hostage on October 7, until his body was found in another victim's grave in Israel.
It's hard to judge a father who went through that. But Libman's opinions predated his son: He was the head of the Kiryat Arba local council near Hebron, one of the oldest West Bank settlements. In 2016, Libman testified in defense of Elor Azaria, the soldier who executed a Palestinian who had tried to stab other soldiers in Hebron after the attacker had been shot and lay unconscious on the ground.
And while it's true that wars are precisely about killing the enemy, Libman's intention seems sweeping, as if there were no other recourse.
Another principle is that diplomacy is over, at least with the Palestinians. This is a feat, considering that official negotiations have been dead since 2014, and today's cease-fire talks are merely indirect negotiations with a non-state actor. It's also a strange thing to advocate, considering how successful diplomacy has been for Israel, from the peace treaties with Jordan, Egypt and the countries of the Abraham Accords. While the cabinet's new plan for Gaza City can reportedly pause if negotiations restart with Hamas, there's little sign Israel wants this to happen.
Israeli soldiers in Nur al-Shams in the West Bank, February.Credit: IDF Spokesperson's Unit
Instead, ministers are communicating that negotiations for the sake of Israeli lives are no longer an option. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told last week's conference: "I am announcing very clearly: There will be no more negotiations with Hamas over a release deal." The audience broke into applause. "The only possible deal is the total surrender of Hamas, the return of all our hostages with no conditions, the disarmament and demilitarization of Gaza, the exile of the leaders, and allowing all those who wish to leave to do so."
The next principle is to take land, because "Arabs understand land more than life." In recent months, this line has been everywhere. Lawmakers from the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, former senior military officials and lawmakers from the ruling Likud partyhave been using uncannily similar language lately. Likud's Hanoch Milwidsky, the new head of the Knesset Finance Committee who is also being investigated on suspicions of rape, declaimed on Channel 14 in mid-July: "Enough of talking about [hostage release] deals at all. ... We need to take land. ... You kill their people, they don't care, destroy buildings – they don't even care about famine. What they care about is land."
We should have known this was coming: Amit Segal, the political commentator who is the closest person to the government in the mainstream media, argued the same logic in January in The Wall Street Journal. Someone gave it to someone and suddenly that line is everywhere.
What should Israel do once it has the land? Annex and settle. One of the most passionate speakers at the "sovereignty" conference was Justice Minister Yariv Levin. He nearly trembled as he recounted how close Israel came to declaring sovereignty in the West Bank (he didn't call it that) in 2020. There will be a great moment, he told the audience, "when we start pushing the buttons to vote in the Knesset and in cabinet meetings to extend sovereignty," so that all the land will belong to the Jewish people. The audience broke out into beatific applause once again.
The constant gardener
Some security experts are critical. Omer Zanany, a retired lieutenant colonel who heads the joint political-military unit at Mitvim (a liberal foreign policy institute) and the Berl Katznelson Foundation, characterizes the new approach as a stark shift away from a long-standing security doctrine based on reducing friction by separating conflicting groups.
Messianic right-wingers, driven by ideology, believe that such friction is a good thing. "They think settlements contribute to security because the friction sparks constant fighting and 'mowing the lawn,'" Zanany said in an interview, using the euphemism for occasional rounds of severe fighting in Gaza to constrain Hamas in the decade before October 7. "[They think] you can't do that from the outside; you have to sit inside and do it from within. Instead of bringing in a gardener once a month, he's there every day."
Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen. He advocates for the strategic military basis of maximalist expansionism.Credit: Emil Salman
Zanany pointed to the security doctrine elaborated by Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen, who has become one of the most influential public voices advocating the strategic military basis for the maximalist expansionism of Israel's new security paradigm. He is a central figure in "the securitists" – habithonistim – a group of retired right-wing military figures finding military logic for positions the Israeli government has advanced during the war. The group represents a counterpoint to Commanders for Israel's Security, an organization of retired military personnel who promote a two-state solution based on their military and security experience.
In a January 2024 article, Hacohen argued that Israel had moved to a wrongful paradigm of withdrawal over the years, as major ground operations in urban areas came to seem like obsolete industrial-era warfare, in an era when advanced information technology allowed for remote security methods. "It is essential to develop a new Israeli security perspective … that moves away from the konzeptzia of withdrawal … as if the IDF could forgo territorial depth and win fast even from the 1967 lines," he wrote.
Palestinians looking at Israeli soldiers stationed in the West Bank settlement of Carmel on Thursday.Credit: Mosab Shawer/AFP
But Zanany says: "The classic security approach is the complete opposite – that it's better to operate with a line and with an 'address'" such as a central government or a decision-making authority. Israel's government wants no such thing for the Palestinians, since it could become the basis for a state. Then, when government figures are confronted in interviews with the question of how Israel was able to reach cease-fire agreements in Lebanon and Iran but not in Gaza, the answer is always a variation of circular logic: "Ah, it's different! Those are proper states with governments."
Hacohen, the right-wing military thinker, argues for a return to earlier Zionist security strategies. In 2019 he described an organic harmony of Jewish settlements that provide the essential foundation for the IDF presence, and the army, in turn, delivered "successful" military operations such as Defensive Shield in the West Bank back in 2002. Speakers at the "sovereignty" conference repeatedly pointed to West Bank settlements as the only reason there has not been a massive October 7 style attack there.
It's a view that ignores all other factors: Relative to Gaza, West Bank Palestinians had a better economy, greater mobility and deeper coordination with Israel on security for over three decades, while accelerated settlement contributed violent escalations that spiked in the years ahead of October 7. Zanany believes that this right-wing paradigm both provokes and depends on such regular escalations in order to continuously "mow the lawn."
But he points to the obvious problem, which is almost a tautology. "You can't win because it's endless. You won't create any positive direction."