https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2023-10-27/israel-plan-gaza-sinai/
Israel’s long-held plan to drive Gaza’s people into Sinai is now within reach
As the UK and US back the carnage in Gaza, including an imminent ground invasion, are they also about to assist Israel’s ethnic cleansing plan for a “Greater Gaza” – in Egypt?
As Israel masses its forces along the fence encaging Gaza, waiting for a green light from the United States for a ground invasion, the question few are asking is: What is the ultimate endgame for Israel?
Instead, British and US politicians, backed by their media, have limited themselves to amplifying Israel’s bogus rationales for indiscriminately bombing men, women and children in the tiny coastal enclave and preparing to send in troops. Only 80 or so British MPs, out of 650, have so far called for a ceasefire.
Israeli strikes are known to have killed more than 7,000 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, with many times that number seriously injured. They are being treated in hospitals without medicines or electricity. The United Nations estimates at least 600,000 Palestinians are homeless from the bombing.
At first, Western establishments justified the carnage as Israel’s “right to defend itself” – a right Palestinians had been denied for the previous 16 years while Israel enforced a brutal military siege of the enclave that prevented basic goods and medicines from entering.
Israel’s supposed “right to self-defence” – the official line from both sides of the political aisle in Britain – serves as western cover for, and complicity in, the crimes against humanity Israel has been committing: mass killing and wanton destruction; a “complete siege” of Gaza, starving it of food and water; and attacks on community infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, mosques, and UN compounds.
But now, as the death toll becomes increasingly obscene, the rationale has shifted. In chorus, British and US politicians say Israel must be given the time and space to “destroy Hamas”.
That requires a ground invasion by Israeli troops – many of them religious extremists from illegal settlements in the West Bank – who are certain to be seeking vengeance for Hamas’ attack on October 7. The atrocities are only likely to intensify.
Military madness
But there is method in Israel’s military madness. And the main goal is not the one being promoted. Israel has much larger ambitions than “destroying Hamas”.
Israel knows enough history to understand that occupied and oppressed peoples never come to accept their subjugation. They continue to find ways to resist. Even if Hamas can be wiped out, a new, more fearsome adversary will emerge among the next generation currently being traumatised by Israel’s bombs.
In fact, after Israel removed its physical presence from Gaza by pulling out settlers and soldiers in 2005, it began to understand that it had boxed itself into a strategic corner.
It was still occupying the enclave, but at arm’s length. This was the rationale for the blockade that tightly limited what was allowed in and out of the strip. Gaza had been turned into an open-air prison, controlled by Israel through intensive surveillance via drones, eaves-dropping and local collaborators.
In practice, however, Israel found it much harder to police Gaza from afar. Hamas managed to create a much more sophisticated resistance movement in the small spaces left inside the prison that Israel could not surveil, such as a network of underground tunnels.
The results became fully apparent in the preparation and execution of Hamas’ attack on 7 October.
Israel’s strategic problem was compounded by the humanitarian crisis it had created by penning such a large and growing population into a tiny area with no resources.
Poverty, malnutrition, unclean water, overcrowding and lack of housing, as well as the trauma of being encaged and intermittently bombed by Israel to subdue any resistance, was slowly turning Gaza from a prison into a death camp. The UN had warned that the enclave would be effectively “uninhabitable” by 2020.
The solution to this – one that accorded with Israel’s long settler colonial ambitions to replace the Palestinians in their own homeland – was clear. Israel needed to create a consensus in the West justifying the expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza.
And the only realistic place for them to go was into the neighbouring Egyptian territory of Sinai.
‘Greater Gaza’
Behind the scenes, Israeli officials term their latest ethnic cleansing proposal a “Greater Gaza Plan”. Details first leaked in the Israeli media in 2014, although reports indicate that the origins date to 2007, when the Bush administration was apparently brought on board following Hamas’ election victory in Gaza a year earlier.
At the time, Israel’s secret plan relied on carrots more than sticks. The idea was to attach Gaza to Sinai, erasing the border between the two. Washington would help secure international funding for a free trade zone in Sinai.
With unemployment at over 60 per cent, massive overcrowding in the enclave and little clean water to drink, the expectation was that Palestinians in Gaza would gradually move the centre of their lives to Sinai, settling there or moving to distant Egyptian cities.
Following the leaks, Egyptian and Palestinian officials hurriedly denounced the plan as “fabricated”. However, there were plenty of clues that Egypt had begun facing pressure from 2007 onwards.
In response to the Israeli media leaks of 2014, an official close to former president Hosni Mubarak admitted that the screws had been turned on him in 2007 to agree to annex Gaza.
Five years later, according to the same source, Mohamed Morsi, who led a short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government, sent a delegation to Washington. There, the Americans proposed that “Egypt cede a third of the Sinai to Gaza in a two-stage process spanning four to five years”. Morsi too refused.
Suspicions that Egypt’s current president, Sisi, was close to capitulating in 2014 were fuelled at the time by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. In an interview on Egyptian TV, he said Israel’s Sinai plan had been “unfortunately accepted by some here [in Egypt]. Don’t ask me more about that. We abolished it.”
The Greater Gaza plan received another boost in 2018 when it was reportedly consideredfor inclusion in Donald Trump’s “deal of the century” Middle East “peace” plan. The hope was it would be financed by Gulf states as part of their normalisation with Israel.
That summer, Hamas even sent a delegation to Cairo to learn about the proposals.
Crushing Hamas
The gains for Israel in moving Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai, whether voluntarily under the Greater Gaza Plan or by force during a ground invasion, are obvious.
Egypt’s military dictatorship would inherit the problem of crushing Palestinian resistance groups like Hamas – largely out of view – rather than Israel. Hamas would not be likely to fare well, given the Egyptian military’s repression of the country’s own political Islamist movements.
The costs of confining and policing Gaza would shift from Israel to the Arab world and international community.
Once inside Sinai, ordinary Palestinians could be expected to seek alleviation from their poverty and suffering by integrating into wider Egyptian society, eventually moving to big cities like Cairo and Alexandria. They would be stripped of their right in international law to return to their homes.
In a generation or two, their children would identify as Egyptian, not Palestinian.
Meanwhile, the West Bank would be even more isolated and vulnerable to attacks from Jewish settlers, backed by Israeli soldiers. And Abbas would no longer be able to claim to represent the Palestinian cause, undermining his campaign to win recognition for statehood.
Very large stick
The problem is that no Egyptian leader has dared to accept such a plan, however much international arm-twisting and bribery was involved.
None wanted to be seen conspiring in Israel’s ethnic cleansing and final dispossession of the Palestinian people, one of the gravest and longest-running grievances shared by populations across the Middle East.
Which brings us to Israel’s current bombing campaign, which accords with no conceivable principle of proportionality, and its imminent ground invasion. Far from targeting Hamas, Israel has every incentive to use the Hamas attack of October 7 as a pretext to wreak as much damage on Gaza as possible.
Israel’s goal is to speed up the process of making Gaza uninhabitable.
Israel needs Palestinians in Gaza so desperate to leave that they will ethnically cleanse themselves, and Egypt under so much opprobrium for not opening the border to Sinai that it finally relents.
With its current bombing campaign, Israel has moved from carrots to a very large stick.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is aware that he has only a limited time-window to effect enough carnage to realise Israel’s plan.
Notably, back in 2018, veteran Israeli reporter Ron Ben-Yishai revealed that the Israeli military was considering a new strategy towards Gaza that involved invading it and dissecting it in two, with Israel occupying the northern half.
At the same time the US was said to be willing to deepen Gaza’s humanitarian crisis by withholding funds from UNRWA, the UN’s relief agency.
Israel is currently achieving both through its bombing rampage and its demand that northern Gaza’s population “evacuate”, supposedly for their own safety, to southern Gaza.
The aim appears to be to squeeze Palestinians into the tiny space of Gaza’s south, next to the border with Sinai, destroy all civilian infrastructure, and bomb and terrorise Palestinians in the south too.
Palestinians are already clamouring to be allowed into Sinai, while Sisi is presumably coming under the severest pressure behind the scenes to back down and open the border.
In Israel’s cold, cynical calculations, its military is rolling the toothpaste tube tightly, before opening the top to see the toothpaste pour out.
If Gaza can be emptied, Israel will hope to establish a precedent the international community will condone. West Bank Palestinians will be pressured to join family or compatriots in Sinai.
Having been embarrassed by the festering wound of the Palestinians’ dispossession for more than 75 years, the West and Arab world will be only too happy finally to bury the Palestinian cause for good.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/joe-biden-armageddon-gaza-ukraine/5837968
Joe Biden’s Armageddon, from Gaza to Ukraine
The White House newly prioritizes hegemony over humanity.
At a private Manhattan fundraiser one year ago this month, President Joe Biden shared an assessment that he had not told the public. From his vantage point, Biden told the room of Democratic Party donors, the world faces “the prospect of Armageddon” for the first time “since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
At the time, Biden was referring to the conflict in Ukraine, which had just intensified with the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines and Russia’s declared annexations of four Ukrainian regions. Despite noting the dangers of a proxy war against Russia, the world’s other top nuclear power, Biden has nonetheless pursued the higher priority of enforcing US hegemony by attempting to “weaken” it. Accordingly, Biden has continued the proxy war with a signature policy of flooding Ukraine with weapons, encouraging a failed counter-offensive, and blocking diplomatic off-ramps.
One year later, Biden is not only doubling down on his apocalyptic approach in Ukraine, but adding a second front in the Middle East. The White House has asked Congress for a new spending package that would provide over $14 billion for Israel’s assault on Gaza and more than $61 billion for Ukraine – the largest such request since Russia’s February 2022 invasion. Concurrently, the US is directly assisting Israeli atrocities and standing virtually alone to block global calls for a ceasefire – all while risking a wider regional confrontation.
In an Oval Office address last week, Biden dusted off George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” playbook to draw a direct tie between the Ukraine proxy war and Israel’s assault on Gaza. “Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: They both want to annihilate a neighboring democracy,” he said.
In another nod to neoconservative dogma, Biden appropriated Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s pitch to voters on funding the war in Ukraine. The weapons sent to Ukraine and now Israel, Biden explained, are “made in America” – including, he stressed, the election swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio. “You know, just as in World War II, today patriotic American workers are building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom.” According to Biden’s budget office, nearly half of his $106 billion request, $50 billion, will be spent on “the American defense industrial base.”
Beyond hegemony and war profiteering, Biden’s mention of states vital to his 2024 re-election chances underscores another reason for his record spending request. In bundling the two conflicts together, Biden is hoping to entice pro-Israel Republicans skeptical of more funding for the Ukraine war – thereby giving him $61 billion to prolong the fight against Russia until after the November 2024 election.
As it has done in Ukraine, the Biden administration is declining to use its significant leverage over Israel to end the carnage. If it wanted to, the White House could call on Israel to accept a ceasefire and pursue a negotiated release of Hamas’ captives, on top of the four that have already been freed. But according to the Washington Post, one US official “said it was clear that Netanyahu was not going to wait until the hostage crisis was resolved to initiate a ground offensive and that there was little Washington could do to change that calculus.”
A major factor, the Post adds, is that Biden “officials are loath to create a public spat as Republicans on Capitol Hill search for any sign of the president being insufficiently pro-Israel.” To avoid looking “insufficiently pro-Israel,” therefore, Biden must be sufficiently pro-mass murder – even at the expense of endangering the hostages that he insists are his top priority.
As for the argument that there is “little” Biden could do to impact Israel’s behavior, even top Israeli officials admit that to be false. At a recent meeting with Israeli lawmakers, Defense Minister Yaov Gallant acknowledged that his government agreed to allow some humanitarian aid into Gaza after US pressure. “The Americans insisted and we are not in a place where we can refuse them,” Gallant said. “We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?”
Luckily for Israeli leaders, they will not have to tell Biden “no” on an immediate end to the bombardment of Gaza, and a negotiated return of Hamas’ captives there. After Gaza’s health ministry reported the deadliest night of Israeli airstrikes so far – over 700 Palestinians killed – Secretary of State Antony Blinken allowed himself to declare at the United Nations that “humanitarian pauses must be considered.” In other words, the mass killing of Palestinians with US weaponry may proceed, so long as a pause to the slaughter is “considered.”
Having previously deemed ceasefire proposals “repugnant”, the Biden administration is openly embracing more Palestinian civilian deaths.
“This is war, it is combat, it is bloody, it is ugly, and it’s going to be messy,” spokesperson John Kirby said at the White House, just as Blinken appeared at the United Nations. “And innocent civilians are going to be hurt going forward.”
Kirby’s callous indifference to the deaths of more Palestinian civilians contrasts with his response to Hamas’ killings of Israeli civilians on October 7th, which led him to weep on live television.
Israel will thus have free rein to bombard Gaza with no concern for the civilian population or the Hamas captives.
“Hostages and civilian casualties will be secondary to destroying Hamas,” ABC News reports of the prevailing Israeli government view. Economy Minister Nir Barakat explained the strategy further: “We shall do all efforts to bring our hostages, to bring our hostages [back] alive,” but destroying Hamas is the “first and last priority.”
A non-existent priority is the fate of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, who are facing what Martin Griffiths, the UN’s top humanitarian official, describes as a crisis that “has reached catastrophic levels.”
When it comes to the meager amounts of aid that the US and Israel have allowed into Gaza, even that is subject to constraints. The first delivery of 20 trucks did not include any fuel, which powers hospital, water pumps, and everything else needed for survival – including the incubators for premature babies.
“Without fuel, there will be no water, no functioning hospitals and bakeries,” the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees warns. “Without fuel, aid will not reach those in desperate need.”
But Israeli needs negate such concerns. “The move to exclude fuel from the first delivery was an apparent concession to Israel, which worries that Hamas and other armed groups could divert it for military purposes,” the Washington Post notes. This follows the previous “concession” to Israel that created the need for these trucks in the first place: the Biden administration’s green light for Israel to shut off Gaza’s water and electricity supplies.
As Dr. Michael Ryan of the UN’s Health Emergencies Programme notes, the small fleet of trucks allowed so far “is a drop in the ocean of need right now in Gaza,” where over 1.4 million people – more than 60% of the population – have been displaced. Before Israel’s current assault, Gaza was already in such need that “several hundred trucks had been arriving in the enclave daily,” Reuters notes.
The Biden administration also acknowledges that its touted aid packages do not meet the bare minimum for Gazans’ survival. In an interview touting the first deliveries, the newly appointed US special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues, David Satterfield, said that the White House goal is to “build that flow up to the levels necessary to begin to meet Gaza’s needs.” Left unstated is that many Palestinians will die due to a lack of medical equipment and other vital supplies before the US-approved aid deliveries can “begin to meet” their life-saving needs.
The US is also actively involved in Israel’s military operation against Gaza. The White House has sent a Marine three-star general, Lt. Gen. James Glynn, and several other military officers to advise the Israeli military, including for its planned ground invasion. According to the New York Times,
US officials “have become increasingly concerned that a ground invasion in Gaza could lead to a huge loss of civilian lives,” but nonetheless insist that they have “not told Israel what to do and still supported the ground invasion.”
Biden’s commitment to protecting Israel’s carnage in Gaza and broader regional hegemony creates dangers far beyond the besieged territory. Since the assault began, Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged fire along the south Lebanon border. In preparation for a potential regional conflict, the US has deployed air defense missiles and two aircraft carriers to deal “with threats to American troops throughout the Middle East,” the Wall Street Journal notes. According to the Pentagon, US forces in Iraq and Syria have come under fire at least 13 times in the past week, leaving at least 24 soldiers wounded. Meanwhile, Israel continues its routine airstrikes on Syrian territory, including the country’s two major airports.
The attacks on US forces from Iranian-backed groups are understood to be a direct result of the Gaza slaughter.
“For more than six months,” the Journal reports, “Iranian-backed militia groups refrained from launching drones or rockets against American troops in Iraq and Syria, as part of what appeared to be an undeclared truce between Tehran and Washington.”
Just as the lives of Palestinian civilians and US-Israeli hostages are subordinate to the imperatives of US-Israeli hegemony, so are US forces’. In Iraq, the US has retained its military contingent despite a 2020 vote from the Iraqi parliament calling for a full withdrawal. In Syria, the US remains all while ignoring government demands for both a withdrawal and compensation for looted oil reserves.
Although the US claims that its “sole purpose” in Syria is fighting ISIS, the US military has in fact barely done any fighting against the militant group. In 2019, now-senior Biden official Dana Stroul explained that occupying the “resource-rich”, “economic powerhouse” region in Syria’s northeast — which contains the country’s “hydrocarbons” and is its “agricultural powerhouse” — gives the U.S. government “broader leverage” to influence “a political outcome in Syria” in line with US dictates. Jennifer Cafarella of the Institute for the Study of War, a neoconservative Washington think tank, has likewise explained that the US military occupation gives it “direct influence over the vast majority of Syria’s most productive oil fields,” thereby controlling “Syrian national treasures that, when added up amount to brute geopolitical power for the US.”
As of this writing, more than 5,000 Palestinian civilians have become the latest casualties of the United States and Israel’s brute geopolitical power. This includes more than 2,300 children, a calamity that UNICEF calls a “growing stain on our collective conscience.” Not that of the Biden White House, content to sacrifice countless more civilian lives from Gaza to Ukraine in its dogged embrace of Armageddon.
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