https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/31/chris-hedges-a-genocide-foretold/
A Genocide Foretold
The genocide in Gaza is the final stage of a process begun by Israel decades ago. Anyone who did not see this coming blinded themselves to the character and ultimate goals of the apartheid state.
There are no surprises in Gaza. Every horrifying act of Israel’s genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel’s settler colonial project. This dispossession has had dramatic historical moments — 1948 and 1967 — when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in increments — the slow-motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the total erasure of Palestinians.
Israel has razed 77 percent of healthcare facilities in Gaza, 68 percent of telecommunication infrastructure, nearly all municipal and governmental buildings, commercial, industrial and agricultural centers, almost half of all roads, over 60 percent of Gaza’s 439,000 homes, 68 percent of residential buildings — the bombing of the Al-Taj tower in Gaza City on Oct. 25, killed 101 people, including 44 children and 37 women, and injured hundreds — and obliterated refugee camps. The attack on the Jabalia refugee camp on Oct. 25 killed at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, and injured 280. Israel has damaged or destroyed Gaza’s universities, all of which are now closed, and 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. It has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, including 208 mosques, churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives that held 150 years of historical records and documents.
Israel’s warplanes, missiles, drones, tanks, artillery shells and naval guns daily pulverize Gaza — which is only 20 miles long and five miles wide — in a scorched earth campaign unlike anything seen since the war in Vietnam. It has dropped 25,000 tons of explosives — equivalent to two nuclear bombs — on Gaza, many targets selected by Artificial Intelligence. It drops unguided munitions (“dumb bombs”) and 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on refugee camps and densely packed urban centers as well as the so-called “safe zones” — 42 percent of Palestinians killed have been in these “safe zones” where they were instructed by Israel to flee. Over 1.7 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, forced to find refuge in overcrowded UNRWA shelters, hospital corridors and courtyards, schools, tents or the open air in south Gaza, often living next to fetid pools of raw sewage.
Israel has killed at least 32,705 Palestinians in Gaza, including 13,000 children and 9,000 women. This means Israel is slaughtering as many as 187 people a day including 75 children. It has killed 136 journalists, many, if not most of them deliberately targeted. It has killed 340 doctors, nurses and other health workers — four percent of Gaza’s healthcare personnel. These numbers do not begin to reflect the actual death toll since only those dead registered in morgues and hospitals, most of which no longer function, are counted. The death toll, when those who are missing are counted, is well over 40,000.
Doctors are forced to amputate limbs without anesthetic. Those with severe medical conditions — cancer, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease — have died from lack of treatment or will die soon. Over a hundred women give birth every day, with little to no medical care. Miscarriages are up by 300 percent. Over 90 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza suffer from severe food insecurity with people eating animal feed and grass. Children are dying of starvation. Palestinian writers, academics, scientists and their family members have been tracked and assassinated. Over 75,000 Palestinians have been wounded, many of whom will be crippled for life.
“Seventy percent of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children,” writes Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, in her report issued on March 25. “Israel failed to prove that the remaining 30 percent, i.e. adult males, were active Hamas combatants — a necessary condition for them to be lawfully targeted. By early-December, Israel’s security advisors claimed the killing of ‘7,000 terrorists’ in a stage of the campaign when less than 5,000 adult males in total had been identified among the casualties, thus implying that all adult males killed were ‘terrorists.’”
Israel plays linguistic tricks to deny anyone in Gaza the status of civilians and any building – including mosques, hospitals and schools – protected status. Palestinians are all branded as responsible for the attack on Oct. 7 or written off as human shields for Hamas. All structures are considered legitimate targets by Israel because they are allegedly Hamas command centers or said to harbor Hamas fighters.
These accusations, Albanese writes, are a “pretext” used to justify “the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.”
In scale we have not seen an assault on the Palestinians of this magnitude, but all these measures – the killing of civlians, dispossession of land, arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, closures imposed on Palestinians towns and villages, house demolitions, revoking residence permits, deportation, destruction of the infrastructure that maintains civil society, military occupation, dehumanizing language, theft of natural resources, especially aquifers — have long defined Israel’s campaign to eradicate Palestinians.
The occupation and genocide would not be possible without the U.S. which gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military assistance and is now sending another $2.5 billion in bombs, including 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, 500 MK82 500-pound bombs and fighter jets to Israel. This, too, is our genocide.
The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of a process. It is not an act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel had to end up.
Zionist leaders are open about their goals.
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, after Oct. 7, announced that Gaza would receive “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.” Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Israel Katz said: “Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened.” Avi Dichter, the Minister of Agriculture, referred to Israel’s military assault as “the Gaza Nakba,” referencing the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, which between 1947 and 1949, drove 750,000 Palestinians from their land and saw thousands massacred by Zionist militias. Likud member of the Israeli Knesset Revital Gottlieb posted on her social media account: “Bring down buildings!! Bomb without distinction!!…Flatten Gaza. Without mercy! This time, there is no room for mercy!” Not to be outdone, Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu supported using nuclear weapons on Gaza as “one of the possibilities.”
The message from the Israeli leadership is unequivocal. Annihilate the Palestinians the same way we annihilated Native Americans, the Australians annihilated the First Nations peoples, the Germans annihilated the Herero in Namibia, the Turks annihilated Armenians and the Nazis annihilated the Jews.
The specifics are different. The process is the same.
We cannot plead ignorance. We know what happened to the Palestinians. We know what is happening to the Palestinians. We know what will happen to the Palestinians.
But it is easier to pretend. Pretend Israel will allow in humanitarian aid. Pretend there will be a ceasefire. Pretend Palestinians will return to their destroyed homes in Gaza. Pretend Gaza will be rebuilt. Pretend the Palestinian Authority will administer Gaza. Pretend there will be a two-state solution. Pretend there is no genocide.
The genocide, which the U.S. is funding and sustaining with weapons shipments, says something not only about Israel, but about us, about Western civilization, about who we are as a people, where we came from and what defines us. It says that all our vaunted morality and respect for human rights is a lie. It says that people of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not count. It says their hopes, dreams, dignity and aspirations for freedom are worthless. It says we will ensure global domination through racialized violence.
This lie — that Western civilization is predicated on “values” such as respect for human rights and the rule of law — is one the Palestinians, and all those in the Global South, as well as Native Americans and Black and Brown Americans have known for centuries. But, with the Gaza genocide live streamed, this lie is impossible to sustain.
We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we are Israel, infected with white supremacy and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our industrial weapons. Remember The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman telling Charlie Rose on the eve of the war in Iraq that American soldiers should go house to house from Basra to Baghdad and say to Iraqis “suck on this?” That is the real credo of the U.S. empire.
The world outside of the industrialized fortresses in the Global North is acutely aware that the fate of the Palestinians is their fate. As climate change imperils survival, as resources become scarce, as migration becomes an imperative for millions, as agricultural yields decline, as costal areas are flooded, as droughts and wild fires proliferate, as states fail, as armed resistance movements rise to battle their oppressors along with their proxies, genocide will not be an anomaly. It will be the norm. The earth’s vulnerable and poor, those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” will be the next Palestinians.
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https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/03/31/liberal-finger-wagging-at-netanyahu-is-a-phony-cynical-charade/
Liberal Finger-Wagging At Netanyahu Is A Phony, Cynical Charade
We’re seeing more and more of the cynical, obnoxious plan of the western liberal political-media class to try and pin the blame for the entire multinational genocidal campaign in Gaza solely on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“There is growing opposition to Netanyahu’s war machine,” reads a new tweet by Senator Bernie Sanders. “More Americans than ever are standing up against this horrific war in Gaza, which is causing tremendous suffering amongst the Palestinian people.”
This is on the same day we learned that the Biden administration has quietly signed off on the delivery of billions of dollars worth of 2,000-pound bombs and warplanes for Israel to use in its ongoing massacres of civilians in Gaza. There is absolutely no excuse for continuing to babble about “Netanyahu’s war” this far into a US-backed genocide. This is Biden’s war as much as it is Netanyahu’s — and Sanders supports Biden.
Sanders has been at this schtick for a while now, working to insert the idea into public consciousness that what we are seeing from Israel today is some kind of fluke aberration in the apartheid state’s history and not the obvious fulfillment of its inbuilt nature. The other day he publicly griped that “the Israel of today is not the Israel of Golda Meir,” falsely suggesting that there was once some kind of golden age in which Israel was not an abusive ethnostate built on ethnic cleansing, oppression, racism and injustice.
In an Al Jazeera article published earlier this month titled “This is not ‘Netanyahu’s war’, it is Israel’s genocide,” Ahmad Ibsais berates Sanders and his fellow “progressive” senator Elizabeth Warren for this pernicious narrative control campaign, saying that “Blaming Israel’s blatant human rights abuses, disregard for international law, and open celebration of war crimes on Netanyahu alone is nothing but a coping mechanism for liberals like Sanders and Warren.”
Ibsais writes the following:
“By blaming Netanyahu for the suffering and oppression of the Palestinian people, past and present, they keep alive the lie that Israel was built on progressive ideals, rather than ethnic cleansing.
“By blaming Netanyahu, they whitewash their seemingly unconditional support for a state blatantly committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
“By blaming Netanyahu, and casting Israel as a progressive, well-meaning state that would respect international humanitarian law but is currently taken over by a bad leader, they are absolving themselves — and the US at large — of complicity in Israel’s many war crimes.”
But that’s exactly what the Democratic Party has been trying to do in recent weeks. A couple of weeks ago Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer drew the ire of the Israeli right wing with a speech on the Senate floor saying that Netanyahu has become a “major obstacle to peace” who has allowed “his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel,” calling for new elections to oust the prime minister.
In a recent article for Jewish Currents titled “Chuck Schumer and Democrats’ New Line on ‘Netanyahu’s War’,” Alex Kane picks apart the fallacious reasoning behind this trend:
“But despite Democrats’ repeated suggestion that Netanyahu is the impetus for Israel’s war, political analysts say that in reality the prime minister’s actions are in step with Israel’s political mainstream. ‘Schumer is operating in this fantasy that if you get rid of Netanyahu, you might be able to get somebody else who’s more moderate who could then save the relationship between the US and Israel under the pretense of support for progressive values and democracy,’ said Omar Baddar, a Palestinian American political analyst. But this narrative ignores how Israeli politicians almost across the board agree with Israel’s conduct in Gaza, as do the majority of Israelis. Yair Lapid, the former prime minister and head of the Israeli opposition, supports the ongoing assault, as does war cabinet member Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s main political rival and the man who, according to polling, would become prime minister if Israel held elections today…
“Instead of constituting a substantive shift in US support for Israel, experts say, Democrats’ emboldened critique of Netanyahu should be understood as an attempt to respond to growing voter frustration without changing policy, as the Biden administration remains unwilling to use US aid and arms exports to Israel as leverage to demand a change in behavior.”
Portuguese author and journalist Bruno Maçães recently tweeted that “One possible outcome of this is 200,000 Palestinians will be dead, Gaza will be destroyed, hundreds of thousand will be expelled and everyone will blame Netanyahu and move on.”
Would it surprise you if this happened? Would it not be entirely in keeping with what we have been seeing from the US empire in recent years? Would it be very different from what happened after the US destroyed Iraq, blamed George W Bush and Dick Cheney, and then moved on without anyone having been held responsible or any meaningful policy changes implemented?
That’s the entire goal here. The empire managers want nothing to change about Israel, nothing to change about Washington’s relationship with Israel, nothing to change about US foreign policy or the US war machine in general, and for the mainstream public to be thrown some cognitive bone to chew on while the amnesia of the daily news cycle sets in.
They want everyone to pin all the blame for the Gaza genocide on Netanyahu, but this is not all the fault of Netanyahu. It’s the fault of the entire Israeli state. It’s the fault of Joe Biden. It’s the fault of the Democrats. It’s the fault of all the Israel supporters on Capitol Hill. It’s the fault of the western press. It’s the fault of the Israel lobby. It’s the fault of the unelected empire managers in US government agencies. It’s the fault of the entire US empire and all its imperial member states like Australia, the UK, the EU, and Canada.
Gaza is proof that the US empire cannot be permitted to exist any longer, and they’re trying to get everyone to ignore this fact and blame the whole thing on one guy. Don’t let them do this. Don’t let them deceive you into losing sight of what they’ve done.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/can-bibi-netanyahu-stopped/5853475
Can Bibi Netanyahu be Stopped?
Recent developments suggest that Israel’s full-scale ground offensive in Rafah could take place at any time. What we have been told by Israeli officials, is that the operation will require the evacuation of the city, presumably so the IDF can inflict the same level of destruction on Rafah as was inflicted on Khan Yunis and Gaza City. Once the ground forces are deployed, the Palestinians will be forced to flee to the Egyptian border where they will seek refuge from the Israeli onslaught. What happens next is uncertain but –given the numerous meetings between Israeli and Egyptian officials and their respective Intel chiefs– we think there may be an agreement to allow over a million Palestinian refugees to cross the border into Egypt. Here are a few recent articles suggesting that Egypt may be getting paid to participate in Israel’s ethnic cleansing operation.
1– Egypt signs expanded $8 billion loan deal with IMF, Reuters
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on Wednesday it would increase its current loan programme with Egypt by $5 billion…. The new agreement is an expansion of the $3 billion, 46-month Extended Fund Facility that the IMF struck with Egypt in December 2022….
Egypt is also seeking a separate loan from the IMF’s Resilience and Sustainability Facility which promotes climate transition financing. Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said that loan would be $1.2 billion
2– EU announces €7.4 billion aid package for Egypt as concerns mount over migration, Le Monde
The European Union on Sunday, March 17 announced a €7.4 billion aid package for cash-strapped Egypt as concerns mount that economic pressure and conflicts in neighboring countries could drive more migrants to European shores….
The aid package includes both grants and loans over the next three years for the Arab world’s most populous country, according to the EU’s mission in Cairo….
The deal comes amid growing concerns that Israel’s looming ground offensive on Gaza’s southernmost town of Rafah could force hundreds of thousands of people to break into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The Israel-Hamas war, now in its sixth month, has pushed more than 1 million people to Rafah.
3– World Bank Aid Pushes Egypt’s Global Bailout to Over $50 Billion, Yahoo finance
The World Bank on Monday said it would provide Egypt with over $6 billion, boosting the global bailout for the North African nation’s struggling economy to more than $50 billion in the past few weeks….
The announcement comes a day after the European Union pledged around $8 billion in aid, loans and grants. Those funds followed a newly-expanded $8 billion International Monetary Fund program that was unveiled hours after authorities enacted the nation’s biggest rate hike ever and devalued the currency for the fourth time since early 2022.
Obviously, heaping billions of dollars of loans on a debt-ridden nation whose moribund economy shows no sign of a rebound, is not normal procedure. One can only conclude that the money is being offered for some alternate purpose, that is, to deal with the surge of refugees that will soon be pouring over the border. But, if these articles have not yet convinced readers that the Egyptian government is in cahoots with Israel, then perhaps this March 23 column will:
EU sidelines parliament to rapidly send €1bn to Egypt, euobserver
The European Commission is officially sidelining the European Parliament’s scrutiny role when it comes to €1bn of loans being sent to Egypt. The announcement came ahead of a €7.4bn cash-for-migration-control agreement with Cairo, posing tricky questions for an increasingly frustrated European Parliament.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen says, in a letter dated 15 March and seen by EUobserver, that the urgency of wiring the money to Cairo requires her to bypass the assembly. She has since decided to trigger article 213 in the EU treaty, allowing the European Commission to go at it alone.
“For reasons of utmost urgency and highly exceptionally, the recourse to of Article 213 TFEU is considered as appropriate legal basis for the first operation of EUR 1 billion,” she writes, in a letter sent to European Parliament president, Roberta Metsola..
Why would the president of the European Commission feel such an unbearable sense of urgency over the dodgy finances of a failed state in east Africa? And why did Ms. von der Leyen chose to ignore the limits of her legal authority by wiring the funds to Cairo without first acquiring the approval of the assembly?
If all of this seems rather unusual, it’s because it is. Political powerbrokers across the West are doing whatever they can to assist Israel in its plan to ethnically cleanse Palestine. Ms. von der Leyen is just one of the contributors to this malign project but there are others as well. The point we are trying to make is that Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the herding of its population towards the southern border is part of a broader plan that has many moving parts and many powerful players. Israeli leaders know what it takes to carry off an operation like this because they have conducted similar operations in the past as this excerpt from an article at Counterpunch helps to illustrate:
Ethnic cleansing was and remains integral to the Zionist project…
In order to create a Jewish state in Palestine the Zionists had to create an overwhelming Jewish majority…. Nazi Germany helped by driving out Jews from Europe… but there still existed no realistic prospect anytime soon of creating an overwhelming Jewish majority by attracting Jewish settlers….
Israel’s first round of ethnic cleansing began in 1947, intensified in 1948, and continued into 1949. Altogether, 720,000 Palestinians, some eighty percent of the Palestinians in the territories occupied by Jewish/Israeli forces, were expelled during this period; this amounted to half the Arab population of mandatory Palestine.
Israel engaged in a second round of ethnic cleansing during and after the capture in June 1967 of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem… Palestinians who were present in the Occupied Territories but were not counted in an Israeli census after the June War were denied the right of residence in Israel…. by these and other means, Israel had ethnically cleansed one-fifth of the Palestinians in the occupied territories.
In the decades following the June 1967 War, Israel made life increasingly difficult for the Palestinians in the occupied territories…. Between 1970 and 2000 the population of the West Bank and Gaza tripled, increasing from one million to three million. Inside its de factor borders, Israel now contained 4.1 million Palestinians and 5 million Jews. This was ringing alarm bells. Something had to be done about this…. Postscripts on Israel: October 7 Surprise?, M. Shahid Alam, Counterpunch
What we can infer from this excerpt is that the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza is not aimed at quashing terrorism but at changing the demographic make-up of the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The fact is that one cannot preserve a Jewish-majority state without a clear Jewish majority. By annexing the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank, Israel will dramatically increase the number of Arabs within its borders putting that core principle at risk. Here’s more from the same article:
Israel’s Jewish population grew tenfold between 1948 and 2023, increasing from 717,000 to 7,181,000. Nearly half the world’s Jewish population now lives in Israel.
Yet Israel
has not been winning the demographic race. In 2023, the Palestinians
outnumbered the Jews in historic Palestine—7.4 million Palestinians
versus 7.1 million Jews….
Postscripts on Israel: October 7 Surprise?, M. Shahid Alam, Counterpunch
Israel’s military operation in Gaza is merely a response to a demographic problem that has bedeviled Israeli leaders since the inception of the Jewish state. In light of that fact, we can see that Hamas is just the pretext that’s being used to conceal the motive driving the hostilities. In truth, it wouldn’t matter if the Palestinians were Hispanic, Asian or Scots-Irish. If their numbers threatened to exceed those of the Jewish majority, their fate would be the same.
Naturally, the de facto annexation of additional Arab territory poses a numerical challenge for which there is ultimately only one solution; ethnic cleansing. And while the formulation has been repeatedly repackaged to sound less oppressive, (transfer, evacuation, resettlement, voluntary migration) the practice remains the same. (Ethnic Cleansing def– The mass expulsion or killing of members of one ethnic or religious group in an area by those of another. Oxford) Here are a few recent iterations on the same theme:
In a document from October 17, 2023, Israels’ Intelligence Ministry, examined the option of ‘evacuating’ the Gazans to the Sinai, and claimed that this would “yield positive, long-term strategic outcomes for Israel.”….
An Israeli think tank, the Misgav Institute, also made a similar pitch. It argued that the conditions in Gaza offered “a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip and its coordination with the Egyptian government.”….
Jonathan Adler, a Hurford Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing on December 31, 2023, asserts that “today there is a growing momentum [in Israel] to carry out mass transfer—with American support.” Some Israeli politicians and officials—including a former Brigadier General and a former Israeli ambassador to the United States—“suggest that Palestinians should flee Gaza through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt and seek refuge in the Sinai Peninsula…
On October 20, the White House asked Congress for funds to “address potential needs of Gazans fleeing to neighboring countries.” If the White House was preparing to finance the ethnic cleansing of Gazans, it is unlikely that this happened without prior discussions with Israel and Egypt. Did these discussions happen before October 7?… Counterpunch
Clearly, what Israel wants a Palestine without the Palestinians, and in the last six months they have done everything in their power to achieve just that. Now that the goal is within their grasp, they will do anything –even jeopardize relations with their most important ally– to reach their objective. That is why on Wednesday “Netanyahu said that Israel “had no choice” but to move into Rafah as the country’s “very existence is on the line.” In truth, Israel is in no danger at all, Netanyahu is merely trying to conceal the real aim of Israel’s ground offensive which is to exile over a million Palestinians into Egypt. According to a report in CNN:
Netanyahu had earlier told the delegation that displaced Palestinians in Gaza could “just move” out of Rafah and “move with their tents.”
“Move with their tents”?
So, now, Netanyahu is admitting what his critics have been saying from the very beginning, that Israel’s military onslaught is actually an ethnic cleansing operation aimed at pushing the Palestinians out of Gaza and into tent cities in the Sinai Desert?
It appears so, and it also looks like Egypt is going along with the plan. According to the Guardian:
Egypt has begun building an enclosed area ringed with high concrete walls along its border with Gaza that appears intended to house Palestinians fleeing a threatened Israeli assault on the southern city of Rafah.
Photos and videos released by the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights (SFHR), a monitoring group, show workers using heavy machinery erecting concrete barriers and security towers around a strip of land on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing….
SFHR said on social media that the videos showed efforts to “establish an isolated area surrounded by walls on the border with the Gaza Strip, with the aim of receiving refugees in the event of a mass exodus”. Egypt building walled enclosure in Sinai for Rafah refugees, photos suggest,Guardian
Everything from the clearing of land in the Sinai desert to the issuance of humongous loans to Egypt, to the secret meetings of Intel chiefs in Doha (CIA, Mossad, Egypt’s General Intelligence) to the blustery pronouncements of Israeli officials, to the frenetic leapfrogging of Anthony Blinken from Jedda to Jerusalem to Doha to Cairo and back again, suggests that we are about to begin the final phase of Israel’s malignant ethnic cleansing operation. Here’s how Johnathan Adler at the Carnegie Endowment summed it up:
….. it is becoming increasingly clear that the war is in pursuit of a second goal: the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. Israeli politicians and officials from the Israeli defense establishment have called for a second Nakba and urged the military to flatten Gaza. Some suggest that Palestinians should flee Gaza through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt and seek refuge in the Sinai Peninsula, including former Brigadier General Amir Avivi and the former Israeli ambassador to the United States Danny Ayalon.
Avivi and Ayalon insist that evacuating Palestinians out of Gaza is simply a humanitarian measure, protecting civilians while Israel conducts its military operations. But other reports suggest that Palestinians would be permanently resettled outside of Gaza, in an act of ethnic cleansing….
Today’s plans for mass transfer thus bear a closer historical resemblance to the 1948 Nakba and its aftermath. After 200,000 Palestinian refugees had fled from historic Palestine to Gaza by March 1949, the United States pushed for a UN proposal to resettle tens of thousands in the Sinai desert….
Over the past few weeks, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has resisted Israeli and American pressure to allow Palestinians to evacuate through Rafah into the Sinai… But in exchange for accepting Palestinians from Gaza, the US has reportedly offered Cairo economic incentives at a time when Egypt faces an extreme debt crisis…. South into the Sinai: Will Israel Force Palestinians Out of Gaza?, Carnegie Endowment
In all probability, there’s nothing that can be done to prevent Israel’s flattening of Rafah or the inevitable eviction of the Palestinians from their last refuge. The only hope is that the international community will condemn Israel’s illegal occupation of Gaza by imposing painful economic, political and military sanctions that will last until the land is returned to its rightful owners. That is not sufficient restitution for the death and suffering the Palestinians have endured over the last half century, but it’s a step in the right direction.
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