***

“The settlers aren’t wrong. The right is correct: That is the way to seize and hold land, and their claim that, any place we Israelis leave, the Arabs will come in our place, is correct. The right is also correct in its path: It’s by settlement and only by settlement that sovereignty can be imposed. The debate is whether sovereignty should be imposed. The settlements claim that they are the successors to Kibbutz Hanita [on the Lebanon border], because, just as in the Tower and Stockade days [a method of establishing new settlements during the period of the British Mandate], you [need to] conquer hill after hill without consideration for the law and you create facts on the ground. They [the settlers] learned from us how to settle and seize land. The argument with them is not about the way or the method, but about the intention and the goal.”

“There will be no peace with the Palestinians. My opinion changed long before October 7. It’s not the disengagement [2005 Gaza pullout], that failed, it’s Oslo. I don’t tell myself stories.”

“The attitude toward the conflict and its solution is bound to change across the board. Many of the kibbutzniks who experienced October 7 can’t bear to hear Arabic and want to see Gaza erased. They are the new ‘victims of peace.’ Very few of the kibbutzniks whose homes mark the border think today that the people living on the other side are good people. They cannot overcome rationally the emotional experience. The trauma is stronger than their worldview.”

During the riots of 1921, they learned that it’s better to deal with a security threat through a shared life, and Kibbutz Ein Harod was established among hostile communities in the Jezreel Valley. And thus it was in every new area where Zionism arrived: the Hefer Valley, Beit She’an Valley, Hanita and the 11 communities established overnight in the Negev. Their first mission was to ‘conquer the land.’ Today, too, the kibbutz is the most effective way to maintain a hundred civilian outposts along the border fence.