“It’s hazoy [hallucinatory] — f**king hazoy.”

So explained a well-known artist, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, as he sat in the tiny “safe room” (in fact, the bathroom) of his Jaffa apartment, chatting over WhatsApp during the latest flare-up of extreme violence in the Holy Land. Rampaging mobs of right-wing Jews marauded through the neighborhood below his window while missiles shot from Gaza screamed overhead.

Hallucinatory. There is no better word to describe the belief by Israeli leaders that they can forever squeeze Palestinians, on both sides of the Green Line, without forcing an explosion of resistance that would cast an increasingly harsh light on the undemocratic underpinnings of Israeli rule “from the river to the sea.”