Israel Has Become a Borderless State of Settlers - Opinion
Who can draw the 1967 "Green Line" border?, students were asked at one of the lessons on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at Sapir College a few years ago. Glassy eyes indicated that not only was the request strange, but also the concept sounded like some mysterious riddle. Only one student knew how to explain exactly what that green line was. "How do you know?" she was asked. "I live in Judea and Samaria, and there we know what we are fighting. The Green Line is the enemy."
Anyone reading the disconcerting story by Matan Golan, which describes in great detail the manner in which the government is shattering Israel's recognized borders, flooding the West Bank with hundreds of "points" that are meant to dismantle the identity and national affinity of the Palestinians – cannot but be shocked by the dangerous threat it poses for Israel's future identity. Not only in the West Bank are Israelis being trained to live in a fluid status quo, a temporary-permanent one that does not allow them to develop their horizons in terms of identity and boundaries.
When Israel has no border in the Gaza Strip, and when it stretches its limbs into Syria and Lebanon, its citizens are required to take a daily bite from a mushroom of a hallucinatory, defense-related conception and imagine that the new borders are vital for their protection. In practice, they live in a reality of getting used to a permanent impermanence. This develops into an ideology that determines that it is possible and even desirable and seemly to live without clear borders.
In this dangerous transition, from a nation-state striving to shape its identity and values within recognized borders to a state with fluid borders, a "Sparta nation" is formed. This one fosters a fortress-minded society, alert, vigilant, armed – but one without a horizon. Not a society that asks where it wants to go, but one that wishes to get through the next week. And its values are derived accordingly.
In the not-too-distant past, even people who opposed making any territorial concessions and did not believe in an agreement with the Palestinians, Syria or Lebanon still operated within a conceptual world in which the main question was what is the desired resolution. Now, a totally different framework is being created. No more striving for a permanent arrangement, but getting used to a situation in which there isn't any; a situation in which one only needs to manage its consequences.
Evidence for this is the wondering, justified in itself, at what military advantage there is in remaining in Lebanon, in controlling a few thousand acres in Syria or in deepening the occupation in the Gaza Strip by a few percent. The Israel Defense Forces has some ready answers: more infrastructure can be destroyed; another tunnel can be blown up and one more terrorist killed. Above these hovers the slogan "October 7 will not be repeated," which silences any doubts. But the decisive question is not whether such occupation has any military advantage, but rather what happens to a society that gets used to measuring its future only according to the effectiveness of its means of domination; one that no longer asks how wide the state wishes to expand, but instead how far is it capable of reaching; and one for which defining its borders, as far as it is concerned, has stopped being a diplomatic objective.
- IDF expands Gaza occupation, displacing more Palestinians to less territory Nir Hasson
- As the world watched Gaza, Israeli settlers charged ahead in the West Bank. A clash is imminent Yarden Michaeli
- Israel fast-tracks 1 billion shekels for 69 illegal West Bank outposts Simi Spolter
This is precisely the steep slope Israel has slid down, becoming a state of settlers, a state in which many citizens living within its recognized borders have "forgotten" what the Green Lineis. It is the runway on which the judicial overhaul took off, on the margins of which lie the dying remnants of Israel's democracy. Now, its good citizens are horrified from the revolting scenes its criminal gangs are generating, carrying out pogroms against Palestinians with the state's permission and authority.
But even those who present themselves as the future leaders and the alternative to the destroyers now ruling this country have lost all interest in a resolution. They are very cautious not to let the words "two states" pass their lips, and they have no horizon for Gaza, Lebanon or Syria. "The old is dying and the new cannot be born," diagnosed the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. In the meantime, he warned, monstrous developments take shape.