T

he Israeli scheme to expel the Palestinians from Gaza into Sinai is very dangerous and it is important to understand why. Let’s begin by setting that idea in its historical context. For decades, the Zionist propaganda machine has been disseminating the image of Israel as a tiny, peaceful state surrounded by hordes of hostile Arabs who want to “throw it into the sea”. They had to attribute that quote to somebody, so they chose Gamal Abdel- Nasser, the most powerful Arab leader at the time it was fabricated.  

There is a little known-fact that Israel has long tried to cover up, which is that Alfred Lilienthal, a Jewish American journalist and an outspoken critic of Zionism, openly accused those who circulated that bogus quote of lying and deceit. They sued him for defamation and slander. In the trial, Lilienthal challenged his accusers to produce one excerpt from Nasser’s many speeches containing that phrase. Of course, they could not, and Lilienthal won the case. This, however, did not prevent the Zionist propaganda machine from continuing to spout the lie which served Israel’s objectives so well.

How the times have changed. Israel has stopped playing the helpless state in a sea of Arabs bent on its destruction. The mask has fallen, exposing the last remaining racist colonial state in the world, a state that wages war more often than it calls for peace. Today, that entity calls for the reverse of the quote it falsely attributed to Nasser: throwing the Palestinians, not into the sea but into the desert. Senior Israeli officials have been explicit about this. Moreover, the US-led West which had vowed never to allow the Jews to be “thrown into the sea” has no problem echoing Israel’s call to throw the Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai desert.

Fortunately, Egypt put a stop to that with its absolute refusal to permit such an abominable scheme. Surely if throwing the Jews into the sea is a heinous crime, so too is throwing the Palestinians into the desert.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 16 November, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly