Self-harming

When three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered, it unleashed a firestrom of passion with Israel, a state that regards the life of every single one of its Jewish citizens in a much higher regard than many other nations would of their own citizens.  The deaths allowed the bombardment and incursions into Gaza at tremendous cost to the Palestinians and (compared to the last twenty years) very high mortality rates for Israeli soldiers.  No-one wanted to question the motives or rationality of the teenagers - to refer to them as settlers (which is what they were) was squalid, a disgusting intrusion of politics into national grief.  Questions such as 'why were they hitch-hiking through the West Bank,' were suppressed by most Israeli media organs.
Now, in the wake of a popular war that has turned sour, the administration of Netanyahu has annexed the biggest chunk of territory in the West Bank since it started occupying the place in 1967, including the area where the teenagers were murdered.  The Israeli government is doing exactly what it accused critics of doing - besmirching the memory of the teenagers with politics (with an eye on elections later this year) but hypocrisy comes easy to right-wing Israeli leaders.  Designating it as 'state land' would be okay normally if Israel built Palestinian settlements on it, but of course it is to expand Jewish settlements and further harm the chances of peace, of which Netanyahu is contemptuous (his actions suggest he sees the situation as an unending struggle).  Tzipi Livni, who is a member of the governing coalition has condemned it correctly stating that it "weakens Israel and damages its security," but she is of a centrist nationalist hue.
Spokesmen for the international community elite may deplore these actions yet Israel's government acts like a Millwall of the Middle East ('no-one likes us and we don't care') without seeing that such actions undermine its international legitimacy (in the USA, over-65s support rather than oppose all of Israel's policies by a factor of 7:1; for those under 30, it is only 2:1) and its internal cohesion.  A one-state solution would be the demographic death of Israel.  The myopia over two-states continues to infect Israeli politics as it hurtles rightward.  Davidi Perl, the Jewish mayor of Gush Etzion, a nearby settlement to the land grab, said "The Arabs have to understand the consequences if they kill a Jew. They want us to go to hell, but we have to show them that we are here and we will stay here for ever."  Settlers in the Occupied Territories are by their nature fanatics but the mayor's comments are particularly disturbing.  If this land is permanently Israeli in the event of a two-state solution, then the current rate of expropriation means that the scale of land swaps that need to take place in any peace deal would give Palestinians the 'right of return' by the backdoor.  So ordinary Israelis would have to give up their homes because of the fanatics who insist on living in the Occupied Territories.  Are right-wing Israeli politicians really that callous and stupid?