[News] ‘Gaza is ours, forever’ – Israel’s extremists have a plan for the day after the genocide

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 ‘Gaza is ours, forever’ – Israel’s extremists have a plan for the day
after the genocide
By Ramzy Baroud <https://english.palinfo.com/?p=250012>

Thursday 31-October-2024 -
https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/gaza-is-ours-forever-israels-extremists-have-a-plan-for-the-day-after-the-genocide/
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<https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/gaza-is-ours-forever-israels-extremists-have-a-plan-for-the-day-after-the-genocide/#>
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Under the slogan ‘Gaza is Ours, Forever’, a large number of Israeli
extremists and right-wing politicians met in the settlement of Be’eri, near
the Gaza border region, on 20-21 October.

The group represented the who’s who in the Israeli right, far right and
ultranationalists. They included Israeli Ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir, May
Golan and Bezalel Smotrich, as well as ten MKs of Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.

The event, entitled “Preparing to Resettle Gaza”, was organized by one of
Israel’s most extreme settler movements, Nachala, led by the notorious
Daniella Weiss.

To appreciate how extremist this 79-year-old settler is, consider this: on
27 June, the Canadian government, though one of the most stalwart
supporters of Netanyahu and his wars, imposed sanctions on her, due to her
“role in facilitating (…) acts of violence by Israeli extremist settlers
against Palestinian civilians.”

The hate-filled conference, however, was but a culmination of a year-long
effort to build a case of why Israel should ethnically cleanse Palestinians
in the Strip and re-establish illegal settlements.

The story, however, does not start on 7 October. In 2005, Israel decided to
redeploy its forces out of the tiny coastal region. That was the start of
the hermetic Israeli siege on the Strip, which led to multiple wars and,
ultimately, the 7 October events and the ongoing genocide.

Although the number of Jewish settlers who were evacuated from the
dismantled 15 illegal settlements was fairly small – 8,500 – the sense of
betrayal felt by the settlers created deep divisions throughout Israeli
society.

Chaotic scenes of settlers being forcefully removed from the Gush Katif
settlements bloc in Gaza created a national crisis in Israel, and was
compared to the forceful evacuation of the illegal Sinai settlement of
Yamit, which Israel dismantled in April 1982 as part of a previous
agreement with Egypt. But, why the crisis?

Israel is a settler-colonial society, which has linked its colonial
expansion to religious diktats and prophecies. So the forced departure from
Gaza, to most of these settlers, must have appeared to represent both
national treason and a sacrilegious act.

This is why resettling Gaza became the immediate rallying cry for Israeli
settlers. Compared to their limited political share of power during the
redeployment of 2005, current extremists are now effectively the
decision-makers.

While the army remains unclear regarding its strategic objectives in Gaza,
the settlers have always been aware of the nature of their mission: the
ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Gaza and the rebuilding of the
settlements.

Thus, quickly, the likes of Weiss and many of her supporters began calling
on Israelis to join the recolonization campaign. “Register, register,
you’ll be in Gaza,” Weiss told an audience of supporters last March,
joyfully declaring that 500 families had already signed up, according to a
CNN report.

Weiss and Nachala are not acting independently from the overall objective
of the country’s leading politicians. For example, on the first day of the
war, 7 October, 2023, Netanyahu made his intentions clear: “I say to the
residents of Gaza: Leave now, because we will operate forcefully
everywhere.”

On 17 October, a position paper introduced by the Israeli Misgav Institute
for National Security & Zionist Strategy called for the “relocation and
final settlement of the entire Gaza population.”

The report saw in the war “a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the
whole Gaza Strip” into the Sinai desert. Later that same month, the Israeli
intelligence ministry itself became involved, with the Israeli news outlet,
Calcalist, publishing a document “recommend(ing) the transfer of Gaza
residents to Sinai.”

On 14 November, far-right Minister Smotrich spoke of ‘voluntary migration’.
In December, media reports said that Netanyahu himself had told Likud party
members that Israel’s real challenge is finding “countries that are willing
to absorb them”, meaning the people of Gaza.

Conferences began to be organized to gather support around the idea of
ethnically cleansing Palestinians. The first major conference was held by a
coalition of settler movements last December. “A house on the beach is not
a dream”, an advertisement for the gathering proclaimed. The ‘beach’ here
is a reference to the Gaza beach.

Even Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, jumped on the opportunity.
In March, he spoke of Gaza’s “very valuable … waterfront property”, which
required Israel to remove the civilians and “clean up the Strip”.

The ongoing so-called General’s Plan, aimed at the extermination and ethnic
cleansing of northern Gaza, is but the military component of the settlers’
vision, that of ‘Gaza is ours, forever’.

But if Israel has failed to sustain its settlements in the rebellious Strip
under more manageable circumstances in the past, will it succeed now?

The settlers are already aware of the challenge at hand. This is why they
constantly link their colonization of Gaza with the ethnic cleansing of the
Strip’s Palestinian inhabitants.

Israel’s success and failure, however, will ultimately be determined by
this maxim: as long as the Palestinian people are fighting back, Weiss and
her fellow extremists will not find safety in Gaza.

Indeed, the native population of Gaza has subsisted in that historical land
for thousands of years. If genocide has not forced them off their land,
nothing else will.

*-Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of the Palestine Chronicle.
He is the author of five books. His latest is ‘These Chains Will Be Broken:
Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons’. Baroud is
a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global
Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC).*
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