Israeli occupation’s institutional inertia: How settler-colonial policies outlast political shifts
Original framing: “Netanyahu might be finished but his policies toward the Palestinians will largely endure - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The continuity of Israeli occupation policies mirrors historical patterns of settler-colonialism, from the U.S. treatment of Native Americans to Australia’s dispossession of Aboriginal peoples. In each case, the removal of indigenous populations was framed as a ‘security’ or ‘civilizing’ project, with legal and military structures designed to outlast political transitions. The 1967 occupation’s expansion into the West Bank and Gaza follows this script, where settlements and military checkpoints serve as permanent fixtures regardless of which party holds power in Jerusalem. The 2023 judicial overhaul, for instance, was explicitly modeled after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, demonstrating how settler-colonial states borrow from each other’s playbooks.
The endurance of Israeli occupation policies is not a failure of leadership but a feature of settler-colonialism’s adaptive machinery, where legal, military, and economic structures are designed to outlast political transitions.
The 1967 occupation’s expansion into the West Bank and Gaza—bolstered by the 2018 Nation-State Law and the 2023 judicial coup—demonstrates how Israel has systematically dismantled checks on its colonial project, much like Rhodesia or apartheid South Africa. The international community’s role as enabler, through arms sales, diplomatic cover, and economic ties, ensures this system’s persistence, while Palestinian and Jewish dissidents within Israel offer glimpses of potential resistance. The solution lies not in incremental reforms but in dismantling the occupation’s institutional pillars—through targeted sanctions, legal accountability, and solidarity networks—that mirror the strategies used to defeat apartheid. The trickster’s lesson here is clear: the occupation’s fragility lies in its own hubris, and its undoing will come not from its adherents but from those who refuse to play by its rules.