Second, Israelis ceased to believe in the two-state solution, which would be achieved through a bilateral negotiation, because they saw what happened last time. In 1993, following the Oslo Accords, Israelis experienced an awful lot of suicide bombers. And following the Camp David summit in 2000, when Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat, give or take, everything, including half of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, we got the second intifada

Now, what happened is, it’s not that the right wing grew. It’s that the center was born. The center promoted a unilateral option, which says, “We’re not going to marry the Palestinians with a new Middle East, like France and Germany following World War II. We are going to divorce them.” And that failed as well in the eyes of the Israeli public.

We saw that the unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005 didn’t lead to a new equilibrium in which everyone can live happily and freely but to more tense times of security.

Over and over again, I’ve heard from Israelis that both the idea of a peace process and the idea of unilateral withdrawal have been discredited. But no new theory of security has arisen. Do you think that’s right?

Yes, people are very disturbed because we tried everything. We got used to Israel’s calmest decade, in terms of security and casualties. And all of a sudden, people understand that this was not feasible for the long run.

That is to say that we will probably have to see more soldiers fighting in the north and in the south for the coming years, maybe decades. And there will be a death toll. It’s not going to be a permanent war but maybe a permanent state of ongoing operations.

It sounds more like a return to a theory of occupation.

You call it occupation from the perspective of the Palestinian population. But I’ll try to explain from the Israeli perspective. Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, evacuated each and every settlement, took out dead from the graves and withdrew from the international border. And Israel, at the same time, stayed in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, in order to preserve its security in a bearable condition.

Now, how come all the international criminal investigations, international committees, condemnations, etc., came from operations in Gaza? How come the Goldstone report in 2009, the arrest warrant against Tzipi Livni in 2009 in the U.K., the I.C.C. now — how come it emanates from a situation in Gaza?

Are you saying it was not a blockade because the tunnels were sort of tacitly permitted?

No, no, no. There were hundreds of trucks every day entering Gaza with everything from the Israeli side and, by the way, the Egyptian side. There were poor people, and there were houses with swimming pools. There were very rich neighborhoods with cafes and cinemas and no alcohol because they prevented it. The only commodity that did not enter Gaza was for religious reasons by Gazans.

So the attempt to claim that Israel created a blockade — I mean, it just helps the Israeli right wing to claim that nothing will happen if you withdraw from Gaza, thus enabling them to prosper.