Israel has historically obstructed political solutions that would bring about a fully sovereign Palestinian state,  Yezid Sayigh, an expert on Israel-Palestine and the Middle East for the Carnegie Middle East Center think tank in Beirut, told Al Jazeera.“Israel has assassinated many Palestinian leaders before and it will continue doing that. Nothing has ever changed because, fundamentally, successive Israeli governments – even under Labour, not just Likud – have been unwilling to cede territory or cede genuine Palestinian sovereignty,” he said.“The result: [Israel] has locked itself into permanent conflict and they have continued all this time to prefer military responses because they put themselves into a position where there are no political solutions,” he added.Netanyahu appears to be continuing that trend.

Mainstream academia and media still refuse to define the Zionist project as a colonial, or as it is referred to more accurately a settler-colonial project. However, as Israel intensifies the colonisation of Palestine in the next year, that might prod more individuals and institutions to frame the reality in Palestine as colonial and the Palestinian struggle as anticolonial and dispense with tropes about terrorism and peace negotiations.

Israeli Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli says that Israel has every right to invade and seize southern Lebanon. He also believes neither Syria nor Iran counts as states, and so don’t merit protection for their status as sovereign nations. Chikli was one of several government ministers who recently urged the Israeli government to cut off all access to humanitarian aid to northern Gaza, and argued that the military should conduct operations to “cleanse” the region. The proposal prescribed similar cleansings of other areas.

Liberal MP Wayne Long and his administrative assistant Jeannette Arsenault were captured on video as they publicly intimidated pro-Palestinian protestors accusing them of “terrorism”, and issuing what were clearly racist comments.