The Bunker State: Why Isolation Will Not Deter Israel's Settler-Colonial Project

As the world finally turns against Israel's actions, understanding its siege mentality may be key to preventing catastrophe.

(If you have received this by email, please click on the title to read the latest version. I often correct typos and continue to edit my essays after publishing the first version).

An Israeli government bunker. Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg

It seems the winds are finally changing. On the 6th of May the Netherlands proposed to review the EU-Israel trade deal. Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp sent a formal letter to EU foreign policy chief expressing concerns about Israel cutting off aid and electricity to Gaza, stating it was “exacerbating an already dire humanitarian situation.” He specifically requested “a review of Israel’s compliance with Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement at the earliest possible opportunity. Veldkamp wrote that “Israel’s blockade of Gaza breached the terms of its free trade agreement with the EU”. During a visit to London, he stated he would ask European foreign ministers to review the treaty at their upcoming meeting in Gymnich, Poland.

The Dutch minister then publicly reinforced this position on the 8th of May at the EU foreign ministers meeting in Warsaw, where he stated that the Netherlands was “drawing a line in the sand” over Israel’s conduct in Gaza. When the Dutch—long time supporters of Israel—finally decided to back previous proposals from Ireland and Spain, I knew something was shifting.

When I first heard about this I was cynical, expecting Europe to continue to support Israel despite everything. But following the Dutch proposal, the European Union has voted to review its trade and cooperation agreement with Israel. The initiative gained support from fifteen member states including Belgium, Finland, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden, while nine countries opposed it.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has escalated rhetoric against Israel, reportedly describing it as a “genocidal state”, which prompted Israel to summon Spain’s ambassador. In response to criticism from Gabriel Rufian, a Catalan member of parliament, who accused the Spanish Government of maintaining trade ties with Israel despite the Gaza war, Sánchez said, “I want to make one thing clear here, Mr. Rufian. We do not do business with a genocidal state, we do not”. Spain was among the first EU countries to recognise Palestinian statehood earlier this year.

The United Kingdom announced yesterday (20th May) that it has suspended free trade negotiations with Israel and imposed new sanctions on West Bank settlers in response to Israel’s renewed military offensive in Gaza. British Foreign Secretary David Lammy condemned Israel’s policies as “indefensible” and summoned the Israeli ambassador. The UK Government still avoids the word ‘genocide’, but this is a step in the right direction likely prompted not by sudden compassion for the Palestinians but by political pressure and fear of litigation under International Law.

All this and much more should have been done decades ago. For seventy-seven years the world has largely enabled and covered for Israel’s settler-colonialism and its crimes. How much human suffering are we prepared to tolerate before something is done? The devastating reality is that we are tolerating too much, and for far too long. During long periods of silence and collusion, people’s lives are devastated by trauma and despair, which continue to reverberate for generations.

As a psychotherapist I have worked with victims of abuse for twenty-five years. The silence of others hurts victims even more than the direct harm perpetrators inflict. Whilst the international community deliberates over terminology and political repercussions, generations of Palestinians are being erased from existence. Those who have already died may, tragically, be the fortunate ones. Living with trauma, as any survivor can attest, is to endure daily psychological hell. While perpetrators bear obvious guilt, an especially insidious form of harm comes from those who witness but remain silent. Perpetrators strip victims of their sense of physical safety. Those who choose to remain silent, or who are actively complicit inflict an even deeper wound: they shatter victims’ fundamental belief in human decency. When those with the power to intervene choose inaction, they are not mere observers but accomplices in the destruction of both bodies and souls.

Nelson Mandela always said that what Israel was doing to the Palestinians was far worse than South Africa’s Apartheid. When he said it, the largely pro-Israel world scoffed. But Mandela was, of course, right. South African Apartheid was unconscionable. No vocabulary adequately captures the moral depravity and devastation it inflicted on its victims. My heart will always ache for the countless generations who were born, lived and died under Apartheid. South African Apartheid was a form of modern slavery, with the regime exploiting the Black population to maintain a two-tiered society that generated wealth exclusively for the privileged white minority. To be useful, slaves must be kept alive. They may be forced to eat inferior food, live in squalid conditions, and endure daily brutality—but their survival, however miserable, remains essential to the system.

For decades Israel exploited Palestinians—particularly from Gaza—as de facto slave labour. Since 1967, Israel maintained a stranglehold on Gaza’s economy, deliberately creating conditions of dependency. This economic control enabled Israel to exploit Palestinian workers, who had little choice but to help build Israel’s sprawling urban centres, and work in the cleaning, agricultural and hospitality sectors. The entire length of our street in Bat-Yam was built by Palestinians from Gaza during my childhood in the 1970s. In a cruel (and quite deliberate) irony, Palestinians were forced to strengthen the very state that was systematically dispossessing them. This profound humiliation of the Palestinian people represents a reality the international community wilfully ignored for generations. Those with power to intervene were never ignorant of these conditions—they simply chose to do nothing or worse, to aid and abet Israel.

Palestinian day labourers waiting to be picked up by Israeli contractors. [Image source: DIWAN]

But Israel’s economic exploitation of Palestinians was always tactical rather than strategic. Controlling and creating economic dependency enabled exploitation, but Israel never intended to maintain Palestinians as a permanent enslaved underclass. Israel’s fundamental objective has always been the complete erasure of Palestinians from all of historic Palestine, including Gaza. In this light, Israeli apartheid and labour exploitation were merely expedient, temporary phases in service of the larger goal of demographic elimination. As a settler-colonial project, Israel has consistently aimed to remove Palestinians from their homeland and replace them with Jews. The growing international recognition of this reality is long overdue, but we mustn’t mistake Israel for South Africa—the ultimate objectives have always been fundamentally different.

Israel’s likely response to becoming a pariah state

“Who do you think is the most dangerous man [sic]?” asked our political philosophy professor at the start of one of his lectures. I had no idea, and neither did any of the other 300 students in the lecture hall. Annoyed, the lecturer finally said, “The most dangerous man [sic] is the one on death row, because he [sic] has nothing to lose”. I can’t remember much about the rest of that lecture, but that idea has always stayed with me.

I moved to Australia in 1991 because I couldn’t stand living in Israel’s bleak, and aggressively anxious society, and couldn’t imagine living by the sword for the rest of my life. But my urgent determination to leave was at war with a profound anxiety about facing a world I had been taught was hostile to Israelis and Jews. I moved to Australia in 1991 despite being absolutely convinced that the world outside Israel was dangerous to me. The revelation that mainstream Australian society was overwhelmingly pro-Israel left me genuinely shocked. Far from encountering the hostility I was promised by my Israeli friends and university lecturers, I experienced the complete opposite—I was always warmly welcomed wherever I went. No one has ever mistreated me or discriminated against me. I was more likely to be the object of discrimination for being a woman than I was for being an Israeli.

This reality disoriented me, as life in Israel conditions you to believe that universal hatred surrounds you. The Israeli media and education system relentlessly pump this poisonous message into the population, embedding it so deeply that it becomes part of the culture’s very ‘DNA’. This manufactured siege mentality serves a purpose: it binds the population together against an imagined external threat, while justifying genocidal policies toward Palestinians.

Despite receiving ongoing and widespread international support for its settler-colonial project, Jewish Israeli society fixates only on criticism. During my formative years there, anyone who wasn’t ‘in love’ with us, or who expressed even mild reservations about Israel was swiftly condemned as antisemitic. Once someone was branded an ‘antisemite’ they lost all credibility. You were encouraged to feel contempt for them, and ignore everything they said. I often find myself on the receiving end of this familiar attitude from Israelis.

When Israel attacked Gaza in October 2023, its politicians and society could hardly believe their good fortune at the widespread support they enjoyed. Israel pressed forward with impunity, support and diplomatic cover from its allies while bombing hospitals, schools and ambulances, murdering Palestinian doctors and academics, targeting members of the international press, medics, and NGOs’ staff, torturing Palestinians, systematically flattening Gaza, and slaughtering tens of thousands, including children and even newborns in incubators.

But Israel has always viewed international support, no matter how abundant, as fundamentally precarious. This mistrust stems from a poisonous conviction embedded within Jewish Israeli consciousness that the world harbours an innate hatred for Jews and secretly desires their elimination. Now, as the international community finally discovers its ‘conscience’—likely motivated more by political self-preservation and fear of legal culpability than genuine moral awakening—Israel finds itself in familiar psychological territory. From Israel’s perspective, external reality is simply aligning with its long-held paranoid worldview, potentially making it even more dangerous.

Since it has always believed it existed in a largely hostile world, Israel is not merely prepared for this international sea change—it has been psychologically primed for it from its inception. Having built its national identity around perceived existential threats, Israel has methodically used the vast resources lavished upon it, particularly from the United States, to create an impregnable fortress, physically and psychologically. Israeli society’s deeply entrenched bunker mentality stems from an existential insecurity common to all settler-colonial projects. This profound insecurity is no accident. Invaders invariably project their own historical actions onto the subjugated population, living in perpetual dread that the violence they inflicted upon indigenous peoples will eventually be visited upon themselves.

I offer this not merely as an observation, but as an urgent warning: international pressure will not compel Israel to abandon its settler-colonial ambitions. Rather, it will likely accelerate them. Like an inmate on death row with nothing left to lose, an increasingly isolated Israel perceives itself as having no alternative but self-reliance and pre-emptive aggression. The international community’s miscalculation of this psychology could prove catastrophic for the Palestinian people.

Israel is currently doing dirty deals with Syria’s new US proxy regime. The official pretext is the usual nonsense: ‘normalising relationships’ and ‘protecting the Druze population’. Israel is also conquering parts of southern Lebanon, making life for the population there impossible in the hope that they would leave. The official excuse for Israel’s actions in Lebanon is ‘self-defence’ from Hezbollah. But Israel’s real and devastating purpose is to secure territories that can function as dumping grounds for millions of Palestinians forcibly displaced from the remnants of the colonised West Bank, and from within Israel itself. The approximately two million Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship are now more vulnerable than ever, as Israel’s government seeks legal pathways to strip them of their citizenship and the protections it affords.

Israel’s ultimate objective remains unchanged: the complete erasure of the Palestinian people from historic Palestine. You can’t negotiate with this. All ‘negotiations’ with Israel have never been anything but tactical delays to provide cover, while Israel methodically advances toward its unchanged colonial ambition. Every ‘peace process’, every ‘ceasefire’, every ‘diplomatic initiative’ have always been a smokescreen behind which the settler-colonial machinery of dispossession continues its relentless march towards completion.

The recent political and economic pressures on Israel, while welcome and long overdue, remain woefully insufficient and inadequate as the Palestinian population faces an imminent threat of extinction. No solution short of physical military intervention will prevent their erasure. The international community must finally acknowledge what Palestinians have always known: Israel is a hostile power pursuing genocidal aims. Diplomatic efforts have repeatedly failed because they refuse to recognise this fundamental reality. Without decisive military intervention—actual boots on the ground—Israel will proceed with its systematic erasure of six million Palestinians. This is but the logical culmination of decades of documented intent. The world must now reckon with this truth or bear the unbearable moral burden of complicity. Should our governments fail to act decisively to stop Israel’s genocide not just in Gaza but all over Palestine, they condemn themselves to eternal disgrace—forever marked by the indelible moral and legal stain of having enabled genocide when they possessed both the knowledge and the power to prevent it.

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A small window into the Jewish Israeli psyche

To give you a small, anecdotal example of Israeli psychology and beliefs, I’d like to share a popular Israeli song from the late 1960s. Written by two prominent Israeli songwriters who significantly shaped the country’s cultural landscape and reinforced its Zionist identity, this song was part of my primary school’s choir ‘repertoire’. The lyrics capture how Israeli society has long viewed itself in relation to the rest of the world. My translation from Hebrew cannot recreate the original’s rhythm and rhyming pattern, but it is accurate. I know one song does not define an entire culture, but it does offer an accurate window into the collective psychology that Israeli society has deliberately cultivated from its beginnings. Those who have encountered the confrontational superiority often displayed by Israelis abroad might recognise this mindset in the lyrics.

The Whole World Is Against Us

Lyrics: Yoram Taharlev
Tune: Kobi Oshrat

The whole world is against us;
it’s a very ancient tune
to which our forefathers taught us to sing and dance.
To its sound they danced the hora,
and to which we too will dance.
Hop forward, hop backward!
Whether in waltz or kazachok¹:

[Chorus]
The whole world is against us,
never mind, we’ll persevere,
they don’t give a damn about us,
never mind, we’ll manage,
The whole world is against us,
never mind, we’ll persevere,
they don’t give a damn about us,
but we give even less of a damn about them!

Who’s greater than Herzl?
He said to the congress:

“If you will it and work at it, you can make it happen.”
When the group began to doubt and hesitate,
he grabbed the garmoshka²
and taught the congress:

[Chorus ]

Our forefathers,
taught this song to us
and we will continue to sing it,
and after us - our sons.
Our great-grandchildren will sing it
here in the land of Israel,
and whoever is against us
can go to hell!

[Chorus ]

(The original Hebrew version is here)

1. A ‘kazachok’ (קזצ’וק in Hebrew, sometimes spelled kazatsky, kazachek, or kozachok) is a traditional Eastern European folk dance that originated in Ukraine and became popular throughout Eastern Europe, particularly in Ukraine, Russia, and other Slavic countries. The word ‘kazachok’ literally means ‘little Cossack’.

The original Zionists were mostly from Eastern Europe. They brought with them many words and concepts that entered Israeli culture and vocabulary. When I was a child, they had a strong influence on Jewish Israeli society.

2. A garmoshka (גרמושקה in Hebrew, гармошка in Russian) is a type of accordion, specifically a small Russian button accordion or concertina. The name comes from the Russian word ‘garmon’ (гармонь), which refers to various types of accordions.

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