The strategically pointless massacres by Israel are an attempt to deny what the Israelis themselves cannot escape knowing: the state of Israel as currently constituted is finished. Zionism is over, a sad delusion that has now become a screaming joke. There is nothing left for Israel to do except turn over the land it rules to the people who live there.

The policy founded on the denial of these inescapable facts is a policy of ethnic cleansing. This is not genocide, but it is the attempt to erase the collective existence of Palestinians in Israel. The explicit goal of this policy -- stated many times -- is to make life intolerable for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Gaza is a starving prison, deliberately deprived for years now of power and water. If I lived there, I'd try to attach myself to the first Qassam rocket headed toward Sderot.

The Israeli policy is to make life unlivable for Palestinians, to wait, and to enlist the collaboration of the PLO, Egypt, Jordan, and the rest of the slavish America-funded Arab kleptocracies in the slow elimination of Palestinians as an identifiable group interested in defending itself and in having a future.

It has been obvious for at least 20 years that the "settlers" are too numerous and entrenched to be removed, and that much of Jerusalem is in fact a "settlement." The only "solution" that allows Israel to survive as presently constituted while also avoiding civil war with the "settlers" is slowly to assimilate the West Bank and to disappear the Palestinians in reservations, camps, and coerced emigration.

But Israel half-consciously knows that the Palestinians aren't going to disappear and certainly aren't going to forget. And Israel know that Israelis themselves cannot forget what Israel is doing. And it knows, too, that what it is doing is inseparable from what it has done from the beginning -- which is to deny the reality of Palestinians.

At first, the denial seemed to work, and Israel and its supporters were able to believe in the ethical claims of Zionism. Now, the denial is becoming more and more costly, and more and more impossible to believe. The current attempt to "assert itself" is Israel's attempt to distract itself from the inescapable reality of Palestinians -- the reality not of Palestinian terrorists or Palestinian military organizations or Palestinian enemy governments, but of Palestinians, as such.

Israel would like to have an enemy, a "threat to its existence" as is seen in Iran, etc. But that is not what the Palestinians are. They are not a threat to Israel. They are the actual proof that Israel is done for, and has been for a long time.

Israel is trying to make this a war. But the very aimlessness of the massacres makes explicit what Israel already knows -- that there is no war to fight. There is no enemy. There are only the Palestinians, the human beings who live under Israeli rule and who delegitimize Israel as a state by doing so.