Dana El-Kurd

the Golden Heights.

I don't see any reason why they would, if they do decide to occupy all of South Lebanon.

And also because the shift, and this is what you were referring to with that quote, that person you mentioned, the shift in Israeli politics in the past few decades isn't even that, if you might call it strategic, that we're going to do the thing, even if it's illegal, we're going to occupy land, even if it's illegal, but it's sort of like the ultimate purpose of it is something that resembles some kind of diplomatic negotiation.

It's domination almost for its own sake.

There is no end goal necessarily.

You mentioned there are, of course, religious Zionists, but you also have others that are not interested in settlement.

They're just interested in destroying the land, like destroying, having this so-called buffer zone, which is a euphemism for just a no man's land.

It's just destroying everything.

And so the policy can shift in a sense, but the intention is to just try and dominate for as long as possible for its own sake.

And this is a wider pattern in Israeli politics that I don't know how well understood it is, maybe a bit more now than before.

Because even before the ongoing war in Iran started, Naftali Bennett, who was the prime minister of Israel and reportedly wants to replace Netanyahu in the upcoming elections, said that Turkey is the next Iran.

Virtually any Israeli paper, center and further to the right, which is most of them, you read them, there is someone who has at some point in this, I'm not talking just a random person, I'm talking like a high ranking politician and military official, at some point described like Turkey as being next.

And what needs to be understood with all of this is not, oh, can they actually do this or whatnot?

Because maybe they can't.

I don't know.

I hope we never find out.

But it's that they can't stop.

It's becoming an end in itself.

There has to be an enemy.

There has to be a constant creation almost of an external enemy in Israeli political discourse today because nothing else works anymore.