Israeli forces continue to grind through the Gaza Strip, pounding towns and killing civilians in their thousands. The casualties could quickly climb much higher if Israel goes ahead with its planned ground offensive.
Over a million Gazans have fled in search of safety to the south of the enclave near the Egyptian border after the Israeli military warned them to evacuate immediately prior to its expected ground attack.
The speed and scale of the exodus make it the biggest and fastest displacement of Palestinians in the Arab world since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, which forced about a million Palestinians to leave their homes.
It has upended many assumptions about the current war in Gaza, including debunking the myth that the deadly conflict is about destroying the militant Hamas Movement that rules the enclave.
The brutal nature of the Israeli aggression on Gaza, its strategy, and the conduct of operations show that the forced displacement of the Strip’s Palestinian inhabitants is the key objective of this war.
US President Joe Biden has expressed his full-throated support for Israel, including its declared aim of destroying Hamas, but his administration is perhaps looking the other way as hawkish Israeli politicians and generals push for a Palestinian exodus.
Some even believe that the Biden administration may share with Israeli officials the agenda of what the latter have been describing as “a strategic and historical operation” in Gaza.
As is becoming clearer every day, Israel’s war against Gaza does not end with the cruelty of the bombings, shelling, and occupation. It goes beyond physical destruction and touches on questions of existence.
The extent to which Israel has systematically shelled Gaza, including public facilities, medical centres, schools, mosques, and churches reveals the kind of scorched-earth policy that armies use to destroy everything that allows an adversary to stay on its land.
Israel’s main goal in Gaza is the long-term process of erasing the presence and ethnic constitution of that part of Palestine. One of its methods is a system of expulsion when it forcibly drives the Palestinians into exile.
The Jewish supremacists in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet have begun to challenge the Palestinian presence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since they came to power in October last year.
In addition to the harsh treatment of the Palestinians, crackdown on activists, and demolition of houses, the Netanyahu Government has laid plans for a huge expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
While the new settlements aim at preventing a Palestinian state from ever coming into being there, the government is racing to implement a hardline agenda for the full annexation of the territory.
If it succeeds, this agenda will eventually push the Palestinians to leave their homes and seek shelter elsewhere.
The deportation drive in Gaza thus comes straight out of the Israeli playbook. Together with Israel’s strategy in the onslaught on Gaza, its long-term intentions become apparent.
Leaked documents and discussions within Israeli think-tanks close to Netanyahu have confirmed plans for transferring Gazans from the enclave following the ongoing operation.
One document attributed to Israeli Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel details a three-phase plan that suggests transferring the Palestinians fleeing their homes in Gaza forcibly to Sinai in Egypt.
Under the plan disclosed by Calcalist, an Israeli news website which is part of the Yedioth Ahronoth group, the first phase will consist of setting up tent cities in Sinai followed by creating a humanitarian corridor and then constructing cities in North Sinai for the new refugees.
The full 10-page document, published on Sunday by the Hebrew independent website Mekomit, details the relocation plan that it suggests should be carried out during the war.
Though it says the document is non-binding to the Israeli army, the phases of the transfer plan look consistent with military plans for the ongoing operation in Gaza, which started with intensive airstrikes on the northern part of the Strip followed by warnings to the population to move to the south.
In the second phase, Israeli ground forces will enter Gaza, leading to the occupation of the entire Strip and the “cleansing of the underground bunkers from Hamas fighters.”
No specific information is available on whether the Netanyahu government has discussed or endorsed such a plan as a durable post-war solution for Gaza. Netanyahu himself probably provided a context for such a mindset when he invoked a biblical prophecy that would ensure “a crushing victory” over the Palestinians in a speech last week.
Many say that the prophecy of Isaiah mentioned by Netanyahu is loaded with the “abomination of Egypt.” The verse, taken from Isaiah 19, is a prophecy against Egypt, its rulers, and its people.
However, as the calamity of Israel’s push into Gaza unfolds, those familiar with Israel’s pre-statehood history of the compulsory transfer of Palestinians have raised the alarm that ignorance should not let Israel get away with the same thing this time around.
ETHNIC CLEANSING
The Israeli policy of ethnic cleansing does not come from a vacuum. It is deeply rooted in the tenets of Zionism and is the basic principle associated with the founding of Israel, summarised in the phrase “a land without a people for a people without a land” attributed to Zionist founder Theodor Herzl.
Israel’s founding fathers, who pioneered a pure Jewish state, fulfilled that ambition by establishing a settler-colonial project in Palestine by resorting to all kinds of violence against the owners of the land.
Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, is on record as telling a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive Committee in 1938 that “I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.”
Israeli revisionist historian Benny Morris shows in his book “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949,” which is based on declassified Israeli documents, how this attitude towards the Palestinians’ expulsion was put into action as the ultimate realisation of the “Zionist dream.”
The Palestinians have had to prepare themselves for the revival of this Zionist project as the calamity of Israel’s occupation has continued. Israel’s leaders have continued to raise their resettlement as a “final solution” to the Palestinian refugee problem.
In 1953, Israel proposed moving thousands of Palestinians to Sinai as part of an UN Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNWRA)-supervised and US-funded pilot project to resettle the Palestinian refugees, a result of the creation of Israel.
The proposal was torpedoed by the cash-strapped newly installed revolutionary government in Egypt, which was nevertheless offered immense funding in exchange after the plan was violently rejected by Gazans.
Yet, Israel’s ambitions to solve the refugee problem at the expense of the Palestinians and their Arab neighbours have never stopped. On Monday, the BBC Arabic Service published a UK Foreign Office document that reveals an Israeli plan to relocate Palestinians to Egypt in 1971.
After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, then Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin discussed with US president Ronald Reagan expelling the Palestinians from Lebanon to other Arab countries as part of withdrawal arrangements.
The Israel newspaper Haaretz reported on 6 June 2022 that according to a transcript of a White House meeting between the two leaders there was discussion of how to resolve the “problem” of the Palestinian refugees.
The proposal was also pushed by Israel during the multilateral peace talks after the signing of the Oslo Agreement in 1993 as an international mechanism to probe a solution for outstanding issues such as the Palestinian refugees.
During protracted negotiations, Israel insisted that the return of the Palestinian refugees was non-negotiable. It also rejected a 2002 Arab Peace Plan that offered Israel normalisation in exchange for the return of the Palestinian refugees and the land it occupied in 1967.
The notion again resurfaced as an alternative scheme to Israel’s troop withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. Giora Eiland, who served as Head of the Israeli National Security Council between 2004 and 2006, proposed the transfer of Palestinians from the Strip to Sinai.
According to some accounts, Eiland, who now heads a security and defence firm, suggested the transfer of Palestinians from Gaza to a large swathe of land in Sinai far from the Israeli border.
The plan was in violation of the 1993 Oslo Agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), and it had zero possibility to be accepted by Egypt. However, Eiland suggested that the latter would be compensated with land in the southeast of Israel that would allow for a car tunnel linking Sinai and Jordan.
In a 2017 leaked voice recording, former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak discloses that he rejected offers from Israel while in office to resettle Palestinians in Sinai as part of a land swap between Israel and Egypt.
The leak, some three years before Mubarak’s death, was probably in response to a report by the BBC Arabic Service quoting a UK Foreign Office document that suggested that Mubarak had accepted the relocation of Palestinians in Lebanon.
In the published document, Mubarak was quoted as referring to a request made by the Reagan administration in 1983. He is quoted as saying that he told senior US emissary Philip Habib that the resettlement risked “creating a dozen difficult problems in various countries”.
Moving forward 40 years, the US now seems to be attempting the same plan of reinforcing Israel as a colonial project, including by helping it to find a substitute home for the Palestinians.
The Biden administration has not only justified Israel’s callousness in conducting the current war and embraced its objectives, but it is also providing generous funding to implement its final goals, including the intended ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
US FUNDING
Most of the biggest concerns about the ominous US role in the Palestinian exodus come from details in a letter sent by Biden to the US Congress on 20 October to advance his proposal for additional funding for Israel after it launched its war on Gaza.
Biden has requested nearly $14.3 billion for Israel, which the White House has said will go almost entirely towards defence contracts and facilitating the transfer of weapons and ammunition to Israel from US stockpiles.
According to the White House and Congress, ammunition for Israel’s missile-defence systems, its ground-based laser air-defence system, precision-guided munitions, kits that turn regular bombs into precision weapons, and artillery shells will all be covered in the package.
A closer look into the details of the aid package proposed by Biden also reveals additional funding for “migration and refugee assistance” to Israel, which raises questions about US complicity in expulsion plans.
In the administration’s letter to Congress, Biden made it clear that the extra funding, some $3.5 billion, will go to “assist refugees in response to the situation in Israel and in areas impacted by the situation in Israel; and for additional support for other vulnerable populations and communities.”
The 69-page letter, tagged as “regarding critical national-security funding needs,” suggests that “these resources would support displaced and conflict-affected civilians, including Palestinian refugees in Gaza and the West Bank.”
The administration outlines that the money will be used to “address the potential needs of Gazans fleeing to neighbouring countries.” This would include “food and nonfood items, healthcare, emergency shelter support, water and sanitation assistance, and emergency protection,” it states.
“This crisis could well result in displacement across the border and higher regional humanitarian needs,” and the funding “may be used to meet evolving programming requirements outside of Gaza,” the letter explains.
“This would also include potential critical humanitarian infrastructure costs needed for the refugee population to provide access to basic, life-sustaining support,” it adds.
While Biden’s unwavering support for Israel’s devastating attacks on Gaza reflects his affinity for the Jewish state as a self-declared Zionist, his backing for a potential expulsion of the Palestinians may also find parallels in US history.
The US’ own state-building history illustrates the distinction between “civilised” and “barbarous” peoples. Its “Indian problem,” which found its solution in creating reservations in the 1880s to assimilate Native Americans, reflected the US white mentality that was based on segregation and elimination.
The early European settlers in the Americas displaced the “Indians” through an unholy trinity of violence, disease, and starvation. By the 19th century, the process was rather more official, as successive US administrations forced native tribes to move from their land.
If this history provides any clue, it explains the US love affair with Israel and the dominant culture that shares the attitudes of completely rejecting or ignoring legitimate Palestinian rights.
Nevertheless, the transfer policy, which goes even beyond apartheid and ethnic cleansing, will not be tolerated by the Palestinians. Against all the odds, lessons from their history show that Palestinian resistance is hard to overcome.
Since the outbreak of the Israeli attack on Gaza, more than a million Gazans have been forced by Israel’s brutal and savage bombardment to leave their houses in the north of the Strip.
This is reminiscent of the systematic violence, deprivation, and disruption of daily life that were exercised by Israel’s founding fathers to force the Palestinians to flee their villages and towns during the 1948 War.
But unlike the lies about the causes of the first Palestinian exodus, which waited for four decades to be exposed by Israel’s own “new historians,” the heroic resilience of the Gazans demonstrates their own “secret weapon” – namely, that they “have no place else to go.”
One finding by the principal investigators at the Arab Barometer, a research network, backed by countless media reports of the Gazans’ trauma has demonstrated the strength of the Palestinians’ connection to the land on which they live.
“The vast majority of Gazans surveyed shortly before 7 October – 69 per cent – said they have never considered leaving their homeland,” wrote Amaney Jamal and Michael Robbins in the US journal Foreign Affairs.
“This is a higher proportion than the residents of Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia who were asked the same question.”
The idea of transferring the Palestinians to Sinai has earned disdain and wrath from public opinion across the Arab world and in particular in Egypt.
Moreover, the idea of settling Palestinians in Sinai has received a sharp rebuke from Egypt’s officialdom. President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi has even rejected the notion as a second Nakba for the Palestinians, a reference to their displacement in 1948-49.
“Transferring Palestinian citizens from the [Gaza] Strip to Sinai simply means transferring the idea of resistance [and] fighting to Sinai. Consequently, Sinai will be a launching pad for operations against Israel,” Al-Sisi said, dismissing speculation that Egypt might yield.
“This will give Israel the right to defend itself and its national security by conducting strikes on Egyptian land in retaliation,” Al-Sisi elaborated, underscoring that Egypt’s national security overrides other calculations.
Egypt’s stern warning seems to have paid off. On Sunday, Biden assured Al-Sisi that the Palestinians in Gaza would not be “displaced to Egypt or any other nation”. In a telephone call, he also affirmed the US “commitment” to a “Palestinian state.”
It remains to be seen, however, if Biden’s promise to Al-Sisi will be translated into action or whether Israel will halt its horrific drive to expel the Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt.
Whether Israel will be able to execute its plans to eliminate the Palestinians on their own land in this round of the war or not, its leaders’ ambitions to do so is a reminder of another movement to grab land from the Palestinians and give it to invaders and occupiers wanting to establish a Jewish state.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 2 November, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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