against a protracted occupation with no end in sight that has allowed the continued pulling out of their land from under their feet. For the Israelis, it is an outburst of murderous terrorism. The perpetrators of these attacks appear to the Palestinians as national heroes and to the Israelis as vicious criminals who must be liquidated.
75. The official media in Israel frequently dropped the term "settlers" and, by command from above, started to refer to them as
"residents," so that any attack on them looked like a crime against civilians. The Palestinians see the settlers as the spearhead of a dangerous enemy who is dispossessing them of their land, and who must be resisted and attacked.
76. In the course of the al-Aqsa Intifada, a large part of the Israeli "Peace Camp" collapsed, demonstrating the shallow-rootedness of many of its convictions. Since it never undertook a real revision of the Zionist narrative and never internalized the fact that there exists a Palestinian narrative, too, it found the Palestinian behavior quite inexplicable, especially after Barak had "turned every stone and made more generous offers than any previous Prime Minister." The only remaining explanation was that the Palestinians had deceived the Israeli Peace Camp, that they had never really intended to make peace and that their true purpose is to throw the Jews into the sea, as the Zionist right has always claimed. The conclusion: "We have no partner."
77. As a result, the dividing line between the Zionist "right" and "left" almost disappeared. The leaders of the Labor Party joined the Sharon Government and became his most effective apologists (as did Shimon Peres for example) and even the formal leftist opposition became ineffective. This proved again that the original Zionist narrative is the decisive factor unifying all parts of the political system in Israel, making the differences between them lose their significance in times of crisis.
78. The al-Aqsa Intifada (also called the "Second Intifada") raised the intensity of the conflict to a new level. In its first three years, about 2,600 Palestinians and 800 Israelis were killed. The Israeli military operations turned the lives of the Palestinians into hell, cut towns and villages off from each other, destroyed their economy and brought many to the verge of hunger. The extra-judicial execution of Palestinian militants ("targeted liquidations"), often killing civilian bystanders, became routine. Incursions into Palestinian towns and villages, in order to kill or arrest suspects, also became daily
occurrences.