I borrowed this rhetoric from Dan Schueftan.
It may hurt a little bit, but this guy is totally worth listening to.
He was the intellectual foundation behind Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan.
Search him up. Let me know what you think. While
You do so, keep in mind that every word coming out from this guy’s mouth is backed by his study. You may prepare a counter but no one ever challenged his dignity.
I only watched about 3 hours of him but i believe thats enough to have a understanding of him (and broadly, Israel). without further ado, the below is helpful for people trying to understand Israeli society, culture, world view etc.
Dan Schueftan embodies the goals and worldview of Israel’s political establishment, particularly its more hardline, security-focused factions. His rhetoric, historical interpretations, and strategic outlook reveal a deeply ideological stance on Israel’s role in the region and its relationship with the Palestinians. He repeatedly employs the term “barbarian” to describe Palestinians, constructing a stark moral binary. In this worldview, Israelis are portrayed as superior—rational, moral, and democratic—while Palestinians, and indeed anyone who does not subscribe to his perspective, are cast as inherently dangerous, inferior, or even subhuman. This language not only dehumanizes those outside his ideological camp but also serves to justify harsh policies, including preemptive military strikes, blockade, and collective punishment, all under the guise of self-defense and moral superiority.
Schueftan adopts a revisionist, ideologically driven reading of history, particularly concerning the Nakba, the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948. He contests the well-established historical consensus, suggesting that if any expulsions occurred, they were minimal and incidental. This directly contradicts extensive documentation, including by Israeli historians, of widespread expulsions, destroyed villages, and a systematic campaign to empty Palestine of its indigenous population.
Notably, he rarely acknowledges the cumulative and ongoing nature of Palestinian displacement. Beyond the Nakba of 1948, there was the Naksa of 1967, when another 300,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled following Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. These waves of dispossession are not isolated events; they are chapters in a continuous process of erasure that has shaped Palestinian national memory and fueled a persistent refugee crisis. Today, this process continues in what many refer to as a "daily Nakba"—particularly in the West Bank, where Palestinians are being systematically displaced through settler violence, home demolitions, land confiscation, and state-backed intimidation. Entire communities are being terrorized into fleeing, while the Israeli government provides political cover, legal infrastructure, and often logistical support to the settlers driving these expulsions. In line with much of the political establishment he reflects, Schueftan denies the legitimacy of Palestinian claims to land or protection, thereby helping normalize this relentless campaign of dispossession. He rarely grants Palestinian claims to land equal moral or legal weight and actively minimizes Palestinian victimhood. Strongly supporting the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, he sees them as essential to Israel’s security and strategic depth. Yet, paradoxically, he opposes forcibly displacing Gaza’s population or annexing the territory outright. This is not due to any constraint on Israeli power, but rather to an idealized self-image of Israel that would be morally affronted by such an act—even as Israeli public opinion polls indicate significant support for removing Gaza’s population by force or coercion.
In his view, Gaza must remain isolated and its population contained like a “rabid animal,” with its capacity for resistance regularly neutralized. He explicitly rejects any notion of a sovereign Palestinian state, viewing it as an existential threat to Israel. Paradoxically, he opposes the forced transfer of Gaza’s population, while his stance conflicts with Israel’s long history of displacing Palestinians into Gaza. He advocates for the strategy euphemistically known as “mowing the lawn”—a doctrine of recurring military strikes aimed at keeping Gaza’s population weakened, traumatized, and incapable of mounting meaningful resistance. At the same time, a significant segment of Israeli society holds the opposite view: not only rejecting containment but supporting the reoccupation and resettlement of Gaza. This contradiction highlights the strategic incoherence of Israel’s long-term policy and reveals the tension between this ideological framing and rising popular extremism.
Schueftan viewed former U.S. President Barack Obama as an adversary due to what he perceived as Obama’s naïveté in treating Palestinians and Iran as legitimate political actors deserving diplomatic engagement. In his worldview, such efforts undermined Israel’s security by legitimizing what he regards as existential enemies. He dismissed Obama as dangerously idealistic and fundamentally misguided. Some of his public commentary, such as repeated contrasts between white and non-white political actors, has led critics to interpret his worldview as racially informed. While he does not always state this explicitly, his emphasis on cultural superiority and recurring references to ethnicity have prompted concern that racial perceptions may play a role in his hostility toward Obama. On the international stage, he has remarked on the growing political divide in the United States, noting that a relatively low percentage of Democrats support Israel compared to a high percentage of Republicans. He suggests that unless Democrats shift their stance, they may struggle to win presidential elections. This view implies that powerful pro-Israel lobbying groups, such as AIPAC, will increasingly align themselves with the Republican Party. At the same time, he expresses wariness toward figures like Donald Trump, acknowledging that their unpredictability introduces strategic uncertainty. This suggests an uneasy alliance between the Israeli establishment he represents and the American right, built less on shared values than on political expediency. Overall, he acknowledges Israel’s power over the U.S. but stresses that Israel has to be careful how it goes about it.
He openly acknowledges that the dominant sentiment in Israeli society is to “don’t stop the war, keep going.” He embraces this attitude as validation of his worldview—that continuous offensive military pressure is not only necessary but morally justified. In this framework, peace is not a goal but a delusion, and permanent conflict is both inevitable and preferable.
His views encapsulate a worldview of perpetual conflict, strategic control, and deep skepticism of Palestinian legitimacy. His rhetoric and policy prescriptions do not merely reflect Israeli policy—they help justify, shape, and normalize a vision of permanent occupation, racial hierarchy, and endless war. In doing so, they offer not only a glimpse into the ideological soul of the Israeli security state but also a warning of how deeply dehumanizing narratives can be used to sustain and rationalize systems of domination. At the core of this strategic vision for Israel—and indeed the righteous and morally legitimate world (in his view)—is an offensive posture: wars must be prevented not through diplomacy or de-escalation, but by waging preemptive and ongoing military action. He sees peace as an illusion and deterrence as insufficient. This worldview underpins his support for regular military operations and a refusal to negotiate with actors he sees as innately hostile. Through this lens, Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza over the years are not failures of policy but expressions of it. A crucial question remains whether this worldview—and the hardline ideology it represents—is shaping Washington, coinciding with a noticeable retreat from diplomatic engagement on the international stage by the US.
This post was edited by ferdia on Jun 27 2025 04:57am