When the knock comes: There will come a time—and history demonstrates this with cruel predictability—that the barricades will come crashing down, the slogans will fade, and the engines of oppression will go mute. It will not come with fireworks or victory marches. It will come with a knock. Silence. It will come.

And when that knock finally arrives, Mr Netanyahu, do not be afraid.

The Palestinians at the door will not be what you have trained your people to imagine. They will not come to slaughter families or recreate the crimes that have been committed against them. They will come heavy with the weight of exhaustion, the weight of the dead they have not buried for generations, their steps driven only by the fact that their roads are all that have been left.

By that time, the charm of invincibility will have worn off. Armies do not have to be destroyed to be beaten. They have to be discredited. The world will have already started lowering its flag. Allies, who until then will have been mouthing excuses, will be mumbling doubts. “There is nothing more that we can do,” they will claim — before abandoning the scene.

Empires always retreat not with thunder, but with side glances.

The only thing left is the question that every settler enterprise inevitably will have to ask: What do we do with those who believed the promise?

What happens to the millions who were recruited for the political fantasy of historic destiny, the men and women who traversed the oceans to settle on the land of another people, imagining themselves the restorers, not the replacements? Those who fought, settled, and brought forth children, built on the lie of dispossession?

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