The Ceasefire and Its Uses

Paint and Concrete, Gaza — by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)

Each time Palestinian resistance factions have accepted a ceasefire proposal since this war began—in May 2024, in March 2025, in July 2025, and again now—Israel has responded by treating Palestinian compliance as confirmation of a strategy rather than as an opening toward settlement. Hamas’s acceptance of the latest proposal has been answered with the announcement of Operation Gideon’s Chariots 2, a ground offensive aimed at occupying Gaza City, and with Netanyahu’s declaration that negotiations may continue—to secure the release of captives, on terms, as he has stated, “acceptable to Israel.” The acceptance, in other words, changes nothing. The killing continues.

What makes this legible as doctrine—and removes it from the category of circumstantial opportunism or governmental improvisation—is that its logic was stated with complete candor more than a century ago. In 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky—the founder of Revisionist Zionism, whose political inheritance Netanyahu’s movement has always claimed—wrote with frankness about what Zionist colonization required: “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized.” The lesson he drew was that hope itself had to be destroyed.

His iron wall doctrine stipulated that Zionists must refuse all compromise and enforce submission through sustained mass violence, until Palestinians, having exhausted every prospect of removing the colonizers, would surrender to terms acceptable to the colonial project. Only then, Jabotinsky wrote, would “extreme groups lose their belief, and the influence transfer to moderate groups”—moderate meaning, in this usage, those prepared to accept whatever remained after dispossession had run its course.

Each Hamas acceptance is therefore read within Israeli strategic calculation as evidence that the killing yields results, and that further killing will yield further compliance. The ideological genealogy of this policy has never been concealed: Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, served as Jabotinsky’s personal secretary, and the political movement Netanyahu has led has always declared Revisionist Zionism as its inheritance. Reducing Gaza to rubble, occupying its cities, driving its people toward the sea—these are the policy itself, fully continuous with what the iron wall has always demanded. Any arrangement that leaves Palestinians on their land with the capacity to resist sustains precisely the hope the doctrine requires be extinguished, and any agreement short of total submission is, within this doctrine, a problem to be corrected by further violence.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister and the most openly eliminationist member of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, resigned when the January ceasefire was signed and returned the day the killing resumed on March 18. The coalition’s survival and the genocide’s continuation are not parallel interests—they are the same interest, expressed through the same minister’s movements. The genocide is at once a war aim and an instrument of Netanyahu’s political survival.

The mechanisms nominally available to constrain this—Arab state mediation, UN resolutions, international ceasefire arrangements—have been absorbed into a structure of managed impunity that produces neither accountability nor interruption. Since March 18, more than 10,500 Palestinians have been killed; Arab states have neither withdrawn their ambassadors nor suspended normalization, nor closed their airspace to Israeli traffic, nor done anything that would register as consequence. International sanctions have not materialized, and the killing has continued without sustained documentation in the press of the countries that supply the weapons and the diplomatic protection that make it possible. The mechanisms exist; they have simply been made to coexist with the genocide they are supposed to prevent.

What the present moment lays bare is a precise account of why every path offered to Palestinians leads to the same destination. Had Hamas rejected the mediators’ proposal, that refusal would have dominated international coverage as confirmation of a formula that has served since 1948: that Palestinians are by nature intransigent, responsible for what is done to them. Having accepted, they watch the genocide continue uncontested, their compliance passing through the international system without consequence, acknowledgment, or accountability. Acceptance is met with indifference; refusal with condemnation; every position in the architecture serves the completion of the same colonial project. Jabotinsky described this logic with complete candor in 1923. What has changed is the scale of the arsenal available to enforce this doctrine and the character of the international silence surrounding it—which should be recognized for what it is: active, deliberate consent, constructed over decades by the same states whose weapons make the genocide possible.

Television Starvation by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)

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