Hollow Souls: Settlements, Intellectual Redundancy, and Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

8 November 2025

Israel’s genocide in Gaza is an extrapolation of Zionism’s traditional attempt to suppress reality with mythology, leaning heavily on Israel lobby-generated American backing.

The tendency to distinguish between the 1967 occupied territories including East Jerusalem and historic Palestine, is artificial and fails to stand the test of reason. Zionism in Palestine as such and its supporters in the world constitute a colonial and apartheid project in the entirety of this territory since the 1917 appalling British Balfour declaration was inserted in the preamble of the 1922 League of Nations mandate over Palestine, when Jews barely constituted 10% of the total population. The rationale of Zionism, its raison d’être, is to redeem the ‘land of Israel’ and rule it without Palestine and the Palestinians. Zionism’s settlement policies since setting foot in Palestine were to control land expansively and diminish Palestinian presence politically, physically, economically, intellectually, and symbolically.

Ben Gurion’s ruling party Mapai carried out this project in the aftermath of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of more than two-thirds of the Palestinian population while imposing a strict military regime against those who were not displaced outside the country. The containment of the remaining Palestinians was successful in controlling their educational system substantially and by security means, leaving few economic paths for prosperity. Governance of their local councils has developed in this paradigm and spirit as well as an extremely localized social structure internalized by most Palestinian academics in Israeli universities who suffer not only from their low number and shattered self–esteem but also from a failed pretense of knowledge production and public involvement as demonstrated throughout Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Denial of Palestine and Palestinians was absolute by all components of Israeli Jewish society. To speak genuinely as Palestinians was prohibited. Resorting to the extremely limited rights rhetoric afforded by Mapai and the Soviet Union, as the Israeli Communist Party attempted, resulted in adverse consequences.

Colonizing the land required constant mechanisms of legitimization. Zionism and Mapai needed the imagination of scientific archaeology [1] and the religious teachings of Judaism to claim a rightful presence in a reality that presented little justification.[2] Following the poor military performance mainly against Egypt in the 1973 war where American weapons, guidance, and threats saved Israel from disastrous defeat, Mapai’s rule reached a deadlock with the rising resentment of large segments of the Mizrahi Jewish population who have consistently followed an anti – Mapai political performance with close ties to their heritage and, paradoxically, a persistent anti – Arab and anti – Palestinian mood infused by troubling religiosity and mass technical employment in Israel’s arms industries as well as security services not affected by their melancholic songs. Political dominance remained far away from them despite their numbers and mimicking Mapai’s mode of administrative maneuvers. Mapai’s new versions maintained their hegemony over their culturally different fellows, notwithstanding their embarrassing talent reinforced by artistic advocacy for regional violence.

Mentioning Palestinians was only on the extreme fringes of Tel–Aviv and Jerusalem by uninfluential figures such as Israel Shahak, Uri Avnery who carried a disturbing past, and Matzpen, in contrast to the dominant discourse of the Israeli Communist Party and subsequently Hadash. The prevailing attitude among Israeli Jewish society’s multilayered composition remained that of Golda Meir’s. Total negation of Palestine and Palestinians.

Benny Morris’s pale discovery of the Palestinians was deconstructed by his surrender to the accusatorial terrorism introduced by Israel’s security services in the aftermath of the 1993 Oslo process and in the early 2000s. Mapai’s variants and mutations survived the public encounter with Palestinian political personhood by preferring their identity over even relative and unfair distribution of rights towards their victims.

The very short post – Zionist moment was a triumphant Zionist one, cheering for Palestinian capitulation and the wavering of the liberationist platform exemplified by Mahmoud Abbas, while reducing the burden of patrolling Palestinian cities in the West Bank and Gaza. Overall military and civilian control and occupation was maintained by the Israeli army and settlers, practically sabotaging any other right for the Palestinians such as sovereignty over East Jerusalem, evacuation of all settlers from all Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, right of return for Palestinian refugees to their 1948 locations of residence,  reparations, an apology for Zionism’s constant atrocities, and geographic as well as parliamentary autonomy for Palestinians in Israel.

The Israel lobby in the United States added pressure to abandon Palestinian rights, encouraging Israel not to worry about any genuine regional assistance to them, diplomatic or otherwise. Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk managed the Oslo process maliciously on behalf of the Israel lobby when settlers’ numbers in the 1967 occupied territories grew fundamentally and have more than doubled since. Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005 left it under a crippling siege of the Israeli military, maintaining effective control over the lives of Palestinians residing in the enclave. The dominance of Palestinians’ rights by Israel’s supporters in the United States reached monstrous levels during the Saban and Adelson post-Oslo era.

Writing in Hebrew in Mapai’s intellectual environment at the Hebrew University and later also in the same setting of Haaretz, Baruch Kimmerling revealed the obvious in 1993 that Israeli society is a militarized one perceived as a colonial enterprise by the surrounding communities. Little change has occurred since, except in the Israeli Jewish society’s internal demographics and power struggles. Relatively audacious considering the Israeli Yeshuv mindset, Kimmerling never extracted the necessary conclusion that Zionism is a colonial venture without a right to sovereignty in Palestine that produced repressive, dispossessing, and apartheid political structures. One of the baffling dimensions of ‘critical’ Israeli writing is never taking responsibility, either by projecting purportedly rigorous professional research qualities or engaging in unjustified self-admiration for uttering basic and simple truths.

Major obstacle before such unpersuasive writing is the character of Meron Benvenisti. Raised in an ardent Zionist household, Benvenesti was an enforcer of Israel’s expropriating policies in East Jerusalem following its occupation in 1967 including its de facto annexation captured already by United Nations General Assembly resolutions 2253 and 2254 of July 1967, U.N. Security Council resolutions 252 of May 1968, 298 of September 1971, and 446 of March 1979 reiterated subsequently by other similar resolutions and two advisory opinions of the International Court of Justice (ICJ).  

The more traditional Mapai lost influence in the Israeli government, Benvenesti became unenchanted by the ideology that shaped his thinking and jurisdictional activities. True, in 1997 his article titled “The Hebrew Map” about the colonial process of designating ethnically cleansed Palestinian places with Hebrew names that covered the entirety of displaced Palestine was published. But there is no actual sense of guilt or the absorption of responsibility in this process. On the contrary, throughout Benvenisti’s writing career after the unconvincing change in his political stance, he maintained Zionism’s right for sovereignty in the ‘land of Israel’, including at the Van Leer Institute, which some perplexingly have likened to the German Institute for Social Research that produced the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.

Yossi Sarid, another classical Mapai figure with the values of an indoctrinated high school teacher, praised Benvenesti in 2012 for not abandoning the traditional Zionist viewpoint, distancing him from non–existent Israeli critical thought. Benvenisti has also been glorified for his peculiar ‘critical’ insight that has legitimized Zionism again by declaring during the 1988 Intifada that the ‘conflict’ is not reversible and it should be managed, and for his outspokenness in undermining both Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish.[3]

Suffering from extreme scarcity in moral authorship about Zionism, Benvensti’s ‘ideas’ proved to be contagious among self-proclaimed Israeli progressives, chief among them the phenomenally unappealing Oren Yiftachel. Geographer in his training, Yiftachel has attracted an audience from local Palestinian academic elites who seem to consider him key to resolving outstanding land issues theoretically and in the legal sphere. One of Yiftachel’s main fallacies, out of many, is failing to recognize Israel’s apartheid essence and nature, which is derived also from his field of specialty, Israel’s land regime. An academic version of civil rights attorney Avigdor Feldman and his protégés, they often contribute to redefining the scope of rights for Palestinians, legitimate Zionism’s claims through court rulings, and do not contribute in any sense to rhetorical or practical empowerment of individuals or communities that they reputedly represent.[4]  

In the context of post-1967 settlements, the Israeli official legal framework is typically ideological. Erasure of Palestine and Palestinians, with the introduction of outposts as a problematic phenomenon dealt with in contrast to international law by two commissions in 2005 and 2012. Settlements’ illegal status in all of the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967, including East Jerusalem, has been established since their inception. ICJ’s 2004 advisory opinion about the Wall affirmed their void stature, and the same Court’s advisory opinion of 2024 determined that the occupation as such in all of this area is also unlawful and forms apartheid.

Settlers’ violence and vandalism should not distract from the actual scope and nature of their legally abolished condition. Their attacks against Palestinian civilians and property, with the complete backing of the Israeli occupying military and enjoying total impunity from the Israeli legal system, attained record levels in October 2025.[5]During its genocide in Gaza, Israel continued its attempt to consolidate its physical transformation of the West Bank[6], including a military operation in January 2025, causing the forced displacement of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and the arbitrary mass arrest of hundreds.[7]  

Zionism, not the settlements or the ‘outposts’, is the obstacle to peace. Accountability for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the grave violations of human rights in the other 1967-occupied Palestinian territories should indeed capture the priorities of any reasonable and decent person following Israel’s atrocities and constant illegal expansive plans backed by the United States. But the path towards peace in Palestine and the ‘Holy Land’ passes through one road: abrogation of Zionism and the reconfiguration of Israeli Jewish identity.

   Smotrich and Huckabee. Source: Arutz 7, 12 June 2025.

Meron Benvenisti, 1967. Source: Haaretz / Hazman Hazeh, 27 October 2020.

Shimon Peres at Ofra Settlement, mid-1970s. Source: Makor Rishon, 28 September 2016.

David Ben Gurion and Jewish National Fund’s Yosef Weitz, 1961. Source: JNF’s archive.

[1] See Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self – Fashioning in Israeli Society, (University of Chicago Press, 2002).

[2] See Shalom Goldman, “David Ben Gurion Asks 51 Jewish Scholars: ‘Who is a Jew’?”, Tablet Magazine, 30 November 2018.

[3] See Nadav Shargaim “In memoriam half year into his death: back to conversations with one of the finest researchers of the Israeli – Palestinian conflict, Meron Benvenisti”, Israel Hayom, 25 March 2021. Compare with Salim Tamari, Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighborhoods and their Fate in the War, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1999; Rashid Khalidi et al, The Other Jerusalem: Rethinking the History of the Sacred City, Institute for Palestine Studies and the Khalidi Library, 2020; Edward Said, “Palestine has not disappeared”, Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1998; Edward Said, “Palestinians under Siege”, 22(24) London Review of Books, 14 December 2000.  

[4] The Israeli legal system’s Mapai’s essence is projected by proponents of rights discourse such as Professor Mordechai Kremnitzer of the Hebrew University, and the long-time legal director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel Dan Yakir. See, for example, “A betrayal of international law”, Jerusalem Post, 28 September 2014; Hagai Amit, “300% in a year and a half: this is how the war launched the Yakir brothers’ arms company”, The Marker, 7 February 2025 (Hebrew). Kremnitzer supervised the PhD of the Israeli Justice Ministry official tasked to represent Israel in international law proceedings in the Hague, the Netherlands. Regarding Palestinians in their various ‘legal’ capacities, the Israeli civilian legal system is a reflection of the military one. South Africa-born and raised Hebrew University academic David Kretzmer has been suffering for a long time from what can be called the Benjamin Poground syndrome: insisting that Israel is not an apartheid state despite its laws, policies, and countless legal and moral imperfections. See also Chris McGreal, “How apartheid history shaped South Africa’s genocide case against Israel”, The Guardian, 8 January 2024.

[5] Michelle Nichols, “Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians reach record number in October, U.N. says”, Reuters, 7 November 2025. See also Patrick Kingsley et al, “With Arson and Land Grabs, Israeli Settler Attacks in West Bank Hit Record High”, New York Times, 14 August 2025; Bethan McKernan, “‘A New Nakba’: settler violence forces Palestinians out of West Bank villages”, The Guardian, 31 October 2023; Bethan McKernan, “‘Never like this before’: settler violence in West Bank escalates”, The Guardian, 27 February 2023; Mona Chalabi, “Settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank – visualized”, The Guardian, 22 April 2024; “Israeli forces kill three Palestinians after settlers attack West Bank town”, The Guardian, 25 June 2025; Lorenzo Tondo, “ ‘This is not an isolated event’: attack on Palestinian director brings rising settler violence into focus”, The Guardian, 28 March 2025.

[6] Claire Parker, “Sweeping Israeli actions transform West Bank in shadow of Gaza war”, Washington Post, 28 September 2025.

[7] Amnesty International, Israel’s destructive West Bank military operation fuels mass forced displacement of Palestinians, 5 June 2025.