»This split between Sharon and his core constituency is not surprising. Labour Zionism (Sharon’s school of Zionism) is the rival of romantic revisionist Zionism, the Likud’s historical forebear. The vision of the revisionist Zionists was the establishment of a Jewish state within the borders of Greater Israel (including what today is Jordan), without specifying how this aim should be achieved or how to deal with the Arab inhabitants of the country and region. The revisionists’ basic assumption was that the Jewish people had an incontestable historical and moral right over the entire ancestral land, which right was to be self-implemented. For three decades this secular messianic movement – which was and still is detached from any political and social reality – found natural allies in the national religious movements and later also in messianic orthodox circles.«

»The approach of Labour Zionism to Jewish nation-building in Palestine was completely different. They believed less in rights and more in incrementally established facts on the ground; they also took into consideration the changing local and international balance of power between Arabs and Jews. The basic tactic was to acquire by purchase – and later by fighting – the maximum amount of territory with the minimum number of Arab inhabitants. Labour Zionism has no fixed or sacred borders: the amount of territory under Jewish control is flexible, subject to a complex combination of territorial, political, social and demographic considerations. This pragmatic approach was one of the main reasons for the incredible success of the Zionist project, which at the start had seemed to be against all the odds.«

»So began the era of Jewish colonisation. But prosperity depended on the continuing good behaviour and cooperation of the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and their willingness to accept Israel’s policy of including them in the Israeli economy but excluding them from other spheres. For almost a generation the Palestinians accepted these colonial rules, benefiting from relative prosperity but totally deprived of human and civil rights; they began to protest about this in 1973. They had no right to self-determination, to the use of collective symbols, or even to the display of any ethnic or national identity. Both societies became addicted to this deeply asymmetric situation and grew increasingly interdependent. (Most Israelis and Palestinians who grew up in this anomalous situation see it as quite natural and find it hard to imagine other kinds of relationships.)«

»Besides its economic interest in the occupied territories, Israel had had to deal with a new complication after the 1967 war: the desire of Israeli society, both left and right, to annex the historic heartland of the Jewish people in the West Bank without acquiring its Arab residents. Formal annexation would have meant that Israel would no longer have a Jewish majority: demographic changes would destroy the Jewish identity of the state, even if Palestinians were not granted full citizenship.«

»Current demographic projections show that by 2020, 15.1 million people will live in historic Palestine and Jews, at 6.5 million, will be a minority. Jewish Israelis and their political culture suffer from two deeply rooted existential anxieties: the physical annihilation of the state, an issue that is frequently used, abused and emotionally manipulated by many Israeli politicians and intellectuals; and the loss of the fragile Jewish demographic majority, seen as a prelude to the physical elimination of the Jewish state. Israel therefore has faced contradictory imperatives: to possess all the Holy Land ran counter to the other patriotic necessity, to ensure a massive Jewish majority in that land. A large part of the electorate, from both Zionist schools, voted for Sharon twice, expecting him to find a proper solution to these internal contradictions and to end the second intifada.

Sharon had his own idea for solving the Palestinian problem: "politicide", an idea that goes back to the 1948 war. Politicide is a military-political, diplomatic and psychological process that has as its ultimate goal the dissolution of the Palestinian people’s existence as a legitimate, independent social, political and economic entity. This process could also, though not necessarily, include their gradual ethnic cleansing, partial or complete, from the Land of Israel or historic Palestine. The so-called peace camp and even Yitzhak Rabin, at the end of his life, tried to solve this problem by giving up most of the territories. That is why he was assassinated. But in the elections after his death a majority of Jewish voters rejected this solution, which they saw as a deviation from Labour’s Zionist approach. Sharon’s government later opted for a reversal of the Oslo approach.«

»The incursions and the sieges of the Palestinians’ towns, villages and refugee camps, and the extrajudicial executions of their military and political leadership, from all factions, had another aim: to demonstrate Israel’s military might and its readiness to use it. The Palestinians had to be shown how vulnerable and defenceless they were against any act of Israeli aggression. Arab states and the international community paid no more than lip service to the plight of the Palestinians, and that mainly to silence internal unrest. Under the protection of the United States’ current administration, with its roots close to Christian fundamentalism, Israel is seen as a moral extension of the US, enjoying the almost unconditional political and military support of the sole superpower.«

»All these conditions are designed to lower Palestinian expectations, crush their resistance, isolate them, make them submit to Israel’s conditions and eventually persuade them to emigrate en masse. But Sharon’s plan, which fits into the pragmatic Labour Zionist approach, is in no way compatible with that of the revisionists or with messianic dreams of an exclusively Jewish Greater Israel. Which is why the Likud referendum failed. Yet the majority of Israelis support Sharon’s plan and many outside Israel see the glimpse of a breakthrough toward a settlement of the conflict. Politicide is not over.«