
By Maher Al Charif
The displacement of Gazans to the Sinai desert which emerged during the Israel’s current war of genocide against Gaza strip is not a new project on the Zionist movement’s agenda; it is part of projects that have accompanied this movement since its inception.
Palestinian Arabs are “Semi Bedouins” who can be removed or displaced
Since 1901, the English Writer Israel Zangwill, a close associate of Theodore Herzl, who in 1897, the year of the First World Zionist Congress visited Palestine and familiarized himself with its demographic realities, coined the phrase: “Palestine is a country without a people and the Jews are a people without a country”, in an article published by the New Liberal Review, after borrowing it from some supporters of the so-called ‘Christian Zionism’ movement in the nineteenth century and some British politicians, such as Lord Shaftesbury. The idea of an “empty land” For Zangwill, this meant that the people living in Palestine were “semi-nomads” who had no cultural or national ties to the land they lived on, making it easy for them to leave the land or be deported from it. In his book, The Voice of Jerusalem, he emphasized that after the Balfour Declaration was issued: “We must gently persuade them [to leave for the desert]. Isn’t the Arabian Peninsula of one million square miles all theirs? The Arabs have no reason to hold on to this handful of kilometres; it is their custom and saying to fold tents and sneak around; let them now set an example.”
Zionist Terrorist Gangs: A Tool for Displacing Palestinians
Since the Great Palestinian Revolution 1936-1939 and till the establishment of the state of Israel , Zionist gangs used terrorism as a military strategy to accelerate the establishment of an independent Jewish state, and many attacks were carried out on Palestinians in order to terrorize them into relocating and emigrating out of the country. These Zionist gangs were led by leaders who in later years became heads of government in Israel, such as David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin, and Yitzhak Shamir.
In 1920, David Ben-Gurion was one of the founders of the Haganah, which passed its constitution in 1924, declaring itself a secret military organization to protect the Jewish settlement community in Palestine (the Yishuv). Its members were trained in the use of weapons in kibbutzim and Jewish settlements. In 1939, a high command was formed, headed by Yaakov Dori, who later became the first chief of staff of the Israeli army. During World War II, hundreds of Haganah members enlisted in the British army to support Britain in its war against Nazi Germany and its allies, which gave them rich military experience and enabled them to seize many weapons. After the end of the war, and in order to accelerate the establishment of the Jewish state, the Haganah was active in collecting a lot of information about Arabs, their villages and towns, which it used during 1947 and 1948 to carry out military operations against Palestinian Arabs with the aim of displacing them from their cities and villages. As for Menachem Begin, after his arrival in Palestine in 1942, he became one of the most prominent leaders of the Irgun gang, which was formed in 1931 as the military wing of the Revisionist Zionist movement and considered “political violence and terrorism” as “legitimate tools in the Jewish national struggle for the Land of Israel.” This gang committed a series of terrorist acts against Palestinian Arab and British targets, and the British authorities declared Menachem Begin a wanted man and offered a reward for his capture. After the establishment of the State of Israel, Menachem Begin reached an agreement with the interim government in Tel Aviv to disarm the Irgun and transform it into a political movement that took the name “Herut” and participated, in 1973, in the establishment of the Likud Party. Yitzhak Shamir was one of the leaders of the secret “Lehi” gang, which was formed in 1942, and succeeded the “Stern” gang founded by Abraham Stern, before he was killed by the British police in his hideout in Tel Aviv. Known for using assassination as a tool of terror, Lehi committed 42 assassinations, more than double the total number of assassinations carried out by the Irgun and Haganah. The Israeli government took advantage of the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte in September 1948 by members of this gang to dismantle its military structure.
The Palestinian Displacement Project (1947-1949) and its phases
The leaders of the Zionist movement in Palestine began to view the deportation of Palestinians, or most of them, from their homeland as a necessary solution to the “Arab Question” as soon as the British Peel Commission, investigating the events of the 1936 revolution, put forward the first proposal for the partition of Palestine on July 8, 1937. However, the deportation project moved from being contemplated to being implemented when the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947, which divided Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, after it became clear to the Zionist leadership that the Jewish state would include a large Arab minority, amounting to more than 42% of the population.
Contrary to the official Zionist narrative, which claims that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians left their lands voluntarily or under the influence of calls issued by the Arab armies that entered Palestine on May 15, 1948, or by Arab radio stations, historians Nour Masalha and Ilan Pappe, and many years before them, historian Walid Khalidi, proved that the Palestinians left their lands occupied by the Zionist forces, either by intimidation or by force of arms. Leaving their lands occupied by Zionist forces, either by intimidation or by force of arms, was carried out according to a systematic plan developed by the Zionist leadership, at the Haganah headquarters in Tel Aviv on March 10, 1948, with the personal participation of David Ben-Gurion, known as Plan “D” or “Dalt”, which took about six months to implement, and resulted in the uprooting of about 800,000 Palestinians, 800,000 Palestinians were uprooted and deported from their homeland, 531 villages were destroyed, and 11 urban neighborhoods were emptied of their inhabitants. The deportation of this large number of Palestinians took place in four phases, the first of which began immediately after the partition of Palestine in December 1947, and the fourth phase was completed between October 1948 and early 1949.
Old projects to resettle Gazans in the Sinai desert
In 1953, after months of negotiations with UNRWA, the Egyptian government approved a project to settle some 12,000 families of Gaza Strip refugees on land in the northwestern Sinai desert after making it suitable for agriculture by delivering a percentage of the Nile River water annually. The project, which was supported by the US administration at the time, was allocated $30 million for its implementation. However, the popular uprising in the Gaza Strip in March 1955 prompted the Egyptian government to abandon the project. After Israel occupied the Gaza Strip during the June 1967 war, Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon proposed a project to relocate a number of refugees from the Gaza Strip to three areas in the Egyptian region of al-Arish, with Israeli funding, with the first phase starting with 50,000 of them; however, Egypt categorically rejected this project. In 1971, Ariel Sharon, commander of the Israeli army’s Southern District, who was waging a military campaign to liquidate the armed Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip, proposed a project to uproot 12,000 refugees from the Gaza Strip camps and place them in other refugee stations in the Sinai desert. But Egypt strongly rejected this project as well, and the rejection of settlement in the Sinai became a firm part of the Egyptian state’s security and political doctrine.
Displacement projects after October 7, 2023
On October 13, 2023, Israel’s Ministry of Military Intelligence released a report addressing how to deal with the civilian population in Gaza. Among the three options it proposed was the evacuation of the civilian population from the Gaza Strip to the Sinai desert, calling on the United States and European countries to pressure the Egyptian authorities to assume their responsibilities and open the Rafah crossing to allow the passage of Palestinian civilians to the Sinai, in exchange for financial assistance to solve Egypt’s current economic issues. On the day the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence released its report, UN staff in the Gaza Strip reported that on the evening of October 12, 2023, the Israeli military informed them that approximately 1.1 million Palestinians living in the northern Gaza Strip would have to move to the south of the Strip within 24 hours. In a tweet posted in Arabic a few minutes later, Lieutenant Colonel Avichai Adrai, an IDF spokesperson, called on Gaza residents to “head south of the Gaza Valley,” adding that “they will not be allowed to return to Gaza City unless authorized to do so.”
On January 28, 2024, a conference was held at the International Conference Hall in Jerusalem: “Settlements Bring Security and Victory,” which brought together some 5,000 pro-settlement Israelis . Eleven ministers from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, representing four parties, as well as 15 Knesset members, pro-settlement rabbis, and the families of soldiers involved in the war on the Gaza Strip, participated in the conference. Banners was reading “Settlements bring security” were scattered throughout the hall, and some activists carried a sign that read: “Only deportation will bring peace.” A map of the Strip appeared on the central screen with the location of the old settlements, which were dismantled in 2005, and the six new settlements that settler leaders want to establish in the northern Gaza Strip.
Despite the verbal condemnations issued inside and outside Israel, the forces that organized this conference seem determined to achieve their project. They will resort to the classic method that the settlement movement in the West Bank has been using for years, namely, positioning themselves in the territories or in army positions in outposts and small groups, perhaps in lands where the army intends to establish a security belt, and then exert political pressure on the government and the Knesset to legitimize their presence.
In the face of international reactions warning of the consequences of plans to forcibly displace Palestinians, Israeli ministers have recently been dodging the issue and talking about the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip after the Israeli military makes the Palestinian territory unlivable for its inhabitants. Since January 2024, the Israeli government has reportedly been negotiating with African countries – Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Chad – to convince them to take in Palestinians displaced from Gaza, promising financial and military aid in exchange for welcoming Palestinians into their territories. However, the governments of these three African countries later denied any negotiations with Israel regarding the reception of Palestinian refugees.
Conclusion
Thus, it appears that the Israeli war government is determined to displace the population of the Gaza Strip after it has rendered the Strip uninhabitable, as its army has done and is doing during its destructive war. It believes that Israel will only enjoy security and stability on its southern border if it finds a “final solution” to Gaza’s dilemma, and that solution lies precisely in the displacement of its residents. In order to avoid an international backlash against forced displacement, the Israeli government has circumvented the issue by talking about “voluntary migration” and has been looking for countries willing to take them in. Will it succeed, or will the Gazans insist on staying in their land at any cost, and will succeed in thwarting this new and old Zionist scheme?
Maher Al Sharif is leading member of Palestinian People’s Party (PPP). He is a Marxist historian specialising in modern Arab intellectual history and the history of Arab political movements, lecturing and undertaking research on medieval, modern, and Arab history at the French Near East Institute in Syria
The views expressed in the articles published on this website do not necessarily represent those of Liberation
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