From Yellow Wind to Yellow Line: The Disastrous Legacy of October 8 Wars

Nearly forty years ago, David Grossman published The Yellow Wind — a prophetic text warning of the effects of the occupation on both Jews and Palestinians. I argue here that after the dust settles from the recent wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and against Iran, Grossman’s warning has transformed the “yellow wind” into “yellow lines” — scars etched on the landscape, marking violent expansion, destruction, and ethnic cleansing, as Israel continues its political, security, and moral decline.

“Yellow lines” have been declared as “new borders” by the IDF Chief of Staff and the Israeli Security Minister in Gaza and Lebanon, while similar moves are underway in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Negev. This amounts to uprooting Arab populations from their lands and out of their homes into “yellow enclaves” — reminiscent of the Palestinian areas marked as yellow blotches on the original Oslo Accords maps more than thirty years ago. These yellow lines are presented as security responses to violence and terror, but in practice they constitute de facto annexation — without paying any political or legal price.

The yellow lines represent a new-yet-familiar phase in the Zionist-Palestinian conflict: Jewish expansion, devastation, and cleansing. Following the Nakba of 1948, in which roughly two-thirds of Palestinians were displaced and their homes destroyed, most Palestinian communities that survived remained in place — even after the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. They were surrounded by hundreds of Jewish settlements built on confiscated land, however continued to exist and grow.

During the 1990s and 2000s, Israel withdrew from certain Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Gaza, and almost halted the building of new settlements. That brief phase looked like a fading of the colonial project and the emergence of a spatial status quo. It appeared that the system had come to terms with a “tolerable” Palestinian presence under Jewish ethnocratic rule, alongside a partial democratization process within the Green Line.

But it was an illusion. The colonial and expansionist drive of Zionism — backed by powerful settlement and land institutions, ethnonationalist education and diasporas —simmering ceaselessly beneath the surface. Since Likud’s return to power in 2009, and especially over the past decade, Israel has accelerated its project of Judaizing the land and building an apartheid regime of ethnic segregation and hierarchy: enabling legislations, a flood of new settlements and outposts in the Palestinian territories, a suffocating blockade on Gaza, the humiliation of the Palestinian Authority, the dispossession of the Bedouins, and the maintenance of two million Arab citizens in a political ghetto. The “judicial overhaul” promoted since 2024 by the current government was designed to further weaken the remnants of Israeli resistance to all of this.

We should remember of course that the process is not unilateral. Years of Hamas and Jihad terrorism — suicide bombings, thousands of rockets, provocations along the border — alongside Hezbollah threats and empowerment by Iranian backing, generated sustained hostility and nurtured the destructive Palestinian fantasy of “eliminating the Zionist entity.” The horrific October 7th massacre — which likely represents “the mother of all mistakes” — gave the signal for what I term ‘the October 8 wars’ – the series of aggressive, criminal attacks launched by Israel on its neighbors and beyond, including – first and foremost – the genocidal campaign in Gaza and the unprecedented rounds of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, the Negev, Syria and nearly the entire southern Lebanon. The triggers were Hamas (and Hizbolla’s) criminal attacks; the responsibility for unprecedented destruction is Israel’s.

Now, as the dust begins to settle, it is becoming clear that — contrary to widespread belief — the disaster of October 7th did not fundamentally change Israeli policy – It only accelerated it. The terrible blow Israel suffered — the killing, destruction, and displacement of over a hundred thousand civilians, for the first time in the state’s history — did not lead to soul-searching, accountability, or a change in doctrine. The Israeli government simply shifted into a higher gear on the same policy: Jewish expansion, Palestinian displacement, and the deepening of apartheid.

Some argue that Israel has shifted from a strategy of “conflict management” to pursuit of “decisive victory” as advocated by the far right, but the facts speak for themselves: Israel has allowed Hamas to remain in power over a bleeding, obliterated and shrunken Gaza; the Palestinian Authority sits stripped and enfeebled in Ramallah while informal annexation continues; Hezbollah and the Iranian regime have been militarily weakened but continue to rule and threaten. The “eternal enemies” keep serving Israeli strategy and providing a convenient justification for a state of emergency and continued Judaization – ‘conflict management’ — on steroids.

Meanwhile, the settlement project has also accelerated: massive land seizures and acquisitions, more than two hundred outposts and a hundred private Jewish farms in the West Bank, and approval for nearly a hundred new settlements along with eighteen new Jewish communities in the Negev. It seems likely that we will soon see Jewish settlement in Gaza as well — and perhaps even in Lebanon. The slogan may change: no longer “from the river to the sea,” but “from the riverS to the sea” — connecting back to early Zionist visions of a state stretching all the way to the Litany River in Lebanon.

But this colonial drive will not bring security — quite the opposite. Anyone thinking clearly can see that settling along the borders and throughout occupied territories exposes hundreds of thousands of Israelis to violence, fear, and destruction. History also teaches us that colonization and devastation worldwide lead only to more wars, terrorism, war crimes, global antisemitism, and international isolation.

This is time to change course. It is the moment to build a broad civil-political bloc — of millions of Jews and Palestinians — that opposes apartheid and offers a vision of peace. Only such a bloc, grounded in Jewish-Arab equality within Israel, and a genuine peace plan developed in full partnership with Palestinian leadership from the territories, can connect with a coalition of Arab states. Those states, it should be remembered, have been offering Israel peace since 2002 — but their outstretched hand has never been met with one in return.

Those who believe in an equal and peaceful future internalized Grossman’s warnings long ago and have understood an evident truth: not lines in any color, but only genuine peace agreements between the peoples — in accordance with international law — will bring real security to all who live in this hard and contested land.

The joint Palestinian-Israeli peace movement “A Land for All” has begun this project by presenting a new horizon for peace – a confederation for the entire land, where Israelis and Palestinian can both enjoy self-determination in their own states, as well as be equal partners in the entire shared homeland. Recent events clearly show – this is a far more effective path than endless wars, deepening apartheid, and violent yellow lines.