SC289-1

https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2023-11-01/israel-cleanse-gaza/

Mounting evidence suggests Israel may be ready to ‘cleanse’ Gaza

All the signs are in place that Israel is once again seriously considering a massive ethnic cleansing operation, conducted at lightning speed and with US assistance

As Israeli forces began making limited ground incursions into northern Gaza over the weekend, reports proliferated that Israel was readying plans to expel much or all of the enclave’s population into the neighbouring Egyptian territory of Sinai.

In part, those fears were fuelled by a report last week, published in the Israeli outlet Calcalist, of a leaked policy draft from the intelligence ministry outlining just such an ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza.

Further concerns were raised by a report in the Financial Times on Monday that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had lobbied the European Union on the idea of driving the strip’s Palestinians into Sinai under cover of war. 

Some EU members, including the Czech Republic and Austria, were said to have been receptive and floated the idea at a meeting of member states last week. An unnamed European diplomat told the FT: “Now is the time to put increased pressure on the Egyptians to agree.”

According to the leaked Israeli intelligence ministry document, after their expulsion, Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians would initially be housed in tent cities, before permanent communities could be built in the peninsula’s north.

A military “sterile zone”, several kilometres wide, would prevent any return to Gaza. Longer term, Israel would encourage other states – especially Canada, European countries such as Greece and Spain, and North African countries – to absorb the Palestinian population in Sinai. 

The ministry reportedly believes the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza into Sinai would be “liable to provide positive and long-lasting strategic results”. 

For Palestinians, on the other hand, it has traumatic echoes of Israel’s mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland at Israel’s creation in 1948 – what Palestinians call their Nakba, or Catastrophe.

Ethnic cleansing plan

The leaked document was quickly dismissed as speculative. But, in fact, Israel has had just such an ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza on the drawing board, approved by the United States, since at least 2007. That was shortly after Hamas won Palestinian elections and took control of the enclave.

After a series of failed, secret diplomatic efforts over the past 16 years to arm-twist Egypt into accepting this so-called “peace plan” – known officially as the Greater Gaza Plan – Israel may be tempted to exploit the current moment to implement a much crueller version of it by force.

That would certainly explain Israel’s current devastating bombing campaign in Gaza – which officials are positively comparing to the horrifying firebombing of civilians in the German city of Dresden in the Second World War – as well as Israel’s order to one million Palestinians to ethnically cleanse themselves from northern Gaza.

On Sunday, Israel bombed buildings all around al-Quds hospital in northern Gaza, filling wards with clouds of toxic dust. Administrators received repeated warnings that the hospital had to be evacuated immediately. Staff said that was impossible because too many patients were far too sick to be moved.

The concentration of Palestinians into southern Gaza – where they are also being bombed and deprived of power, food, water and communications, with hospitals and aid compounds unable to function – has created an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe. 

The pressure is building day by day on Egypt’s military ruler Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to open the Rafah crossing on humanitarian grounds and let Palestinians flood into Sinai.

Hamas’ attack on Israeli communities next to Gaza on 7 October may have provided precisely the pretext Israel needs to dust off its ethnic cleansing plan.

With Washington and Europe on board, and the western media still focused primarily on Israel’s trauma rather than Gaza’s, Netanyahu cannot wait too long before his window for action closes.

Pressure on Egypt

The Greater Gaza Plan first came to light in 2014, after leaks to Israeli and Egyptian media – apparently part of a pressure campaign on Sisi, then recently installed with US backing. The Egyptian military had overthrown an elected Muslim Brotherhood government the previous year.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas confirmed the plan’s existence at that time by insisting he had quashed it. He told an interviewer that it had been “unfortunately accepted by some here [in Egypt]. Don’t ask me more about that. We abolished it, because it can’t be.”

Middle East Eye was one of the very few western media outlets to report on these developments at the time.

As concern grew among Egyptians and Palestinians, a former aide to Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt until 2011, came forward to state that the administration of George W Bush had pressured Mubarak to accept the plan as far back as 2007.

The next president, Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, was also reportedly leaned on in a similar manner in 2012. 

The source quoted Mubarak as saying in response to the plan: “We are fighting both the US and Israel. There is pressure on us to open the Rafah crossing for the Palestinians and grant them freedom of residence, particularly in Sinai. In a year or two, the issue of Palestinian refugee camps in Sinai will be internationalised.”

At that time, pushing Palestinians into Sinai was dressed up as a “peace plan”. Now, should Israel succeed, it will be the endgame in a violent ethnic cleansing operation.

As MEE noted back in 2014, the Greater Gaza Plan envisioned transferring 1,600 sq km of Sinai – five times the size of Gaza – to the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank, headed by Abbas. 

“The territory in Sinai would become a demilitarised Palestinian state – dubbed ‘Greater Gaza’ – to which returning Palestinian refugees would be assigned… In return, Abbas would have to give up the right to a state in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

The hope was that Abbas would agree to rule a mini Palestinian state in Sinai, where most Palestinian refugees in the region could be settled, stripping them of their right of return under international law. 

Most Palestinians in Gaza are refugees, or descended from refugees, from Israel’s ethnic cleansing operations of 1948.

Israeli right’s dream

The idea of creating a Palestinian state outside historic Palestine – in either Jordan or Sinai – has a long pedigree in Zionist thinking. “Jordan is Palestine” has been a rallying cry on the Israeli right for decades. There have been parallel suggestions for Sinai.

The scheme became the centrepiece of the 2004 Herzliya conference, an annual meeting of Israel’s political, academic and security elites to exchange and develop policy ideas. It was enthusiastically adopted by Uzi Arad, the conference’s founder and long-time adviser to Netanyahu. 

A variation of the “Sinai is Palestine” option was revived by the right during Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s 50-day attack on Gaza in the summer of 2014.

Moshe Feiglin, the speaker of the Israeli Knesset and then a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, called for Gaza’s inhabitants to be expelled from their homes under cover of the operation and moved into Sinai, in what he termed a “solution for Gaza”.

The Greater Gaza Plan received a further shot in the arm in 2018 from the Trump administration, when reports suggested it was considered for inclusion in the US president’s “deal of the century” plan to bring about normalisation between Israel and the Arab world.

Israel’s rationale for the Sinai option between 2007 and 2018 was that it undermined Abbas’ campaign at the United Nations to seek recognition of Palestinian statehood.

Notably, Israel’s large-scale military attacks on Gaza – in the winter of 2008, 2012 and again in 2014 – coincided with reported Israeli and US efforts to turn the screws on successive Egyptian leaders to concede parts of Sinai. 

Destruction of Gaza, intensifying the humanitarian catastrophe there, seems to have been part of that pressure campaign. 

‘No human can exist’

All of that is the context for interpreting Israel’s unprecedented current rampage through Gaza, as well as the similarly unprecedented fallout from political and military crises in Israel caused by Hamas’ 7 October attack.

The Greater Gaza Plan was originally intended to provide the Palestinian leadership with a sweetener, offering some kind of state – though not in historic Palestine. Sinai would host new Palestinian cities, a free-trade zone, a power plant, and a seaport and airport.

The main sticking point for Egypt – apart from being seen to collude with Israel in erasing the Palestinian national cause – was concern that Hamas would gain a base inside Egypt, and strengthen Egypt’s home-grown Islamist movements.

There are plenty of indications that Israel’s determination to drive Palestinians into Egypt has intensified since the 7 October attack, and that the Hamas breakout has provided an opportunity to achieve by force what could not be achieved through diplomacy.

Israeli leaders now sound in no mood to take account of Egyptian concerns.

A week into its military operations, a spokesman for the Israeli military, Amir Avivi, told the BBC that Israel could not ensure the safety of civilians in Gaza. He added: “They need to move south, out to the Sinai Peninsula.”

The next day, a former Israeli ambassador to the US, Danny Ayalon, a Netanyahu confidant, amplified the point: “There is almost endless space in the Sinai Desert… This is not the first time it has been done… We and the international community will prepare the infrastructure for tent cities.” 

He concluded: “Egypt will have to play ball.”

These officials have presented this as a temporary move during Israel’s bombing campaign and ground invasion. But all the signs are that Israel has far larger ambitions. 

Benny Gantz, a former general who now sits in a unity government with Netanyahu, has said Israel has a plan to “change the security and strategic reality in the region”.

Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser, has said the goal is to “create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable”. As a result, “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”

Spiralling out of control

Sisi is more than aware of the pressure Israel is bringing to bear on Egypt. At a press conference on 18 October, he warned that Israel’s bombing of Gaza was creating a humanitarian crisis that “could spiral out of control”.

He added: “What is happening now in Gaza is an attempt to force civilian residents to take refuge and migrate to Egypt, which should not be accepted.”

The scenario Sisi fears is a repeat of events in 2008 when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians broke through the barrier between Gaza and Sinai to get food and fuel because of Israel’s siege of the enclave. To prevent a recurrence, Egypt has repeatedly bolstered security measures along its short border with Gaza.

Nonetheless, Cairo reportedly has made preparations for just such a development. Its plans include the rapid setting up of tent cities next to the Sinai towns of Sheikh Zuwayed and Rafah.

Sisi said that, if Palestinians were driven into Sinai, Egyptians would “go out and protest in their millions”. 

Cairo’s concerns about Israeli intentions are shared by United Nations’ official Francesca Albanese, a special rapporteur on the occupied territories. 

Referring to Israel’s two main historic ethnic cleansing operations, she observed: “There is a grave danger that what we are witnessing may be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale. The international community must do everything to stop this from happening again.”

The US, which has long backed the Greater Gaza Plan, has its own forms of leverage – including financial pressure – to encourage Sisi to comply. 

Egypt is mired in an unprecedented debt crisis of more than $160bn, plus spiralling inflation, as Sisi heads into a presidential election.

Egyptian officials reportedly believe Washington will try to use a debt write-off as an incentive to accept refugees from a renewed Israeli ethnic cleansing operation.

Only three days after the Hamas attack, Biden administration officials publicly declared that they had made arrangements with unnamed third countries to offer safe passage out of Gaza for Palestinian civilians.

All the signs are in place that Israel is once again seriously considering a massive ethnic cleansing operation, conducted at lightning speed and with US assistance, to override international objections. 

The question is, is anyone ready, or able, to stop them?

....

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/authoritarians_drunk_on_power_its_time_to_recalibrate_the_government

Authoritarians Drunk on Power: It’s Time to Recalibrate the Government

“There is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame?”— V for Vendetta

We have arrived at the dystopian future depicted in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, which is no future at all.

Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta (written and produced by the Wachowskis) provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a government-engineered virus wreaks havoc on the world. Capitalizing on the people’s fear, a totalitarian government comes to power that knows all, sees all, controls everything and promises safety and security above all.

Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) have been established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.

With Vendetta, whose imagery borrows heavily from Nazi Germany’s Third Reich and George Orwell’s 1984, we come full circle. The corporate state in V conducts mass surveillance on its citizens, helped along by closed-circuit televisions. Also, London is under yellow-coded curfew alerts, similar to the American government’s color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System.

Sounds painfully familiar, doesn’t it?

As director James McTeighe observed about the tyrannical regime in V for Vendetta, “It really showed what can happen when society is ruled by government, rather than the government being run as a voice of the people. I don’t think it’s such a big leap to say things like that can happen when leaders stop listening to the people.”

Clearly, those we appointed to represent our interests have stopped following the Constitution and listening to the American people.

What will it take for the government to start listening to the people again?

In V for Vendetta, as in my novel The Erik Blair Diaries, the subtext is that authoritarian regimes—through a vicious cycle of manipulation, oppression and fear-mongering—foment violence, manufacture crises, and breed terrorists, thereby giving rise to a recurring cycle of blowback and violence.

Only when the government itself becomes synonymous with the terrorism wreaking havoc in their lives do the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny.

V, a bold, charismatic freedom fighter, urges the British people to rise up and resist the government. In Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, while in Erik Blair, freedom fighters plot to unmask the Deep State.

Acts of desperation and outright anarchy are what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent: people get desperate, citizens lose hope, and lawful, nonviolent resistance gives way to unlawful, violent resistance.

This way lies madness.

Then again, madness may be unavoidable unless we can wrest back control over our runaway government starting at the local level.

It is time to recalibrate the government.

For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

By “government,” I’m not referring to the farce that is the highly partisan, two-party, bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided the government with the perfect excuse to lay claim to a long laundry list of terrifying lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level) that override the Constitution: the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die, and impose health mandates on large segments of the population.

Crises tend to bring out the authoritarian tendencies in government.

That’s no surprise: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

This is exactly the kind of concentrated, absolute power the founders attempted to guard against by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary.

“The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance,” concludes law professor William P. Marshall. “The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”

Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom.

There’s no point debating which political party would be more dangerous with these powers.

The fact that any individual—or branch of government—of any political persuasion is empowered to act like a dictator is danger enough.

So, what we can do to wrest back control over a runaway government and an imperial presidency?

It won’t be easy.

We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority.

This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.

We are viewed as relatively expendable in the eyes of government: faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars. Those in power aren’t losing any sleep over the indignities we are being made to suffer or the possible risks to our health. All they seem to care about are power and control.

We are being made to suffer countless abuses at the government’s hands.

We have little protection against standing armies (domestic and military), invasive surveillance, marauding SWAT teams, an overwhelming government arsenal of assault vehicles and firepower, and a barrage of laws that criminalize everything from vegetable gardens to lemonade stands.

In the name of national security, we’re being subjected to government agencies such as the NSA, FBI and others listening in on our phone calls, reading our mail, monitoring our emails, and carrying out warrantless “black bag” searches of our homes. Adding to the abuse, we have to deal with surveillance cameras mounted on street corners and in traffic lights, weather satellites co-opted for use as spy cameras from space, and thermal sensory imaging devices that can detect heat and movement through the walls of our homes.

That doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways in which our Fourth Amendment rights are trampled upon by militarized police and SWAT teams empowered to act as laws unto themselves.

In other words, freedom—or what’s left of it—is threatened from every direction.

The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers are shooting unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—are being armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies are fleecing taxpayers. Government technicians are spying on our emails and phone calls. Government contractors are making a killing by waging endless wars abroad.

In other words, the American police state is alive and well and flourishing.

Nothing has changed, and nothing will change unless we insist on it.

How to do this? It’s not rocket science.

There is no 10-step plan. If there were a 10-step plan, however, the first step would be as follows: turn off the televisions, tune out the politicians, and do your part to stand up for freedom principles in your own communities.

Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree. Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc. Vote like Americans, for a change, not Republicans or Democrats.

Most of all, use your power—and there is power in our numbers—to nullify anything and everything the government does that undermines the freedom principles on which this nation was founded.

Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it. If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it. Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it.

That’s their job: make them do it.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, all freedoms hang together. They fall together, as well.

The police state does not discriminate. Eventually, we will all suffer the same fate.