No one ever asked us if we wanted to be ethically cleansed. Indeed, this is how far our dehumanisation has gone, writes Emad Moussa [photo credit: Getty Images]
With the far-right settlers controlling Israel’s decision-making and slowly moulding the state in their image, much of the anti-Palestinian sentiment has been translated to extreme steps on the ground, at a much higher rate than usual.
Accelerated land grabs, expansion of settlements, and vows to annex the West Bank and potentially deport Palestinians to neighbouring countries, all became the minimum norm.
The impression for most Palestinians is that Israel has moved from decades of gradually dispossessing and displacing them, to putting a second Nakba in high gear. This may well be a buildup to Plan Dalet 2.0, a resumption of Ben-Gurion’s Plan Dalet which led to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.
What transpired thus far is a bizarre situation where Israeli officials would threaten to bring about, and take steps toward, a ‘second Nakba’, while continuing to deny Israel’s responsibility for the 1948 Nakba.
With October 7 2023 came a rare opportunity, a second Nakba slot became available. Netanyahu and his minister of strategic affairs, Ron Dermer, made it clear to State Secretary Anthony Blinken that they wanted to ethnically cleanse two million Gazans toward Egypt.
Fast forward a year, and after the nefarious bombing and starving Palestinians into leaving the Strip, people stayed. But the notion of ethnically cleansing Gaza has been normalised as part of Israel’s realpolitik and public discourse.
Across the political spectrum with very few exceptions, Israeli officials and media outlets are now dealing with the expulsion of Gazans as a matter of logistics, discussed mostly in terms of how and when, and to what extent.
The discussion gained serious traction following Trump’s proposal to relocate Gazans to Egypt and Jordan.
Even after Trump partially walked back on his words, Israelis still hang on to the original proposal, with a majority of Israeli Jews, eight out of ten, supporting it.
What is phantasmagorical about it all is that we Palestinians are hardly consulted on our fate. No one ever asked us if we wanted to be ethically cleansed. Indeed, this is how far our dehumanisation has gone, that even our agency has been confiscated.
Nakba 2.0
It is not surprising, therefore, that when Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz declared the creation of an agency to “facilitate the emigration of Gazans,” hardly any one of us flinched.
The new agency, said Katz, would provide “extensive assistance to allow Gazans who want to emigrate to a third state…”
They call it ‘voluntary emigration’ — after they made most of Gaza unliveable. And Netanyahu has been working to make that happen, including sending Mossad Director, David Barnea, to find countries “to house Gazans”. Sudan, Somalia, and Indonesia were suggested as possible host countries.
“They have been culling us for 18 months and think they can decide where we should go, They could try removing us again,” Samer, a teacher in Gaza City, told me. Like most Gazans I routinely converse with, Samer is aware that Israel doesn’t vow to inflict a second Nakba on Gaza to exercise pressure on Hamas to release the Israeli captives.
They believe Israel violating the two-month fragile ceasefire in March was mainly because the job of ethnically cleansing Gaza or cut down its demographics significantly was still unrealised. “Why do you think Netanyahu didn’t allow the caravans into Gaza as per the ceasefire agreement?,” Samer added.
Subscribe Now and Listen to our Podcasts OnOut of the 60,000 mobile homes that were stipulated in the ceasefire agreement to enter Gaza to shelter the homeless, Israel allowed in only 15, and with a lot of procrastination.
Mobile homes meant resettling, and to Israeli eyes, Palestinians were not meant to return to their homes in Northern Gaza especially. But they returned and set up tents on top of their destroyed homes. “If we leave, we’ll never come back. We saw what happened to our grandparents after the Nakba,” Samer commented.
Indeed, Palestinians say ethnic cleansing and, apart from the Nakba, think of all the other instances thereafter that Israel implemented and attempted to displace them.
In 1956 during the Suez Crisis, Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and Sinai for nine months and tried to push Palestinians, most of whom were Nakba refugees, into Egypt. It tried again, but softly after it reoccupied the Strip in 1967 and barred Palestinians abroad at the time of the occupation from returning.
In 2005, Major General Giora Eiland — who headed Israel’s National Security Council between 2004 and 2006 — suggested a plan to transfer Gazans to Sinai. And, in 2010, Egyptian President Mubarak reportedly rejected a Netanyahu proposal to resettle Gazans in the Egyptian peninsula.
Eiland is also the mastermind of the so-called Generals’ Plan in 2024 to empty northern Gaza. The plan was seemingly ‘interrupted’ with the ceasefire coming into effect last January.
Today Gazans observe what is happening on the ground and draw conclusions. “They’re (Israelis) gradually building up toward a more refined ethnic cleansing campaign,” Yassir who lives in the Nuseirat Camp told me.
Even if Israel succeeds in moving tens of thousands of desperate Gazans ‘willingly’ to a third state, as per Katz plan, the final outcome will unlikely be sufficient and the process will be extremely slow. The only effective method is to carry out mass expulsion and force hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into Egypt.
There seem to be preparations in that direction. The Israeli forces returned to the Netzarim Corridor from which it withdrew in January/February following the ceasefire. But this time the army remained on the corridor’s eastern side only, leaving the coastal road connecting Gaza’s north with the south open.
“They want to free a corridor for people to move south should the moment comes,” Yassir speculated.
The army also started land operations in northern Gaza, reoccupying land and pushing residents towards Gaza City. Should the land offensive expand toward the city, people will be expected to head south – again.
Simultaneously, in Rafah on the Egyptian border, mass evacuation orders have been issued. That, while the Israeli army is systematically separating what is left of Rafah from the neighbouring city of Khan-Younis through what Netanyahu called ‘the Morag corridor’. People fear this is to prepare the area to become the new ‘displacement zone’, at Egypt’s doorstep.
This happens as Gaza is teetering dangerously on mass starvation following weeks of full Israeli blockade, a war crime that the Israeli High Court upheld as permissible.
Should the situation escalate, Palestinians will be faced with death by fire or starvation. Leaving will — theoretically — be the only option.
But this draconian Israeli scenario is not devoid of challenges. There are no guarantees that people, who experienced death and starvation in their displacement would easily move. “They killed us in our tents in the so-called humanitarian zones in southern Gaza, I’d rather die in my own home,” Samer said.
Gaza holds its ground — for now
There is also the fact that Gaza’s resistance groups are still standing and preparing to fight.
Retired Israeli General, Yitzhak Brik, said in Ma’ariv that the Israeli army, even under new army Chief Eyal Zamir, is ill-prepared and understaffed for full deployment in Gaza (for mass expulsion or to defeat Hamas). What is Bibi and his cabinet doing, Brik believes, are repeating the same mistakes and risking setting the region on fire.
Should Netanyahu press forward with the ethnic cleansing, the Israeli army will come head-on with the Egyptians.
Since October 7th, Egypt has been steadily building up its forces in Sinai. Israel says Cairo is violating the 1979 Camp David agreement which limits Egyptian troops in the desert peninsula. This, while the Israeli army continues to create facts on the grounds of the Egypt-Gaza and Egypt-Israel border triggers serious national security concerns for Egypt. Israelis are reacting to the Egyptian reaction to Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, yet see themselves as the ‘violated’.
Egypt made it clear repeatedly that pushing Palestinians into Sinai would mean confrontation with the Egyptian army. That, while Cairo continues to ward off enormous pressures, as well as economic incentives, by the US to take in the Palestinians.
Nonetheless, when it comes to standing against Israel and Palestine, the majority of Egyptians back their otherwise unpopular president. “An insufferable man (al-Sisi), but I will march behind him to fight Israel,” an Egyptian taxi driver in Cairo told me.
“True, Egypt is struggling economically, but when the moment comes, we’ll turn the entire country into a war economy,” a retired Egyptian infantry officer informed me.
The popular support and Egypt’s national security would give al-Sisi reasonable grounds to push against any Israeli attempts to force Palestinians into Egypt. The scope of that ‘push’, however, is hard to predict under the currently changing regional scene.
None of the challenges to Israel’s plans, however, guarantee that the Israeli ‘cabinet of arsonists’, as per Brik’s description, won’t try to endanger a regional explosion. Certainly, as Israeli society is cracking from within, the best way to restitch unity and keep Bibi in his position would be by expanding and accentuating an external threat.
Dr Emad Moussa is a Palestinian-British researcher and writer specialising in the political psychology of intergroup and conflict dynamics, focusing on MENA with a special interest in Israel/Palestine. He has a background in human rights and journalism, and is currently a frequent contributor to multiple academic and media outlets, in addition to being a consultant for a US-based think tank.
Follow him on Twitter: @emadmoussa
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.