The settlement issue isn’t about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it’s about the internal conflict within Israel itself.

If anyone still thinks that the “settlement issue” has anything to do with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, then what is being billed in Israel as the “ East Jerusalem fiasco” should banish that thought once and for all.

In its place, we need to put another thought – that Israeli policies are the expression of a society gone wholly insular; a fully self-contained, hermetically sealed bubble in which Israelis argue amongst themselves, taking no account of the outside world. The Palestinians just happen to be in the way.

Israelis are so focused on themselves, so divisive and navel gazing, that to attribute anything resembling a more comprehensive logic to their actions is to enter into a similar bubble. In point of fact, what has happened in Israel, over the last five years – the disastrously escalated war in Lebanon or the invasion of Gaza, to take but two examples – becomes intelligible only when it is understood as an expression of the internal conflict being waged within Israel itself. That battle is being fought over nothing less than the country’s heart and soul.

The facts of the “East Jerusalem fiasco” themselves are uncontestable. U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden arrived in Israel earlier this week with the intention of mostly repeating President Obama’s declaration that the ties between Israel and the U.S. are unshakable. Had the Israeli government not announced that 1,600 new units will be built in East Jerusalem, Biden would have come and gone, having paid lip service to the peace process but mostly only demonstrating that, like the Israeli government, America believes that Iran is the real danger.

But the orthodox Zionist coalition in Israel could not miss an opportunity to score a decisive blow against the wan secular Zionist community. What the orthodox Zionists had in mind was a bold, in your face declaration of unilateralism: “We will again make it clear that Israel is not the secular Jewish state that early Israeli leaders, including Israel’s first prime minister David Ben Gurion, dreamed of. This is not going to happen. This will never happen.”

Basically, the Israeli government is declaring, “We are orthodox.” And by that, they don’t mean “orthodox Jews,” whom Israelis call “Haredi” and who mostly do not recognize the existence of the state. They mean orthodox Zionists. This is the flag under which religious Zionists and aggressively cultural Zionists rally, form coalitions, and finally bleed into one another until they appear almost indistinguishable.

Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, the leader of this coalition, told Biden that he was not aware of the construction plans. This is impossible to believe, if only because the Tuesday announcement of 1,600 units is part of a far larger and ongoing plan to build 50,000 units beyond the Green Line. The plans for some 20,000 units are already in advanced stages of approval and implementation and have provoked very little protest, in part because they are seen as alternatives to further westward expansion of the settlements.

This last point is critical because it means that replacing this government with a more liberal one would do nothing. The lack of protest tells us that the other parties, including Meretz, the centre-left party, would no more be able to break out of the bubble than President Obama has been able to work the U.S. system.

What is necessary is something bigger – a revolution of sorts. In Israel, this means a constitution (the country currently has no constitution), which in turn requires the rise of a new political movement capable of pulling off such a feat. The spirit of this new constitution must be secular, or secular and Jewish, which amounts to the same thing. Only this kind of action can break Israel out of its bubble.

In 1958, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion sent out a questionnaire to a hundred Jewish intellectuals around the world, asking for their opinion about re-constituting Israel as a secular or secular-Jewish state. Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote back as follows:

If … you think … that the civil status of the state of Israel must be sharply and definitively divided from Judaism as an established religion … and that this is the moment to establish once and for all the principle that a modern liberal State is, and must be, secular in character and that the religion of its citizens must be, in so far as it is a state and nothing else, indifferent to it, then you may be right to issue such a questionnaire.

For half a dozen political reasons, Ben Gurion did not go ahead. He thought it better to compromise with the religious communities, which were, at that time, rather weak and of no particular significance. Looking back, one can only say that he was wrong.