Less "karma" and more strategic land grab.

A decade before the UN partition, David Ben-Gurion (who would become Israel's first Prime minister) candidly articulated Zionist strategy: "We shall accept a state with fixed boundaries today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspiration are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factors can limit them".

Referring to the much-lauded 1990 Madrid "peace talks", former Israeli PM Yitzhak Shamir boasted to a Hebrew newspaper his strategy was "drag" negotiations while doubling the number of settlers, something he and successive governments not only achieved but surpassed, with a wink and a nod from Washington.