“Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today,” Moshe Dayan said in a famous 1956 eulogy for a young kibbutznik killed by infiltrators from Gaza. “For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.” But Israel, Dayan went on, could never lay down its arms: it could not live “without the steel helmet and the cannon’s maw”. Fifty years later the Palestinians still sit suffering in their miserable camps, and Israel continues to heed Dayan’s unyielding call to rule the land by force, which decades of failure have somehow not managed to discredit.
