Israeli Press
Israeli analyst Michael Milstein calls Qusra the settlement revolution's direct product
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The argument Israelis have been having about Qusra is mostly about whether the settlers who besieged three families there are an aberration. On Sunday one of the country's better-known analysts of Palestinian affairs told Ynet's readers that they are not.
Dr Michael Milstein, who heads the Palestinian Studies Forum at Tel Aviv University's Moshe Dayan Center and ran the Palestinian desk in Israeli military intelligence as a colonel before advising the army's coordinator of government activities in the territories, wrote that what happened at Qusra is "not a historical accident" but the direct result of what the Israeli right calls its revolution in the West Bank.
His case is that the outposts and hilltop farms that produced the Qusra attacks have no legal basis and operate anyway, with the state's tacit approval, and that their sponsors present a religious and ideological project in the language of security.
What happens in the West Bank under unprecedented political spin is a sectarian project based on faith and ideology, imposed on the entire public.
Dr Michael Milstein, Dayan Center, writing in Ynet
Milstein argues that the trauma of 7 October has closed the argument rather than opened it: a public in shock, he writes, does not grasp what a single state containing two mutually hostile populations would actually mean, and anyone who raises it is called a defeatist.
He is not writing as a sympathiser of the Palestinians he describes. His conclusion is that Israel is left with two grim options — continued drift into a one-state reality, or a managed physical separation — and that the election campaign now under way offers voters neither, only the slogan of managing the conflict, because that is all the public is asking for.
The value of the piece for Palestinian readers is not its prescription. It is that a mainstream Israeli security analyst, writing in the country's largest news site, has put on the record what the families on Ras al-Ein have been saying since 10 August: the men outside their houses are not operating against the state's wishes.
