The settlers think they have convinced people that they are vital for Israel's future. However, as Avirama Golan points out here what they have actually done is defeated realistic Zionism in the hope of perpetuating the conflict.

How do they explain the fact that Netanyahu, when he was finance minister and a downsizing reformer, gave young people like them, but living in the Jordan Valley, free tuition and rent, while in Hadera and Kiryat Gat they could only dream of such things?

The answer to this question is not political but sociocultural. It's in the settler hoax that depicts Israel as a ghetto, the territories as frontier zones drenched in Jewish sentiment, and the Arab-Israeli conflict as a bloody, eternal struggle, cut off from space and time, in which every non-Jew is out to get every Jew. This is the discourse that has vanquished realistic Zionism. Otherwise how can we explain the sweeping support for Netanyahu's hollow declarations about the Jordan Valley or some other "rock of our existence"?

It's Israel as a Jewish and democratic state within more or less the 67 lines or it's Hamas nightmare. It can't be both. And the sooner the Israeli population stops acquiescing in their own suicide by letting the settlers get away with whatever they want the better for all Jews.