Oddly, it was Israeli historian Benny Morris who got it right, when he offered a candid prediction of the future of his country and its war with the Palestinians.
“The Palestinians look at everything from a broad, long-term perspective,” he said in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2019. “They see that, at the moment, there are five-six-seven million Jews here, surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs. They have no reason to give in, because the Jewish state can’t last. They are bound to win. In another 30 to 50 years they will overcome us, come what may.”
Morris is right. He is correct in the sense that Palestinians will not give up, that there can never be a situation where societies indefinitely survive and thrive within a permanent matrix of racial segregation, violence and exclusion – exclusion of the other, the Palestinians and the isolation of the self.
The very history of Palestine is a testament to such a truth. If the oppressed, the natives of the land, are not fully vanquished or decimated, they are likely to rise, fight and win back their freedom.
It must be utterly frustrating for Israel that all the killings and destruction underway in Gaza have not been enough to affect the overall outcomes of the war: the ‘total victory’ of which Netanyahu continues to speak.
Israel’s frustration is understandable because, like all military occupiers of the past, Tel Aviv continues to believe that the right quantity of violence should be enough to subdue colonised nations. ….more
