December 19, 2023
Gaza is being devastated as we watch. A stated goal of Israel’s assault, which has so far killed more than 19,400 people, is to “destroy Hamas” in retaliation for its attack that killed 1,200 in Israel’s south in October. But a number of critics, such as the Palestinian ambassor to the UK, Husam Zomlot, have argued persuasively that Israel’s goal is less to vanquish Hamas—impossible in any case—than to finally expel Palestinians from Gaza without international censure or sanction.
There is mounting evidence for their claims. In mid-October, Israel’s intelligence ministry drafted a “concept” paper proposing the forcible and permanent transfer of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents to the Sinai Peninsula. The ministry is less influential than its name suggests, but its policy ideas are nonetheless distributed among government and security services. In November a USAID official approached a colleague of mine and asked about the feasibility of building a tent city in the Sinai, which would be followed by a more permanent arrangement somewhere in the northern part of the peninsula. Later that month the daily Israel Hayom revealed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seeks to “reduc[e] the number of Palestinian citizens in the Gaza Strip to the minimum possible.”
The current desecration of Gaza is the latest stage in a process that has taken increasingly violent forms over time. In the fifty-six years since it occupied the Strip in 1967, Israel has transformed Gaza from a territory politically and economically integrated with Israel and the West Bank into an isolated enclave, from a functional economy to a dysfunctional one, from a productive society to an impoverished one. It has likewise removed Gaza’s residents from the sphere of politics, transforming them from a people with a nationalist claim to a population whose majority requires some form of humanitarian aid to sustain themselves.
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