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.
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.
Out 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.