Expansion by Other Means

When conquest cannot be completed by force, it continues through administration—until subjugation is accepted as peace, and a people can no longer name its condition or imagine its liberation.

The Bugs Bunny Gambit — by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)

Earlier this month, while touring the ruins of Beit Hanoun and Jabalia, the occupation army’s Chief of Staff informed his troops that the “Yellow Line”—the demarcation beyond which Israeli forces have not withdrawn under the ceasefire—is now “a new border.” He acknowledged what every Palestinian already understood, what we have understood for decades: the temporary becomes permanent, the ceasefire line hardens into the frontier of annexation, and what is taken is never returned.

For the word “security” has become, in the lexicon of Israeli territorial expansion, what “civilization” was to the nineteenth-century colonial powers, an infinitely elastic concept that justifies whatever is done in its name, and whose fulfillment remains perpetually deferred. Security is never achieved, never declared sufficient, never allowed to reach a point at which the taking of land might finally cease. And this is precisely because security, in the Israeli usage, is not a condition to be attained but a process to be sustained—a permanent emergency that authorizes permanent expansion. Israel remains the only state in the world with no internationally declared boundaries—an omission that is itself a statement of intent. You do not define the limits of what you have not finished taking. And the taking continues by a logic that has become mechanical, each move prepared by the last.

Colonial expansion in the postcolonial era—an era that has declared such expansion impermissible, that has enshrined self-determination in its founding charters, that congratulates itself on transcending the crudities of the civilizing mission—requires its alibis. You cannot simply conquer and announce that you are conquering; the international order no longer permits such candor, though it permits everything else. You must conquer while proclaiming peace. You must dispossess while offering “prosperity.” You must cage a population while speaking of “stabilization.” And so the vocabulary of security provides not explanation but permission, not justification but alibi.

This pattern has a history and the vocabulary to match. Kibbutzim like Nahal Oz in the Gaza envelope—those attacked on October 7, now invoked to justify the Yellow Line—were themselves products of the Nahal system, the doctrine that converted ceasefire lines into permanent borders. Founded as military outposts along a provisional armistice line, they became civilian communities that required protection. Military outposts became civilian settlements; settlements became facts requiring defense; defense required buffer zones, which will become settlements in turn.

This is what “facts on the ground” means—the Hebrew uvdot bashetach—a phrase that names the strategy without disguise: build first, justify later; possess first, legalize after. When justification is required, it is always supplied as “natural growth”—the phrase that emerged during Oslo to exempt expansion from any freeze. Families have children, children need homes, homes need land, land needs security—and security needs land.

The logic moves only in one direction, like a ratchet that cannot turn back. Israel takes, and if there is no response, the taking is normalized, absorbed into the status quo, treated as though it had always been so. The new boundary—no longer contested, no longer even visible as a boundary, simply the way things are—becomes the baseline for the next taking. If there is a response, the response is extracted from its context, stripped of its history, presented as unprovoked aggression, as terror, as proof of what Israel has always said about the impossibility of peace. And this becomes the justification for an escalation that establishes an even more favorable position than before. Israel advances whether there is resistance or acquiescence, whether the world condemns or applauds, whether the taking is called defense or war.

And the ratchet has its narrative equivalent, the machinery that makes each turn appear justified. The question “who started it?” is answered by beginning the clock at the Palestinian action, never at the siege that preceded it, never at the occupation that preceded the resistance, never at the dispossession that started everything and is made to start nothing. History is punctuated so that Israeli violence registers as response and Palestinian violence as aggression—a framing so embedded in Western media grammar that it has become reflex.

The framing has never been clearer, and once Palestinians are established as aggressors they can be treated as such—bombed, starved, displaced, with no limit imposed by law or humanity. And when even this fails to produce what it was designed to achieve—submission, surrender, the final collapse of resistance—the method shifts, and the ceasefire in Gaza marks that shift. Resolution 2803—Trump’s “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict”—enacts the turn that colonial method always makes when force cannot complete the work: from overt assault to administered rule, from genocide to domestication.

An aggressor population requires oversight, administration, and ultimately re-education—hence a “Board of Peace” to oversee a people not consulted on its composition or mandate. Part of that re-education would involve what Netanyahu describes as “deradicalizing” Gaza, as was done in Germany following World War II. The target is Palestinian society itself—its memory, its political consciousness, its capacity to name what has been done to it. The comparison presents Palestinians as a defeated aggressor population, collectively culpable, requiring long-term external control—as though resistance to colonization were madness, and subjugation the cure.

But Gaza is only one front in an architecture of expansion that spans the region. In Gaza, domination is administered directly—through continued killings, aid obstruction, stalled reconstruction, coerced displacement, and the slow work of “deradicalization”—until subjugation or, even better, depopulation. Across the Arab world, where colonization is physically impossible, the strategy differs. Domination is, instead, delegated to compliant regimes. The model for this regional strategy already exists. In the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority has for three decades provided the proof of concept—autonomy without sovereignty, security coordination without political agency, an elite collaborator class administering the occupation on behalf of the occupier. That fiction has now been discarded in Palestine itself, but the model will be exported.

Arab states—and what Israel’s “buffer zones” have left of Lebanon and Syria—are being recruited to the same role, not as equals, but as subordinates. They are expected to contain their own populations in exchange for regime survival, and to abandon Palestine as a political cause—and with it, the right of return for those of us still waiting. This week, Israel signed its largest export deal in history—$35 billion in gas to Egypt—designed, in the Energy Minister’s words, to make “our neighbors, including Egypt, dependent on the State of Israel for the next fifteen years.” Gas, electricity, and water are also being offered to Syria and Lebanon “in exchange for security guarantees.”

The expansion continues. Through military fait accompli, resource dependency, U.S. pressure at the UN, and “peace plans” that function as ultimatums, what cannot be secured by military force is secured politically. Palestinians, in this order, are expected to recognize Israel, renounce resistance, and accept the legitimacy of a state built on our dispossession—while Israel acknowledges nothing, cedes nothing, and reckons with nothing.

Normalization is the political name for this arrangement—the point at which injustice stops needing justification and begins calling itself peace. “Deradicalization” is its internalization—the colonial relationship no longer imposed from without but reproduced within, a region reduced through re-education to servility and unawareness. And so the expansion continues.

Symphony of the Machine by @NorrieHarman

---

---

---