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In both the old and new Nakba, the forced expulsion of Palestinians must be rejected

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | November 21, 2023

It is simply inaccurate to claim that the ongoing Israeli attempt to displace all, or as many as possible, Palestinian refugees from Gaza to Sinai is a new idea, compelled solely by recent events. Displacing Palestinians — or their “transfer”, as it is known in Israeli political circles — is an old idea, as old as Israel itself.

In fact, historically, population “transfer” has been more than an idea; it’s government policy, with clear mechanisms for carrying it out. Yosef Weitz, director of the Land and Afforestation Department, was entrusted with setting up the Transfer Committee in May 1948 to oversee the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their towns and villages. In other words, while Israel was concluding the initial phase of its ethnic cleansing of Palestine, it initiated another phase, that of “transfer”, the results of which are well-known.

Many of Israel’s so-called liberal intellectuals have promoted the concept, either proactively or in hindsight, and continue to do so. “I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes,” Israeli historian Benny Morris told Haaretz in 2004. “I think he [Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion] made a serious historical mistake in 1948… If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job… You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands.”

Morris was referring specifically to the Nakba, which began in earnest in December 1947, and did not conclude until 1949. After that, ethnic cleansing took on a different form; a slower campaign aimed at rejigging the demographic map of the newly-founded state in favour of Israeli Jews at the expense of Palestinian Arabs.

Several campaigns targeting Palestinian Arab communities, those which remained in Israel after the Nakba, were initiated under various guises. Although not a single community had survived the demographic onslaught by the Israeli government intact, Palestinian Bedouins faced the lion’s share of displacement. It’s a campaign that continues to this day.

After the war of June 1967, mass expulsion was again the order of the day. Approximately 430,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced, especially from areas originally occupied in 1948. Over the years, up to the present, hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jewish settlers have taken the place of the displaced Palestinians, claiming their land, homes and orchards as their own.

In fact, the slow ethnic cleansing of the West Bank is considered to be the epicentre of Israel’s ongoing colonialism in Occupied Palestine. From an international law perspective, it is one of its greatest war crimes, as it represents a stark violation of international norms, especially the Fourth Geneva Convention: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies,” states Article 49 of the convention. It also prohibits the “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory.”

To claim that the recent call for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza is a new phenomenon compelled by the violence on 7 October, and the subsequent genocide in Gaza, is therefore both inaccurate and dishonest. Such a claim ignores the fact that Israel, as a settler-colonial project, was founded on the concept of ethnic cleansing, and that Israeli politicians have never stopped talking about the mass displacement — “transfer” — of Palestinians, even under supposedly “normal” circumstances.

For example, the then Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman tried in 2014 to rebrand the old “transfer” strategy, using not-so-clever new language. “When I talk about land and population exchange, I mean the Little Triangle and Wadi Ara,” explained Lieberman, referring to the predominantly Arab regions in central and northern Israel. He insisted that, “This is not a transfer.”

This context is critical if we wish to truly understand the story behind the enthusiastic return to the language of ethnic cleansing by Israel and its allies.

Furthermore, on 11 November, Israel’s Minister for Agriculture and former head of the Shin Bet domestic spy agency, Avi Dichter, called specifically for another Nakba. “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” he said during a TV interview.

The following information can be deduced from Dichter’s statement: Israelis are very familiar with the term “Nakba”, and they know exactly what happened to the people of Palestine 75 years ago — ethnic cleansing and genocide — and remain unrepentant.

Dichter’s words were not said in anger, or in the heat of the moment. A leaked government report dated 13 October, six days into the war, suggested the mass transfer of the Palestinians in Gaza to the Sinai desert. Four days later, the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy think tank published a paper calling on the Israeli government to take advantage of this “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate [sic] the whole Gaza Strip.”

It makes little sense to assume that such extensive reports were conjured up within a matter of days. It takes years of planning and discussions for such complex schemes to be prepared and made worthy of official consideration.

This is not the only evidence that the forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza was not an urgent strategy propelled by recent events; Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, who were not involved in the 7 October operation, have also found themselves under the threat of expulsion. This prompted Jordanian Prime Minister Bisher Khasawneh to state on 7 November that Amman considers any attempt to displace Palestinians to be a “red line”; in fact, a “declaration of war”.

Although Arab and international pressure has, thus far, failed to slow down the Israeli killing machine in Gaza, Arab countries have spoken out firmly against any Israeli attempt to displace Palestinians.

For now, the majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants, most of whom are refugees from historic Palestine, are internally displaced within that tiny piece of land, denied water, food and electricity; in fact, denied life itself. Nevertheless, they remain steadfast and will not allow another Nakba to take place, no matter what the cost.

The “Gaza Nakba” must be rejected, not only by words, but also through solid Arab and international action to prevent Israel from taking advantage of the war to expel Palestinians from their homeland again. Such action must also include steps to hold Israel to account for its war crimes past, present and ongoing, starting with the original 1948 Nakba.

November 21, 2023 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

Never Again… Except When WE Do It

When atrocities are normalized, only normal people will commit atrocities (part I of a series)

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time – Maya Angelou

BY HELEN OF DESTROY | NOVEMBER 21, 2023

No one could ever accuse the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu of being underachievers. They have managed to kill nearly 12,000 Palestinians in Gaza in just over a month, almost all civilians, without facing a single meaningful consequence. In addition to more than 4,000 children, the casualties include dozens of medics, journalists, aid workers, and other individuals theoretically extended additional protection under international law. Hundreds of hospitals and clinics, schools, and other civilian sites have been targeted – hell, they’re even blowing up ambulances carrying people they’ve already blown up to hospitals they’re about to blow up. It’s the first genocide to be carried out in the open, full view of the world, Israel’s efforts to sever internet and telephone connections with Gaza notwithstanding.

But Israel hasn’t just deleted one in every 200 Gazans off the face of the earth — they’ve done so claiming to be acting in self-defense, an outrageous claim still echoed by 98% of the western media despite video after video showing the aftermath of IDF airstrikes on densely-populated refugee camps and hospitals overflowing with displaced families. It doesn’t take skill, ingenuity or talent to massacre a population who literally can’t escape the killing fields, but Israel continues to dupe much of the western public into believing the grinning executioners standing over the expiring corpse of Gaza holding bloody axes and waxing poetic about their deeds are in fact the victims.

Only after a month of this carnage are Americans and their western peers even starting to wake up to the fact that our “greatest ally” in the Middle East is the geopolitical equivalent of Jeffrey Dahmer gnawing on a fresh femur on live television. Even then, as major media organizations reluctantly begin to acknowledge the atrocities unfolding before their eyes, the cracks in their code of silence are only developing because Israel got greedy and started threatening those organizations’ own journalists with execution for being insufficiently harsh in their condemnation of its victims.

It’s not like the media didn’t prostrate itself before Tel Aviv’s demands as usual when the war began. MSNBC mysteriously took its three Muslim anchors off the air following the Hamas incursion. Major news outlets reprinted the most ludicrous unsourced atrocity propaganda as fact, from the “40 beheaded babies” fairytale (so bogus even the IDF would not stand by it) to Hamas “rape manuals” and dog-eared copies of “Mein Kampf” found in “terrorist” hideouts, all while glossing over the suffering being inflicted by the Most Moral Army in the World™. But it wasn’t enough to simply keep a straight face and refrain from challenging howlers like the IDF’s claim that the days of the week were actually the names of terrorists. As casualty counts mounted and news outlets printed the expected complaints by the UN, human rights groups, and anyone with a pulse that the IDF might be killing too many civilians, hasbara operations like the hilariously-named Honest Reporting began accusing the freelance photojournalists who’d been providing art for pieces on Hamas and Palestine of having known about the militants’ plans ahead of time, even while admitting they had no proof. War cabinet minister Benny Gantz seized on the imaginary threat, warning that any journalist who had advance knowledge of Hamas’ attack would be treated as a terrorist – i.e., killed – while former Israeli UN ambassador Danny Danon promised to add offending freelancers to the “eliminate” list Tel Aviv had been keeping since the raid – no empty threat given Israel’s aversion to due process. Republican US Senator Tom Cotton even called on the Justice Department to investigate the news outlets who had dared hire these swarthy strangers to document The Enemy. Never mind that the Israeli government itself almost certainly knew about the attack beforehand (as did the US), or that Israeli troops readily admitted they gunned down their countrymen and torched their houses and cars so badly they couldn’t tell the difference between Israeli and Palestinian dead before circulating photos of the resulting carnage as Hamas’ doing. Reporters are the real threat. What are you, some kind of a Holocaust 2.0-denier?

These news outlets had remained silent while Israeli bombs killed at least 42 journalists and destroyed over 50 media institutions in the wake of Tel Aviv’s declaration of war, looked the other way while Israeli authorities raided, arrested, assaulted, and threatened dozens more journalists, and sat on their hands when Israel passed a law prohibiting the publication of information favorable to the enemy. Even then, CNN bit its tongue, severing ties with the freelancer who’d been accused of palling around with terrorists despite admitting they had no issues with his reporting. But accusing the New York Times of terrorism after years of tying itself in logical pretzels to absolve Netanyahu’s government of an encyclopedia of war crimes was apparently a bridge too far. The Times posted a statement not only defending the freelance photojournalist who’d been smeared but warning that the hasbara brigade’s malignant fantasies threatened press freedom.

Israel had violated the unspoken agreement it has long held with the western media establishment, in which big international outlets cover for Israeli atrocities and are in return spared the indignities visited upon their less-cooperative Arabic colleagues. For decades, American and European journalists have cringed away from this third-rail topic under subtle but unrelenting pressure from the Israeli lobby (first detailed at length in Mearsheimer and Walt’s seminal 2007 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy), fearful of the political and personal repercussions of speaking up for Palestine in countries politically controlled by various shades of Zionism. But while media outlets might have interpreted this as an ideological ceasefire, Israel was taking advantage of the near-total absence of public scrutiny to expand its behind-the-scenes influence, a project that has advanced alarmingly even since its exposure in the 2018 al-Jazeera documentary The Lobby with the help of privatization. Infiltrating the medical freedom movement and the uprising against “cancel culture” – never mind Israel’s hatred for the former and reliance on the latter – has allowed them to neuter even much of the alternative media, meaning the genocide unfolding over the last month has been met with an eerie silence from corners one might expect to resound with outrage.

Taking Pride in Genocide

In theory, at least, Israel has made journalists’ job covering its latest war extremely easy. Netanyahu’s government is anything but shy about what it’s doing in Gaza. One “leak” after another trumpets their plans to systematically eradicate the Palestinian inhabitants of the territory — a “Gaza Nakba” in the words of agriculture minister Avi Dichter — and ship them off to tent cities in the Egyptian desert in order to snatch up that sweet beachfront real estate to carve out a profitable competitor to the Suez Canal, do a little offshore drilling, maybe build some casinos, or just plop some more aesthetically- (and morally-) revolting settlements on the land, depending on who you ask. Add in the possibility of completing the ongoing falsification of their ancestral claim to the Holy Land and seal the whole package with the blood sacrifice of a few thousand children and one can see why they might be a bit excited about it all. Indeed, Israel doesn’t just have one convenient mandate from heaven that can be stretched to justify wiping out anyone they designate as an enemy (Amalek) — they seem to print more every day. The Dahiya doctrine “justifies” flattening entire neighborhoods on suspicion a rocket has been fired from the vicinity; the Hannibal directive “allows” the killing of Israeli soldiers taken captive so they cannot be used as bargaining chips by the enemy. Zionist Jewish media outlets bristle with op-eds like this one, which rejoices in the “Dresdening of Gaza” because the writer was apparently bullied for his religion as a child. The Samson option even lays out a rationale for preemptive nuclear war.

But rather than listen to Israeli leaders when they announce what they are, the western media establishment masochistically picks through the tortured narratives tossed their way by Netanyahu’s cabinet. While Israeli media dredged up the Hannibal directive to explain the shocking IDF slaughter of Israeli civilians at the Nova rave and surrounding kibbutzes on October 7, deaths initially pinned on Hamas and only officially acknowledged as friendly fire last week, US media has continued to deny it happened at all, clinging to the original narrative that had Hamas swooping in on paragliders to lay waste to the helpless kibbutzim with firepower they did not possess. It is never explained how Palestinians with aging Kalashnikovs were supposed to have flattened entire houses, left rows of cars charred and melted, and otherwise enacted a convincing imitation of a bombardment by Israeli Hellfire missiles, but it never had to be — controlling the media establishment means never having to admit you started World War III.

Haaretz wants you to think Hamas did this with guns

If anything, Western media is far more pro-Israel than Israeli media. They’ll cover for Tel Aviv when one of Netanyahu’s minions accidentally admits to bombing yet another Gaza hospital, and they’ll jump at the chance to memory-hole Israeli politicians’ excitement over replicating the Allies’ World War II firebombing of Dresden — a state-sanctioned act of terrorism that essentially vaporized hundreds of thousands of German civilians and one of the country’s prized cultural centers in the hope that Berlin would surrender. They’ll sit with a straight face while Israeli President Isaac Herzog not only claims Hamas fighters carry Hitler’s magnum opus with them into battle (or at least into their camps, located in children’s bedrooms) but that Israel is only trying to help the Palestinians. To cover Israel as an establishment news anchor in the US is an exercise in extreme humiliation, a ritual of publicly renouncing common sense and the evidence of one’s own eyes and ears as antisemitic while uncritically gulping down the garbled narratives of guys who pronounce “terror” as “tewwow.” The publication of the Likud party’s “secret” plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza by (among other things) enlisting the US to pressure Egypt to take all the Palestinians as refugees or watch as they’re slaughtered by the IDF can hardly even be called a “leak,” having allegedly been disseminated by a member of the party in order to see whether “the public in Israel is ready to accept ideas of a transfer from Gaza.” Yet US outlets, when they did acknowledge the plan, treated its goals as the logical endpoint of the war, rather than a cynical effort to pass off genocide as humanitarianism.

If you have to ask, you’re probably Amalek

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s country

There is no reason to believe that Israel will stop the killing once it has extirpated “Hamas.” If permitted to complete its ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank, it will send the IDF into Lebanon (as Netanyahu, haunted by Israel’s 2006 defeat, has repeatedly threatened to do). If it finds itself in military trouble, Israel will simply summon its star-spangled Golem from Washington — perhaps by sinking one of the aircraft carriers the Pentagon sent over for moral support and pinning the strike on Iran in a double-barreled homage to “Remember the Maine” and the USS Liberty. A generation of American soldiers (assuming there are any Americans who aren’t too fat, crazy, or high to serve in the military) will be deployed to enforce the colonialist whims of a regime that at best considers them cattle, even as their countrymen starve back home. And if the US somehow emerges victorious despite having squandered its weapons stocks, finances and international credibility making the world safe for ethnic nepotism in previous wars? Political dissidents — those with the basic human decency to publicly oppose the atrocities their government commits in their name — are already on the chopping block (detailed in Part II of this article), and it will be American cops, trained by Israel in the fine art of placing boot on neck, who will be rounding them up.

Netanyahu has never been shy about his disdain for the US and its inhabitants, whom he considers gullible and stupid, an attitude shared by many in Israel. In an interview earlier this month with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, who bent over backwards trying to out-hawk the Israeli with pleas to go after Hezbollah and Iran too, Netanyahu warned that if “every civilized country” did not rush to Israel’s aid in crushing Palestine, they would all fall to “Hamas barbarism.” Name-checking all the worst unproven propaganda excesses of the war, from beheaded and burnt babies to gang rapes and “mutilations,” he proceeded to literally threaten the audience, declaring through an irrepressible smirk, “If we don’t win now, then Europe is next and you’re next. And we have to win.” That’s an awful nice country you got there, goy. Sure would be a shame if anything happened— oh wait.

Say it ain’t so, Bibi!

Why should Israel be coy about its intentions, in Palestine or in the West? Decades of UN resolutions and the increasingly strident condemnations of human rights NGOs have not stopped the transformation of the West Bank into an apartheid state or Gaza into a concentration camp, nor have they brought weapons inspectors to have a look at the hundreds of nuclear warheads Israel pretends not to have as it stomps around the Middle East wailing in feigned agony while poking its neighbors in the eye. Every major human rights group on Earth has been shouting about Israel’s crimes for years, rising in volume now that Tel Aviv is putting its genocidal rhetoric into action on an unprecedented scale. But even the most sincere among these have stopped at talk, looking on in horror as Israel massacres entire families, flattens their villages, cuts the survivors off from contact with the outside world so that the extent of their annihilation can be hidden, and then runs crying to Big Daddy ‘Murica complaining there’s antisemitism blossoming on every street corner.

Without action, even the most eloquent screaming can’t stop an international criminal cartel hiding behind a national government hiding behind a religion so thickly insulated from the consequences of its actions by US bombs that it simply does not have to care what the geopolitical neighbors think. Abandoned by erstwhile protectors and allies alike, Palestinians have no choice but to take up arms against this most dire of existential threats, and those in the West who take comfort in the annihilation of Gaza, believing genocide to be some kind of zero-sum game in which someone has to get wiped off the face of the earth so better them than us, are in for a very rude awakening. In the eyes of Big Parasite, we are all Palestinians, and have been for quite some time.

(In Part II: Amalek goes to university, and the true meaning of all those Holocaust references)

November 21, 2023 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Israel, Palestine, Zionism | 1 Comment