How expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza again became commonplace in Israel

At first they destroyed a city, and now a camp must come on the ruins of that city. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already given his blessing to the plan of Minister Israel Katz (Defense) to drive Palestinians in Gaza together in the city of Rafah, destroyed by the army, in southern Gaza. Katz has instructed the army to prepare for this.

Palestinians would only enter the camp after a ‘security check’ and that afterwards cannot leave.

Katz uses the term “humanitarian city”, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz In a comment it calls “a concentration camp”. The next step is the expulsion of Palestinians abroad. Katz and other Israeli politicians, including Netanyahu, describe this plan as the encouragement of ‘voluntary migration’.

The announcement of Katz, last Monday, coincided with the third visit this year of the Netanyahu for war crimes wanted by the International Criminal Court to US President Donald Trump. He said in February that he wants to make Gaza the “Rivièra of the Middle East” after removal from the population.

There is no departure in Gaza in any way with the consent of the population

‘Orwellian’

According to the Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard, the implementation of the Katz plan comes down to a double violation of international law. Firstly by forced relocation, in which people are violently moved from their hometown within the territory of a certain state, in this case the Gaza Strip -occupied Gaza Strip. Secondly by deportation: The forced departure of a population to a location across the border. “The aim is to purify Gaza ethnically,” said Sfard by telephone.

According to international law, people do not have to be loaded in trucks and are physically removed to commit these crimes – displacement or deportation -, says Sfard. “It is enough to impose coercive measures that make their lives so miserable that they have to leave, whether in the interior or abroad.”

The term “voluntary migration” is “Orwellian,” said Sfard. “Katz and Netanyahu can abuse the term ‘voluntary’ as much as they want, but in no way there is a departure with the consent of the population now that their houses have been bombed and a humanitarian catastrophe has been created.”

International organizations

According to Katz, the camp in Rafah will be managed by ‘international organizations’ and the area around it by the Israeli army. It is unclear which international organizations he is referring to, since it is to be expected that neither the United Nations, nor aid organizations will be willing to cooperate with such a scenario.

Possibly Katz thinks of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) run by Israel and the US, which has provided militarized food aid in Gaza since the end of May. In addition, more than six hundred Palestinians have been killed so far. The GHF serves Israel’s military and political interests, and contributes to the further expulsion of Palestinians to Central and Southern Gaza, where the only distribution centers are located.

Out research from the Financial Times Last week it turned out that the American consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which has earned millions on setting up the GHF, worked for months on a cost calculation for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. According to the scenario thought out by the BCG, a quarter of the population should leave Gaza, after receiving a so -called ‘relocation package’, worth $ 9,000 (7,700 euros) per person, and three -quarters of them would never return.

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Historic roots

The idea of ​​the massive displacement of the Palestinian population in Gaza to Arab countries or elsewhere abroad is now high on the Israeli political agenda and has deep historic roots. In the 1960s it was the domain of the dominant Israeli workers’ party, in recent years the idea has first been propagated by the extreme right-wing settlers, and then became commonplace in Israel’s ever-shifting to the right.

Shortly after the start of the Gaza War in October 2023 signaled The Palestinian historian Nur Masalha that the idea of ​​the massive displacement of Palestinians had again become mainstream. He warned of a repeat of the Nakba, the violent expropriation and expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians during the war around the founding of Israel in 1948.

Masalha previously wrote, largely on the basis of Israeli archive material, two books about the shifting ideas about the massive displacement (“transfer”) of the Palestinian population in Zionism and under successive Israeli governments. The conflict, says Masalha, is essentially about land and demography. Long before the Nakba there were plans in Zionism for the expulsion of Palestinians to Arab countries to obtain a Jewish demographic majority.

Masalha makes a distinction between the internal and external relocation of the Palestinian population. For example, settlers in the government and on the occupied West Bank seized the Gaza war to accelerate a long-term process of ethnic purification within that area, by the intake of land and the concentration of the Palestinian population in the urban areas.

Since October 2023, much has been spoken about the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza – for which Israeli leaders made various plans in the 1960s. Shortly after Israel’s invasion of Gaza leaked one proposal From the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence with scenarios for the war, in which the option was preferred to expel Palestinians from Gaza to the northern Egyptian Sinai desert. Egypt has – at least openly – categorically opposed.

“Israel stands for a similar question like after the 1967 war,” says researcher Yehuda Shaul of the Israeli think tank ofk. Israel then occupied Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, with which it came to rule over a million Palestinians, including 400,000 in Gaza-largely refugees from 1948 from present-day Israel.

If we can drive 300,000 refugees from Gaza to other places, we can annex Gaza without any problems

“The occupation again created the issue of geography and demography: Israel wanted the country, but not the Palestinian population,” says Shaul in a cafe in Jerusalem. Massive relocation of the Palestinian population, just like in 1948, became a need to obtain Israeli demographic dominance in the area under his control. “If we can expel 300,000 refugees from Gaza to other places […] Can we annex Gaza without any problems, ” said Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan on June 25, 1967.

Also historian Dotan Hallevy, who published a book about Israeli thinking about Gaza, makes the comparison with 1967. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol of the Workers Party strived between 1967 and 1968 to the massive displacement of Palestinians from Gaza to the Western Jordano, with the idea of ​​Jordan, with the idea of ​​Jordan, with the Idea, with the Idaan, with the one with the Jordan, with, with the Idan, with the one with Jordan. The plan failed, says Hallevy by telephone: “Around 30,000 Palestinians, on a population of 400,000, were actually moved.”

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Blockade

According to Shaul, it remained the strategy of Israeli governments to annex Gaza until the 1980s and to move or deport the refugee population to the West Bank. “The Workers Party Government gave priority to conquering territory on the basis of national security interests, where the Egyptian front was given priority. But that strategy has never been realized.”

After the start of the massive Palestinian rebellion against the occupation in 1987 (the first Intifada), unleashed in Gaza, the strategy changed drastically, Shaul says. The goal became the further fragmentation of Palestinian country and the Palestinian society by separating Gaza from the West Bank. In Gaza this happened through the border fence, the permit regime with which Palestinians could only leave the strip with Israeli permission, and from 2007 the blockade.

Not the expulsion of the population was the goal, but rather their imprisonment. Partly due to the blockade, Gaza was called an “outdoor prison”, or-in the words of the Israeli sociologist and Holocaust-surviving Baruch Kimmerling in 2003-“a concentration camp”.

Especially after Hamas took over power in 2007, Gaza was no longer a political issue for Israel, but a safety issue, “says Dotan Hallevy.” Inside there was no mechanism to let the population leave, because the main goal was to control them so that they would not be a threat. “

Political mainstream

Although the idea of ​​the massive displacement of the Palestinian population, according to Shaul, “never completely gone”, the attack led by Hamas brought on 7 October 2023, killing almost 1,200 civilians and soldiers in southern Israel, this is again in the foreground.

According to lawyer SFARD, it has always been a possibility by the Nakba of 1948 in the Israeli ideas to dilute the number of Palestinians during a war in the area ‘between the river and the sea’ [Israël, Gaza en de Westoever]”But real support was small for that.

Only after October 7 “deportation” of the Palestinian population from Gaza became a “real option and the policy of powerful and fanatic members of the government who adhere to an ideology of Jewish supremation,” says Sfard. Where the idea of ​​deportation of Palestinians was first reserved for marginal groups, the support for this under the Israeli population has increased.

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Out of a much -discussed research Van Pennsylvania State University, it turned out last May that 82 percent of Israeli-Jewish population in Israel supports the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, and 56 percent the expulsion of the Palestinian population from Israel.

That support is not only the result of the Hamas attack on October 7. A report from think tank orek set Already in May 2023 that the open calling for relocation of the Palestinian population was normalized in the right, including members of Netanyahu’s Likud party. Right -wing politicians called for a repeat of the Nakba before October 7 – and immediately afterwards.

Since then there have been various conferences, attended by Israeli politicians and ministers, about the annexation of Gaza and the reconstruction of settlements there. With his statements about a “Gaza Rivièra”, according to Shaul, Trump has granted legitimacy to the “annexation camp” in Israel.

Just like in 1967, Israel wants to have “the absolute minimum of Palestinians in Gaza,” says Hallevy. To let people leave, Israel created push factors in the late 1960s, such as the deterioration of employment. But the vast majority of the population wanted or could not afford to leave and it also created a boost for militant resistance, which resulted in a war in the early 1970s. “At the moment Israel is creating horrible conditions in Gaza, but it is again unrealistic that it can force the majority to leave.”

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