Israel, Land, Security, and the Failure of Domination
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Context
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is rooted in two national movements claiming deep attachment to the same land. Jews have ancient religious, historical, and cultural ties to the land of Israel. Palestinians have lived for generations in the land that became Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Both peoples have suffered. Both peoples have histories of fear, loss, and displacement.
The modern conflict intensified in the twentieth century. Zionism emerged partly as a response to centuries of antisemitism in Europe and elsewhere. The Holocaust gave terrible urgency to the demand for a Jewish refuge and a Jewish state. In 1948, Israel declared independence. Palestinians remember the same period as the Nakba, or catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced or fled during the war surrounding Israel’s creation.
In 1967, after the Six-Day War, Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights. Sinai was later returned to Egypt. Gaza was evacuated by Israeli settlers and soldiers in 2005, but Israel has continued to exercise major control over Gaza’s borders, airspace, coastline, population registry, and flow of goods, while Egypt also controls Gaza’s southern crossing. The West Bank and East Jerusalem remain central to the struggle over occupation, settlements, sovereignty, and Palestinian self-determination.
Israeli governments have long argued that military control is necessary for security. That concern cannot be dismissed. Israel has faced wars, suicide bombings, rocket attacks, cross-border raids, and the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attacks, in which civilians were murdered and hostages were taken. Attacks on civilians are crimes, not liberation.
But Palestinian suffering cannot be dismissed either. Palestinians have lived under occupation, blockade, displacement, settlement expansion, military raids, home demolitions, restrictions on movement, and repeated wars. The humanitarian cost has been devastating. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs tracks casualties and humanitarian conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory and has repeatedly raised concerns about civilian suffering, international law, and accountability.
The law is also central. The United Nations Security Council declared in Resolution 2334 that Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, have “no legal validity” and constitute a “flagrant violation” under international law. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion concluding that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and that Israel must bring that presence to an end as rapidly as possible. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant concerning alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity; those allegations remain legal charges, not convictions.
This context matters because the conflict cannot be understood as a simple battle between good and evil. It is a struggle involving real fear, real trauma, real injustice, real crimes, and real political choices. But some principles remain clear: civilians must not be targeted; land must not be taken by force; collective punishment is wrong; occupation cannot become permanent; and no people’s safety should depend on another people’s permanent subordination.
Discussion
A country cannot build a secure future by taking another people’s land. It may gain territory. It may build walls, roads, settlements, checkpoints, and military outposts. It may tell itself that expansion is defensive, temporary, necessary, or historical. But if its security depends on denying another people’s rights, it creates not peace, but permanent resistance.
That is the central tragedy of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. Israel was created as a refuge for Jews after centuries of persecution and after the catastrophe of the Holocaust. That history matters. Jewish fear is not imaginary. Jewish vulnerability is not invented. The need for Jewish safety is real.
But Palestinian dispossession is also real. Palestinian grief is real. Palestinian rights are real. No people’s trauma gives it the right to permanently dominate another people.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as impossibly complicated. In many ways, it is. It involves religion, nationalism, imperial history, refugee claims, terrorism, wars, borders, holy sites, failed negotiations, and outside powers. But one principle is not complicated: land cannot justly be taken by force and then settled permanently by the occupying power.
That principle is central to the international order created after World War II. The world had seen what happens when powerful states decide that their need for land, security, destiny, or historical entitlement gives them permission to crush weaker peoples. The postwar system tried, however imperfectly, to replace conquest with law. It rejected aggressive war. It rejected annexation by force. It recognized that peace requires limits on power.
This is why settlement expansion is not a side issue. It is not merely a technical dispute about zoning, borders, roads, or security arrangements. Settlement expansion changes facts on the ground. It fragments Palestinian territory. It makes a viable Palestinian state harder to imagine. It tells Palestinians that negotiation is a trap: while talks continue, land disappears.
Supporters of the settlement project often present it as a matter of history, religion, or security. They point to ancient Jewish ties to the land. Those ties are real. But historical connection does not erase the rights of the people who live there now. Many peoples have ancient memories of lost lands. If every ancient claim became a modern right to rule, the world would never know peace.
Security is also invoked. Israelis have a right to be safe from attack. But occupation has not brought lasting safety. Permanent domination produces rage, humiliation, extremism, and despair. It strengthens the most violent voices on both sides. It teaches each generation to fear the other. It turns ordinary life into a battlefield.
Netanyahu’s political project has made this worse. His approach has not produced peace. It has encouraged permanent control, empowered extremists, deepened international isolation, and blurred the line between defending Israel and defending occupation. A one-state reality without equal rights is not democracy. It is rule by one people over another.
The moral issue is not whether Israelis deserve safety. They do. The moral issue is whether Israeli safety can be built on Palestinian subjugation. It cannot.
Nor is the moral issue whether Palestinians have suffered. They have. The issue is whether Palestinian suffering justifies attacks on Israeli civilians. It does not. Murdering civilians, taking hostages, and using terror are crimes, not liberation.
A just position must hold both truths at once: Israeli civilians must be protected, and Palestinian civilians must be protected. Israeli self-determination matters, and Palestinian self-determination matters. Antisemitism is evil, and anti-Palestinian racism is evil. Jewish safety is necessary, and Palestinian freedom is necessary.
This is why criticism of Israeli government policy must be carefully aimed. Jews are not responsible as a people for the actions of Netanyahu’s government. Many Jews, in Israel and around the world, oppose occupation, annexation, settlement expansion, and religious nationalism. The target of criticism should be the policy: occupation, settlement expansion, collective punishment, annexationist ideology, terrorism, and the denial of equal human rights.
The deeper lesson is universal. Nationalism becomes dangerous when it treats another people’s land as empty space. It becomes dangerous when it turns fear into permission. It becomes dangerous when it says, “Our people need security, so your people must live without freedom.”
That logic has led humanity into catastrophe before. The answer is not to compare peoples crudely or to turn history into an insult. The answer is to recognize the pattern: domination does not become moral because the dominant group has suffered. Victimhood does not grant a license to victimize.
Israel’s future cannot be secured by endless occupation. Palestinians’ future cannot be secured by terrorism. Neither people is going away. Neither people can be wished out of existence. The only humane future is one based on equal dignity, political rights, security, and the end of land seizure by force.
Occupation will not bring peace. Annexation will not bring peace. Collective punishment will not bring peace. Terrorism will not bring peace. Peace requires law, courage, compromise, accountability, and the recognition that both peoples must be allowed to live.
A just peace does not begin with the question, “How much can one side take?” It begins with a harder and better question: “What would it take for both peoples to live without domination, terror, or despair?”
That is the question Israel, Palestine, the United States, and the world must finally face.
References
- International Court of Justice. “Summary of the Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024: Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.” July 19, 2024.
https://www.icj-cij.org/node/204176 - International Court of Justice. “Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024.” July 19, 2024.
https://www.icj-cij.org/index.php/node/204160 - United Nations Security Council. Resolution 2334 (2016). December 23, 2016.
https://www.un.org/webcast/pdfs/SRES2334-2016.pdf - International Criminal Court. “Netanyahu.” Arrest warrant issued November 21, 2024.
https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/netanyahu - International Criminal Court. “Situation in the State of Palestine: ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I rejects the State of Israel’s challenges to jurisdiction and issues warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.” November 21, 2024.
https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-icc-pre-trial-chamber-i-rejects-state-israels-challenges - United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, occupied Palestinian territory. “Data on casualties.”
https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties - United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
https://www.unocha.org/occupied-palestinian-territory
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