The genocidal settler colony is obviously immoral. This said, an approach centered on individual or collective morality is limited and possibly even detrimental to Palestinian liberation.

First, it is important to understand why the colony is so violent. Of course, Zionists blame Palestinians and Arabs—They are out to kill us, so we must protect ourselves— while anti-Zionist fascists blame Jews. Both are similar in that they ascribe violence to identity.

However, in Ghassan Kanafani's "Returning to Haifa", the Palestinian child raised by settlers ended up joining the occupation army. This is an illustration of how the occupation—and its violence—is not about identity, but about the socio-political and economic conditions engendered by Zionism.

The colony is violent because it is founded on Zionism, which, as a settler colonial movement, aims to impose a polity atop of an existent society. In its eyes, Palestinians are a demographic threat. Eliminating them or subduing them through violence (military rule, siege, apartheid, genocide) becomes a structural necessity to maintain the ethno-purity of the Jewish state and colonial relations of power. The colony can only be violent because Zionism is fundamentally violent. Killing is not a mere individual or collective Israeli defect. Nor is it incidental to the colony's current government. It is structural to Zionism itself.

Regardless of how true expressions like "Israelis are psychopathic" or "Zionism is a death cult" are, they may

eclipse the root issue—settler colonialism. They can give way to the racist rhetoric mentioned earlier, center psychological assessments or even give Zionism a certain mystical image. Such misdiagnoses can lead us away from proper analyses of the problem, and therefore from the solution.

Crucially, such approaches can channel efforts toward stopping the colony's violence without challenging its existence, in effect merely limiting or postponing its violence. Such approaches are also used by liberal Zionists to try to "cure" the colony, in effect trying to save it from its violence rather than save Palestine from it.

This is not to say that the colony's immorality should be kept out of our political vision. Rather, it should be put in the context of the settler colonial political project to which it is inherent. The establishment of a free and democratic Palestine is the antithesis, solution and remedy to Zionism itself.