Israeli Press
Milstein calls Israel's settlements-stop-terror doctrine a strategy without foundation
Israeli PressGraphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The Newsdesk gathers reporting from wire services and primary sources and rewrites every story in-house before publication. How our journalism is made →
Israel's leadership has turned holding territory into what it calls an existential rock, and the doctrine underneath it does not survive examination, the Israeli researcher Michael Milstein argued in Ynet on Sunday.
Milstein is a senior researcher at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, an Israeli research institute, and a former officer in Israeli military intelligence who headed its Palestinian desk.
The proposition he set out to dismantle is the claim that "where there is settlement there is no terror." That formula, in his telling, has no strategic grounding and rests on political and ideological motives rather than security ones.
He compared the confidence around it to the assumptions Israel carried into 7 October 2023, when territorial depth and technological superiority were also thought to make surprise impossible.
“where there is settlement there is no terror”
Milstein listed what he sees emerging from open-ended control of territory: escape routes in Gaza, discipline eroding in the army, destruction no one is controlling, and violence against Palestinians becoming ordinary.
His prescription is not withdrawal in the political sense. He urged redeploying forces to the lines of October 2023 while continuing preventive operations against emerging threats and keeping hold of assets Israel treats as critical, the Philadelphi Corridor among them.
The argument is his, not the paper's, and it is a security argument rather than a rights one. Its interest for Palestinian readers is what it concedes: the men presenting permanent territorial control as consensus are, in Milstein's account, the same men who presided over the failure of 2023.
