[News] The long history of Zionist proposals to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/the-long-history-of-zionist-proposals-to-ethnically-cleanse-the-gaza-strip/?ml_recipient=108911080595523542&ml_link=108911008873973710&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2023-12-29&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation> 



  The long history of Zionist proposals to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip

Mouin Rabbani
December 28, 2023
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Flickr_-_Israel_Defense_Forces_-_Life_of_Lt._Gen._Yitzhak_Rabin_7th_IDF_Chief_of_Staff_in_photos_3.jpg

Editor’s Note: The following article first appeared as a thread on X 
<https://x.com/mouinrabbani/status/1740277218004349340?s=46&t=NxrlttwMtUZ58ydpbMS9nw> 
(formerly Twitter).

Senior Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, are 
again publicly advocating the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. Their 
proposals are being presented as voluntary emigration schemes, in which 
Israel is merely playing the role of Good Samaritan, selflessly 
mediating with foreign governments to find new homes for destitute and 
desperate Palestinians. But it is ethnic cleansing all the same.

Alarm bells should have started ringing in early November when U.S. 
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other Western politicians began 
insisting there could be “no forcible displacement of Palestinians from 
Gaza.” Rather than rejecting any mass removal of Palestinians, Blinken 
and colleagues objected only to optically challenging expulsions at 
gunpoint. The option of “voluntary” displacement by leaving residents of 
the Gaza Strip with no choice but departure was pointedly left open.

Ethnic cleansing, or “transfer” as it is known in Israeli parlance, has 
a long pedigree that goes back to the late-nineteenth-century beginnings 
of the Zionist movement. While the early Zionists adopted the slogan, “A 
Land Without a People for a People Without a Land,” the evidence 
demonstrates that, from the very outset, their leaders knew better. More 
to the point, they clearly understood that the Palestinians formed the 
main obstacle to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. This 
is for the simple reason that, to them, a “Jewish state” denotes one in 
which its Jewish population acquires and maintains unchallenged 
demographic, territorial, and political supremacy.

Enter “transfer.” As early as 1895, Theodor Herzl, the founder of the 
contemporary Zionist movement, identified the necessity of removing the 
inhabitants of Palestine in the following terms: *“*We shall try to 
spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring 
employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any 
employment in our own country … expropriation and the removal of the 
poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” David Ben-Gurion 
(née Grün), Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Jewish Agency for 
Palestine, and later Israel’s first prime minister, was more blunt. In a 
1937 letter to his son, he wrote: “We must expel the Arabs and take 
their place.”

Writing in his diary in 1940, Yosef Weitz, a senior Jewish National Fund 
official who chaired the influential Transfer Committee before and 
during the Nakba (“Catastrophe”), and became known as the Architect of 
Transfer, put it thus: “The only solution is a Land of Israel devoid of 
Arabs. There is no room here for compromise. They must all be moved. Not 
one village, not one tribe, can remain. Only through this transfer of 
the Arabs living in the Land of Israel will redemption come.” His 
diaries are littered with similar sentiments.

The point of the above is not to demonstrate that individual Zionist 
leaders held such views, but that the senior leadership of the Zionist 
movement consistently considered the ethnic cleansing of Palestine an 
objective and priority. Initiatives such as the Transfer Committee, and 
Plan Dalet, initially formulated in 1944 and described by the 
pre-eminent Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi as the “Master Plan for 
the Conquest of Palestine,” additionally demonstrate that the Zionist 
movement actively planned for it. The 1948 Nakba, during which more than 
four-fifths of Palestinians residing in territory that came under 
Israeli rule were ethnically cleansed, should, therefore, be seen as the 
fulfillment of a longstanding ambition and implementation of a key 
policy. A product of design, not of war (historical Christmas footnote: 
the Palestinian town of Nazareth was spared a similar fate only because 
the commander of Israeli forces that seized the city, a Canadian Jew 
named Ben Dunkelman, disobeyed orders to expel the population, and was 
relieved of his command the following day).

That the Nakba was a product of design is further substantiated by the 
Transfer Committee’s terms of reference. These comprised not only 
proposals for the expulsion of the Palestinians but, just as 
importantly, active measures to prevent their return, destroy their 
homes and villages, expropriate their property, and resettle those 
territories with Jewish immigrants. Weitz, together with fellow 
Committee members Eliahu Sassoon and Ezra Danin, on June 5, 1948, 
presented a three-page blueprint, entitled “Scheme for the Solution of 
the Arab Problem in the State of Israel,” to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion 
to achieve these goals. According to leading Israeli historian Benny 
Morris, “there is no doubt Ben-Gurion agreed to Weitz’s scheme,” which 
included “what amounted to an enormous project of destruction” that saw 
more than 450 Palestinian villages razed to the ground.

The understandable focus on the expulsions of 1948 often overlooks the 
fact that ethnic cleansing remains incomplete unless its victims are 
barred from returning to their homes by a combination of armed force and 
legislation, and thereafter replaced by others. It is Israel’s 
determination to make Palestinian dispossession permanent that 
distinguishes Palestinian refugees from many other war refugees.

After 1948, Israel put out a whole series of fabrications to shift 
responsibility for the transformation of the Palestinians into 
dispossessed and stateless refugees onto the Arab states and the 
refugees themselves. These included claims that the refugees voluntarily 
left (they were either expelled or fled in justified terror); that Arab 
radio broadcasts ordered the Palestinians to flee (in fact, they were 
encouraged to stay put); that Israel conducted a population exchange 
with Arab states (there was nothing of the sort); and the bizarre 
argument that because they’re Arabs, Palestinians had numerous other 
states while Jews have only Israel (by the same logic, Sikhs would be 
entitled to seize British Columbia and deport its population to either 
the rest of Canada or the United States). More importantly, even if 
uniformly substantiated, none of these pretexts entitles Israel to 
prohibit the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes at 
the conclusion of hostilities. It is, furthermore, a right that was 
consecrated in United Nations General Assembly resolution 194 of 
December 11, 1948, which has been reaffirmed repeatedly since.


    Ethnic cleansing after 1967

In 1967, Israel seized the remaining 22 percent of Mandatory Palestine — 
the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip. 
Depopulation in these territories operated differently than in 1948. 
Most importantly, Israel, in addition to prohibiting the return of 
Palestinians who fled hostilities during the 1967 June War, and 
encouraging others to leave (by, for example, providing a daily bus 
service from Gaza City to the Allenby Bridge connecting the West Bank to 
Jordan), conducted a census during the summer of 1967 . Any resident who 
was not present during the census was ineligible for an Israeli identity 
document and automatically lost their right of residency.

As a result, the population of these territories declined by more than 
twenty percent overnight. Many of those thus displaced were already 
refugees from 1948. Aqbat Jabr Refugee Camp near Jericho, for example — 
until 1967, the West Bank’s largest — became a virtual ghost town after 
almost all its inhabitants became refugees once again in Jordan. So many 
Palestinians from the Gaza Strip ended up in Jordan that a new refugee 
camp, Gaza Camp, was established on the outskirts of Jerash. The 
occupied Palestinian territories would not recover their 1967 population 
levels until the early 1980s.

Within the West Bank, there were also cases of mass expulsion. These 
included the town of Qalqilya, which was additionally slated for 
demolition but to which its residents were later permitted to return. 
Those of ‘Imwas (the Biblical Emmaus), Bayt Nuba, and Yalu in 
Jerusalem’s Latrun salient were less fortunate. They were summarily 
expelled (many today live in Ramallah’s Qaddura Refugee Camp), their 
villages demolished and annexed to Israel, and replaced by Canada Park, 
so named because the project was completed with donations from the 
Canadian Jewish community. Within Jerusalem’s Old City, the historic 
Mughrabi Quarter, abutting the Haram al-Sharif, was summarily razed to 
make way for a plaza astride the Wailing Wall. With many residents given 
only minutes to evacuate their homes, several were killed when the 
bulldozers went to work. According to Eitan Ben-Moshe, an engineer who 
oversaw the atrocity, “We threw out the wreckage of houses together with 
the Arab corpses.”


    Depopulation through administrative rule

In subsequent years, Israel employed all kinds of administrative 
shenanigans to further reduce the Palestinian population of the West 
Bank and Gaza Strip. Until the 1993 Oslo Accords, for example, an exit 
permit from Israel’s military government was required to leave the 
occupied territory. It was valid for only three years and thereafter 
renewable annually for a maximum of three additional years (for a fee) 
at an Israeli consulate. If a Palestinian lost an exit permit or failed 
to renew an exit permit prior to its expiration for any reason 
(including bureaucratic foot-dragging), or couldn’t pay the renewal fee, 
or failed to return to Palestine prior to its expiration, that 
Palestinian automatically lost residency rights. Separately, Israel, 
over the years, deported numerous activists and community leaders, 
primarily to Jordan and Lebanon. During the late 1960s and 1970s, it 
also exiled Gaza Palestinians accused of resisting the occupation, along 
with their families, to prison camps in the occupied Sinai Peninsula. 
Among those who spent time there was the iconic Palestinian leader 
Haidar Abdel-Shafi.

A particularly notable case of administrative deportations occurred in 
1992 after Israeli special forces botched an operation to rescue an 
Israeli soldier who had been seized by Hamas to exchange him for their 
imprisoned leader, Shaikh Ahmad Yasin. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak 
Rabin ordered the summary deportation of approximately 400 Palestinians, 
many of them prisoners affiliated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad (PIJ), 
none accused of involvement in the incident that led to Rabin’s frenzied 
rage.

In contrast to previous deportations, which were considered permanent, 
these were for one- and two-year terms. In its rush to carry out the 
deportations under cover of night, Israel expelled a number of 
Palestinians who were not on its list and left behind others who were. 
Needless to say, the mass expulsion was, as always in such matters, 
approved by Israel’s High Court of Justice after minor modifications. It 
ruled, among other things, that this was not a collective deportation 
but rather a collection of individual deportations. Perhaps more 
significantly, the deportees were stuck in an inhospitable no-man’s 
land, Marj al-Zuhur, because Lebanon refused to facilitate the 
deportations by receiving them. During their involuntary residence in 
Marj al-Zuhur, assistance came primarily from Hezbollah, and it was 
during this period that relations between Hamas, PIJ, and Hezbollah were 
solidified.


    Israel’s strategies to ‘thin’ Gaza’s population

With the focus in recent years on the intensified campaigns of ethnic 
cleansing in the West Bank, it is often forgotten that, for decades, the 
primary target for depopulation was the Gaza Strip, particularly its 
refugee population, which accounts for approximately three-quarters of 
the territory’s residents. Even before it occupied Gaza in 1967, Israel 
regularly promoted initiatives to achieve the “thinning” of its refugee 
population, with destinations as far afield as Libya and Iraq. Not 
without reason, Israel’s leaders felt uncomfortable with the presence of 
so many ethnically cleansed Palestinians within walking distance of 
their former homes. After 1967, it encouraged Palestinian emigration 
from the Gaza Strip to not only foreign countries but also the West Bank.

    “Transfer,” often presented as the encouragement of voluntary
    emigration either by providing material incentives or making the
    conditions of life impossible, has become increasingly mainstreamed
    in Israeli political life.

In 1969, Israel even devised a scheme to send 60,000 Palestinians from 
the Gaza Strip to Paraguay with offers of lucrative employment. The plan 
was negotiated between Paraguay’s military dictator Alfredo Stroessner 
and Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency. It was, of course, 
purely coincidental that, shortly thereafter, Mossad discovered it no 
longer had the resources to hunt Nazi fugitives in Paraguay, which had 
been one of their destinations of choice. The scheme was discontinued 
when several of its victims, upon realizing the promise of a new life of 
comfort was all a sham, shot up the Israeli embassy in Asuncion, killing 
one of its staff.


    ‘Transfer’ and Gaza today

In the decades since, “transfer,” often presented as the encouragement 
of voluntary emigration either by providing material incentives or 
making the conditions of life impossible, has become increasingly 
mainstreamed in Israeli political life. In 2019, for example, a “senior 
government official,” quoted in the Israeli newspaper /Ha’aretz/, 
expressed a willingness to help Palestinians emigrate from the Gaza Strip.

Mass expulsion has been gaining its share of adherents as well, and it 
is a position that is today represented within Israel’s coalition 
government. As has the idea that “transfer” should include Palestinian 
citizens of Israel — Avigdor Lieberman, for example, who was Israel’s 
Minister of Defense several years ago, is an advocate of not only 
emptying the West Bank and Gaza Strip of Palestinians but of getting rid 
of Palestinian citizens of Israel as well. As one might expect from a 
minister who was in charge of the Israeli military, he is also an 
advocate of “beheading” disloyal Palestinian citizens of Israel with “an 
axe.”

Against this background, Israel saw the attacks of October 7 as not only 
a threat but also as an opportunity. Fortified with unconditional U.S. 
and European support, Israeli political and military leaders immediately 
began promoting the transfer of Gaza’s Palestinian population to the 
Sinai desert. The proposal was enthusiastically embraced by the United 
States and by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in particular. 
Hopelessly out of his depth when it comes to the Middle East, as ever, 
he appears to have genuinely believed he could recruit or pressure 
Washington’s Arab client regimes to make Israel’s wish a reality. Given 
Egyptian strongman Abdelfattah al-Sisi’s economic troubles, the fallout 
of the Menendez scandal, and the looming Egyptian presidential 
elections, it was suggested to him by the Washington echo chamber that 
it would take only an IMF loan, debt relief, and a promise to file away 
Menendez to bring Cairo on board. As so often when it comes to the 
Middle East, Blinken, armed only with Israel’s latest wish list, didn’t 
have a clue his indecent proposal would be categorically rejected, first 
and foremost by Egypt.


    ‘Transfer’ as ‘voluntary emigration’

The fallback position is opposition to “forcible displacement” at the 
point of a gun, while anything else is fair game. This includes reducing 
the Gaza Strip to rubble in what may well be the most intensive bombing 
campaign in history 
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/the-genocide-in-gaza-is-one-of-the-worst-in-modern-history/>; 
a genocidal assault on an entire society that has killed civilians at an 
unprecedentedly rapid pace; the deliberate destruction of an entire 
civilian infrastructure, including the targeted obliteration of its 
health and education sectors; the highest proportion of households in 
hunger crisis ever recorded globally and the real prospect of 
pre-meditated famine; severance of the water and electricity supply 
leading to acute thirst, widespread consumption of non-potable water, 
and termination of sewage treatment; and promotion of a sharp rise in 
infectious disease. One Israeli soldier has already died of a fungal 
infection resulting from the collapse in sanitation he helped bring 
about in the Gaza Strip. How many Palestinians have been consumed by 
similar illnesses, we do not know, but it is reasonable to assume that 
children and the elderly are hit particularly hard.

In other words, if desperate Palestinians seek to flee this seventh 
circle of hell to save their skins, that’s considered voluntary 
emigration — their choice. If they cannot remain in the Gaza Strip 
because Israel has made it unfit for human habitation with U.S. weapons, 
that is a voluntary choice that will be respected. And the U.S. and 
Israel are only here to help, like Mother Theresa, determined to assist 
every last one of them whether they like it or not.

Danny Danon, a member of parliament who was previously Israel’s envoy to 
the United Nations (the guy who sounds like Elmer Fudd), recently held 
up the mass displacement of Syrians to multiple shores during the past 
decade as an example to be emulated. “Even if each country receives ten 
thousand, twenty thousand Gazans, this is significant.”

Asked about Danon’s proposal at a Likud meeting on Christmas Day, 
Netanyahu responded, “We are working on it. Our problem is [finding] the 
countries that are willing to absorb [them].”

As an editorial in the Israeli newspaper /Ha’aretz /put it on December 
27: “Israeli lawmakers keep pushing for transfer under the guise of 
humanitarian aid.”

Not to be outdone by the politicians, the /Jerusalem Post/ ran an 
opinion piece entitled “Why Moving to the Sinai Peninsula is The 
Solution for Gaza’s Palestinians.”

“Sinai,” its author Joel Roskin enthused, “comprises one of the most 
suitable places on Earth to provide the people of Gaza with hope and a 
peaceful future.”

Not individual Gazans, but “the people of Gaza.” Notably, such proposals 
consistently take it as a given that those departing will never return. 
One waits with bated breath, for the European Union is expected to 
respond to these calls for mass expulsion with further investigations of 
Palestinian textbooks.

While ethnic cleansing has been intrinsic to Zionist/Israeli ideology 
and practice from the very outset, it also has a flip side: the 1948 
expulsion of the Palestinians expanded what had been a conflict between 
the Zionist movement and the Palestinians into a regional, Arab-Israeli 
one. The second Nakba Israel is currently inflicting on the Gaza Strip 
similarly appears well on its way to instigating the renewal of 
hostilities across the Middle East.

As importantly, the 1948 Nakba did not defeat the Palestinians, who 
initiated their struggle from the camps of exile, those in the Gaza 
Strip most prominently among them. It would take a Blinken level of 
foolishness to assume the expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip 
would produce a different outcome.

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