After the false promise of a week-long truce, Israel on December 1 resumed its assault on Gaza with renewed ferocity. Israel’s defence minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed that the aim – to completely eliminate the militant resistance group Hamas – would involve repeating in the south of Gaza all that had been done in the north.On December 4, a statement issued from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the source for most essential supplies and services in Gaza, spoke of a repetition of “horrors from past weeks”. “Civilians, including men, women, children, older persons, the sick and people with disabilities (were) the most to suffer”. People who had “more than once” fled the war in other parts of Gaza were being targeted afresh. Evacuation orders by Israeli armed forces had pushed people “into what is less than one-third of the Gaza strip”. “No place is safe in Gaza”, it said: “whether in the south, or the southwest, whether in Rafah or in any unilaterally so-called ‘safe zone’”. The “humanitarian” prefix to the seven-day truce, as it turned out, was grossly misplaced. Under the terms of the deal, Israel released an agreed number of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for captives taken by Hamas on October 7. But it took into custody many more, did not relent in its lethal raids in the occupied West Bank, and was obviously only regrouping for a fresh offensive in Gaza. This time, the south of the Gaza Strip, where civilians were advised to flee during the first six weeks of the military onslaught, was the main focus. Within four days, with tanks pushing into southern Gaza, the death toll was increasing by many hundreds every day, against an estimated 15,000 through the first six weeks.In an article that Jewish Currents described as “the most important piece of journalism” since the carnage began, a reporting coalition from two websites, +972 and Local Call, tells of how, beginning October 8, the Israel Defence Force (IDF) shed all restraint and all pretence of abiding by the laws of war. There was an “expanded authorisation for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before”. All this contributed to destruction on an unimaginable scale. Targets were chosen with specific intent to diminish “Palestinian civil society”, or as a source tapped by the reporters put it, to “create a shock” sufficient to “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas”. Many of the sources who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed that Israel maintains files on every potential target, including homes. These “stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target”, and every Israeli attack happens in full cognisance of the number of civilians “certain to be killed”. This number is “calculated and known in advance”.The onslaught that resumed on December 1 had the obvious object of making unfit for human life even the tiniest acreage that remained habitable. The infrastructure and amenities that made civic life possible, even in the most straitened circumstances, were to be systematically destroyed. And a consequence that is yet to be assessed is the environmental damage: the lasting toxicity that will be left in the soil, air and water of Gaza from this holocaust.Away from the primary focus, Israel pushed ahead with plans in the West Bank to create a “second Nakba”, a mass expulsion of Palestinians. It involved longer-term planning than the military blitzkrieg underway in Gaza, and as the Israeli scholar of Tamil literature, David Shulman put it, targeted the “deliberate erosion of Palestinian civil society and institutions”.Genocide is the clear object, and if intent is to be proven, Israelis starting with the top political leadership, have offered up a whole slew of genocide adjacent statements since October 7. Gazans were children of darkness, while Israelis were children of light, said Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who later invoked a Biblical story of treachery and retribution to warn Gaza of the scale of destruction beyond all humanly discernible dimensions. Defence minister Gallant spoke of a future for the Gaza Strip that would be unrecognisable since Israel intended to destroy everything in it. President Isaac Herzog dismissed any possibility of innocent civilian life in Gaza since everybody living there was ostensibly in moral solidarity with the militant resistance group Hamas.Gideon Sa’ar, a former deputy prime minister now inducted into the wartime cabinet, spoke of Gaza ending up both smaller and lesser, indicating that it would be abbreviated territorially and substantially depopulated. Danny Danon, a former ambassador to the UN who is now a member of the Israeli Knesset, spoke of the best humanitarian solution being the dispersal of Gaza’s population. Countries that cared should step up to do their bit by taking in Palestinians from Gaza in their tens of thousands. With even greater crudity, former Israeli cabinet minister Ayelet Shaked spoke of converting the Khan Yunus refugee camp in Gaza, a teeming place of Palestinian settlement into a football field, and then “taking advantage of the destruction that (Israel would) wreak upon them to tell the world that each country should take a defined quota … We need two million to leave.. Honestly, that is the solution”.Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Photo: X/@netanyahuIs this the brutal climax of the settler colonial project formally inaugurated in the Palestinian homeland in 1917, which gained a new impetus with the breakdown of the tenuous European order forged after World War I? From the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948, the brutal momentum of the settler project encountered headwinds from elsewhere in the world, where colonialism was being dismantled and new sovereign states coming into being. Israel came into existence on very different premises. And its origin story can be told on the smaller canvas of two towns in the south of Israel, Ashkelon and Sderot, that were among the worst affected when armed Hamas militants on October 7, surged across the heavy fortifications that fence Gaza in. As the attack was pushed back or defeated, the threat of rocket fire from Gaza persisted, leading to the quick evacuation of the more vulnerable residents in these towns. And then as the Israeli war machine prepared for retaliation, the citizens of the garrison state celebrated the exemplary display of solidarity in a time of adversity. In parts of the Arab world, the flight of Israeli nationals from the towns of Ashkelon and Sderot was portrayed as the retreat of usurpers.The proclamation of the State of Israel involved the forced transfer of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians, who either crossed the borders into neighbouring countries, or crowded into the West Bank and Gaza. Israel disclaims all blame, entirely faulting the Arab leadership in Palestine and elsewhere for the humanitarian catastrophe. Convinced that the small Zionist force assembled in Palestine would be no match for their armies, the Arab states allegedly encouraged the mass displacement, on the assurance that military victory was certain and resettlement would quickly follow. Also Read: Resisting the Zionist Revisionism of GandhiThe reality as Israeli historians Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe have established, from radically opposing perspectives, is that the Jewish National Agency, which in subsequent years became the Government of Israel, had a blueprint to effect the near complete conquest of territory seen as essential to the strategic defence of Israel as a Jewish state. This required the near-complete expulsion of Arabs.Benny Morris writes as an unreconstructed Zionist, picks and chooses his sources from the IDF archives and concludes, regretfully, that the job was only half-done, leaving Israel with an insoluble demographic conundrum. Ilan Pappe sees the ethnic cleansing, approved at the highest level of the Zionist leadership, as an injustice that calls for restitution. The first phase of the aggression involved the areas designated as Jewish under the UN Partition Plan of November 1947. The UN General Assembly had been more than generous. The Jewish people, though less than 30% of the population of Palestine – despite the surge in numbers after World War II – were given 55% of the land area. The designated Jewish area still had a majority of Arabs, while the designated Arab area had a Jewish population of less than 10%. The Zionist plan was personally approved by the first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, and carried out by the Haganah, a clandestine militia that had achieved some form of recognition by the British authorities during the Palestinian intifada of the 1930s, and later became the nucleus of the IDF. Ben-Gurion’s intent was very clear soon after the Royal Commission appointed by the British to deal with an intractable conflict of their own creation, proposed the partition of Palestine in 1937. Though the plan fell well short of Ben-Gurion’s ambitions, he was prepared to bide his time. In October 1937, he wrote to his son, conceding that the partition gave him “no pleasure”. Yet the land was “not in our actual possession”, and what was “in actual possession” was “less than what they (were) proposing for a Jewish state”. If he were an Arab, he “would have been very indignant”, but being in the position he was, he would be satisfied with getting “more than what we already have”, though “much less than we merit and desire”. The Zionist plan was “not that the land remain whole and unified”, but that the “whole and unified land be Jewish” (emphases in original). While waiting for that time when the whole of the land would be Jewish, Ben-Gurion was clear about what the “solution of the question of the Arabs” would be: “I am for their compulsory transfer”, he said at a meeting of the Jewish Agency: “I do not see anything immoral in it”.Once the UN partition plan was announced, the Jewish Agency hurried into action. Numerous villages within the designated Jewish area were identified and Ilan Pappe (2007: 104-5) provides the details of the Haganah strategy. Picked for early attention was Khisas, a “small village with a few hundred Muslims and one hundred Christians”, known for the “natural beauty of its location”. Late on December 18, 1947, Haganah troops attacked, randomly “blowing up houses” as the village slept. A reporter of the New York Times who witnessed the aftermath and closely followed subsequent events, queried the Haganah, but was met with stout denial. In the face of his persistence, Ben-Gurion “issued a dramatic public apology, claiming the action had been unauthorised”. Just a few months later in a public speech, he listed it among the successful operations carried out by his military wing.This Khisas operation followed the blueprint of Plan C, adopted by the Zionist leadership in May 1946 and executed by the Haganah from about the middle of 1947. The typical mode for carrying out military operations was laid out in clear detail: “.. the village will be surrounded by a force whose size will vary with the circumference of the village and the resistance expected …. A part of this force – at least half – will enter the village and carry out acts of sabotage by setting fire to and blowing up targets. If the objective is general punitive action, everything possible should be set on fire and the houses of the instigators and participants in operations must be demolished”.David Ben-Gurion. Photo: Dan Hadani collection, National Library of Israel/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0,The ethnic cleansing model adopted in urban areas is described in the context of Haifa, then Palestine’s third largest city, by Ilan Pappe (2007: 105). “From the morning after the UN Partition Resolution was adopted”, he writes, “the 75,000 Palestinians in the city were subjected to a campaign of terror”. The Haganah was joined in this enterprise by the terror group Irgun, led by the future Prime Minister, Menachem Begin and drawing inspiration from Vladimir Jabotinsky’s rival Zionist stream. Since the Jewish residents were relatively new to the town, they had occupied higher reaches along the hill slopes. A typical tactic was to pour oil and fuel down the roads, which would be ignited, and “when panic-stricken Palestinians came running out of their homes to try to extinguish these rivers of fire, they were sprayed by machine-gun fire”.Benny Morris records that by July, two months after Israel’s declaration of independence, “only some 3,500 of Haifa’s prewar Arab population of 70,000 remained in the city”. The flight began in December 1947, but the April that followed was especially catastrophic, when the Haganah laid siege to the city and finally conquered it.Ben-Gurion had clearly spelt out how he saw the future of the city when he visited early in May. The number of Palestinians was not to exceed 15,000, of which “two-thirds would be Christians, one-third Moslems”. These communities were to be concentrated in two distinct parts of the city. In the months that followed, these plans of “displacement and concentration” were carried out by newly empowered Jewish military administrators. The depopulation project moreover, was even more successful than envisaged.The Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi documents how the Zionist aggression under the guidance of Plan D scaled new heights as the British departure neared. For all the military operations that had been carried out till then, results were modest in terms of the vacant spaces created for Jewish occupation. Plan D involved actions outside the area designated as Jewish under the UN Partition Plan. Brigade commanders of the Haganah, working in collaboration with the Irgun and other armed terrorist groups, were granted the authority to mount “operations against enemy population centers inside or near (the Zionist) defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force”. The options included the “destruction of villages… setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris”. Brigade commanders were also authorised to mount “combing and control operations” which could proceed by the “encirclement of the village”. In the event that resistance was encountered while “conducting a search”, the military units were empowered to “wipe out” the opposing force, and “expel” the population “outside the borders of the state”. Sderot stands where the two Palestinian villages of Huj and Najd once stood. Soon after Israel’s declaration of independence, Hagana forces cleared out the village of Najd. With the expected advance of Egyptian forces “just hours away”, records Benny Morris (2008: 161), the IDF’s Negev Brigade “conquered the village of Burayr, apparently (sic) committing atrocities and killing several dozen villagers, and drove out the inhabitants of the nearby villages of Sumsum and Najd”. A fortnight later, the same IDF unit “raided the neighbouring villages of Muharraqa and Kaufakha, driving out the inhabitants, and conquered Beit Tima and Huj, a ‘friendly’ village that … commanders nonetheless believed posed a danger”.Ethnic cleansing was consistent with the mandate handed down from the top level of the Zionist leadership, to create the widest possible territorial expanse with minimal encumbrance of Palestinian people. Plan D was quite clearly, an effort through active military operations to fulfil the Zionist fever dream that Palestine was a “land without a people”, that the Jews as a “people without a land”, had divine mandate over. The ethnic cleansing of Huj and Najd and other proximate villages never regarded as a military threat, had a strategic purpose. Benny Morris quotes the secretary-general of the Arab League at the time complaining that the purpose of the ethnic cleansing was to create human shields against the expected entry of Egyptian armed forces. That was indeed, the “grim logic”, writes Morris, to drive out “inhabitants from areas on or near roads by which Arab regular forces could enter the country”.The town currently known as Ashkelon had its day of reckoning with Plan D a little later. It fell to Egyptian control soon after Israel’s declaration of independence and was attacked by artillery and air till November 1948, when the IDF finally completed its conquest. Palestinian scholar, Nur Masalha (1997: 9), provides the essential details. Known till 1950 as Al-Majdal, Ashkelon had till the eve of Israel’s declaration of independence, a population of 10,000. It was emptied out to some degree during the IDF bombardment though after the armistice of 1949, still had a population of 2,700. It was then designated as a town for the resettlement of immigrant Jews from other parts of West Asia and North Africa. In February 1949, an officially constituted committee decided to empty the town of all Arabs. A Jew from Iraq, promised resettlement in the area, recalled being continually reassured by the Zionist administration that al-Majdal would be vacated of all Arabs, clearing space for him to occupy. Masalha (1997: 10) records how this newly arrived Iraqi Jew was uneasy at the thought and found an equal sense of mystification in the course of a conversation with an Al-Majdal resident. There seemed no reason, he thought, for expelling a family that had been resident in the town for generations, perfectly willing to assume citizenship of the new sovereign.Descendants of Al-Majdal, Huj and Najd are today crowded into Gaza, a narrow strip of territory that the Egyptian army managed to hold when an armistice in February 1949 ended the war on that front. The larger part of the Gaza district, which was awarded to the Palestinians in its entirety under the UN Partition Plan, fell to Israel. A truce with other Arab states followed, though expulsion continued to be on the active agenda of the Israeli state. The refugees’ right of return was enshrined in UN Security Council Resolution 194, adopted unanimously in 1949 and reiterated every year till 1967, though Israel has faced little consequence for ignoring it in its obsession with ethnic purity.Palestinians fleeing their homes after the establishment of Israel in 1948. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/David Eldan/CC BY-SA 3.0 DEEDHome to about 70,000 before the creation of Israel, Gaza found itself dealing with an influx of over 200,000. Palestinian villages in the south of Israel continued being emptied out in the years after, with most residents being transferred to Gaza. In 1956, Britain and France joined forces in an effort at forcing the newly installed Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to back away from his nationalisation of the Suez Canal. Israel joined the military misadventure with its own agenda of territorial aggrandisement. Gaza and the Sinai were occupied in no time and at little cost, but as Masalha (1997: 38-41) records, Ben-Gurion could hardly conceal his disappointment with the “demographic outcome”. On his first visit to the newly conquered territory, “a new reality was revealed before his eyes, which shocked him deeply: the Palestinians did not flee from the IDF as they had in 1948”.Between then and 1957, when it was forced to withdraw by the US, yet to sign up as an unconditional source of sustenance and support, Israel did its best to “terrorise the Palestinians into fleeing from the teeming refugee camps”. Two incidents in particular, at Khan Yunis and Rafah, involved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians. After the Israeli withdrawal, a mass grave was unearthed at Khan Yunis, with the “bodies of forty Arabs who had been shot in the back of their head after their hands had been tied”.Demography has been a constant obsession with Israel since its creation. Ben-Gurion and his successors, always intent on all of the land, faced an intractable problem of numbers when that territorial dream was fulfilled. For roughly two decades after it provoked and decisively won the Six-Day War against neighbouring Arab states, Zionism seemed to settle into another kind of compact with the Palestinians, treating the occupied people as a reservoir of low-wage labour to fuel the Israeli economy. But that was an unstable arrangement, always likely to fray in a situation of the constant denial of basic rights. In a research article published in 1989, a civil rights campaigner observed that a movement had begun emerging afresh in Jewish society, which supported “the idea of expelling all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip to neighbouring Arab countries or, preferably, beyond”.Today, with the non-Jewish population in Palestine probably in a majority, the State of Israel is called upon to shed its pretence of being a democracy, always a shallow one. Hiving off the West Bank and Gaza as an autonomous and demilitarised Palestinian state, was a brief promise, insincere and fraudulent at the best of times. Israel is aware that the wounds it has inflicted are too raw, to ever feel secure within the boundaries established in 1948.The Palestine Liberation Organisation, helmed by the largest resistance group Fatah, was given the option of being a caretaker of the Israeli occupation, a lesser body attending to municipal chores, but primarily ensuring the security of Israel’s territory and its settlements. Fatah played along but at some point called off the farce. Israel has ever since been pushing for the settlement it always had in mind: unilateral separation, under which Gaza would remain in a permanent state of siege, and the West Bank would be a thick patchwork of Jewish settlements with segregated routes of access only for Jews. October 7 was a unilateral abridgement of the script from the Palestinian side. It has accelerated the quest for a “final solution” that brings all the genocidal nightmares of the past back in vivid horror.Sukumar Muralidharan is an independent writer and researcher based in the Delhi region. He has worked in print media, as a journalism instructor and trainer, and press freedom campaigner.
