The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has begun the most senseless battle in the history of Israel. Two conscript divisions with Merkava tanks, APCs and artillery, supported in the skies by the Israeli Air Force, are now engaged in a battle to conquer Gaza City. As they go, they are seizing what remains of the asphalt roads in Gaza. Artillery and air force planes are bombing and destroying more houses – about 70 per cent of the buildings in Gaza have already been destroyed by the IDF.
This is now the most political war in Israel’s history. The country fought three wars against regular armies out of necessity: the War of Independence in 1948, the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. All the others were wars and operations of choice. But even in those, political motives were mixed with security considerations, and their purpose was strategic: to secure a political arrangement at the end of hostilities.
This is a bleak vision for Israelis and Palestinians
Any reasonable person understands that the war in Gaza – whose ugly conduct will soon reach two years – now has only two non-substantive goals: the personal survival of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the political survival of his government and the coalition. Officially, though, Netanyahu and his ministers still pay lip service to their constant mantra that they are adhering to the original objectives for which Israel, rightly, went to war after 7 October – the eradication of Hamas and the return of the hostages.
Hamas as a military force was neutralised more than a year ago, however, perhaps longer. About 70 per cent of its fighting force has been killed or is held in prisons in Israel. Almost all of its rockets have been destroyed, as have most of its workshops and arms depots. This is war for the sake of war, but with a hidden aim: to make the lives of the 2.2 million Gazans still living there miserable and to render their lives inhuman.
Israel, with the help of the IDF and the Shin Bet, is turning Gazans into human dust in the hope that they will leave Gaza and emigrate to other countries. The goal is to transfer them. The extreme ministers in the government and Knesset have been saying this aloud since 7 October. Netanyahu, who always speaks in double talk to his audiences at home and abroad, did distance himself from ministers who talk about destroying Gaza, but his historical and associative world is not far from them.
Netanyahu demands ‘unconditional surrender’ from Hamas, a stance borrowed from the Allied powers that set this as a condition for ending the second world war against Hitler and Japan’s Emperor Hirohito. Netanyahu knows that even if Hamas surrenders – the organisation has already made clear that it will fight to the bitter end and will not surrender – the extremists in his government will begin to establish settlements, dispossess Palestinians and expropriate land. This was exactly the process after the Six-Day War that is still ongoing in the West Bank.
The messianic vision of ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir is conquest, dispossession, takeover, creeping annexation, and transfer. In truth, the idea of transfer is not foreign to Zionism and the state of Israel. As early as 1940 Yosef Weitz, one of the leaders of the Jewish National Fund, wrote in his diary:
There is no place in the country for the two peoples together…. The only solution is Eretz Israel without Arabs. There is no room here for compromises! Move everyone. Leave not a single village, not a single tribe. Only in this way, transfer of the Arabs of Israel, will redemption come.
In the heat of the War of Independence, some 700,000 Arabs were expelled or left Palestine voluntarily. The best-known expulsions were those of the Arabs of Lod and Ramle. A new book reveals for the first time Israel’s efforts at the end of the war to encourage the emigration of the Arabs who remained in the country. From the Foreign Office to the Mossad: The Early Years of the Israeli Mossad 1949–1963 by Ori Rost and Shay Raz is based on official Mossad documents and was published at the organisation’s initiative.
The person appointed to deal with the subject was Yitzhak Navon (later president of the state), who was sent on behalf of the intelligence body of the Foreign Ministry, a predecessor of the Mossad. ‘From the Israeli mission in Uruguay where he was posted,’ the book states:
He tried to promote the idea that the Palestinian refugees from Israel should settle in those countries… after a short time he realised that the idea had no prospects.
Nevertheless, Mossad did not give up, and after the Six-Day War it was again involved in an attempt to encourage and fund the emigration of Palestinians to South America. That plan also failed at the outset. Now, once again, Mossad chief Dedi Barnea and his operatives are being sent to various countries – including Ethiopia, Indonesia, Somalia, and Uganda – to try to persuade their leaders to accept Gazans under a ‘voluntary migration’ plan approved by the cabinet. It is an idea that even US president Donald Trump and his administration have toyed with.
Of course, this will not happen. Egypt, which fears Gazans will break through its borders, and other Arab states have already made clear that they would view such attempts harshly. So, all that remains for the Israeli government, which has no strategic plan and is not seeking an alternative to Hamas’s control of Gaza, is to continue the war.
This is a war that will endanger the 48 hostages still being held in the Strip, will continue to exact a heavy toll of Gazan lives (already nearly 100 are now killed each day), and will bring about the deaths of IDF soldiers. The Chief of Staff, General Eyal Zamir, who opposed the ground incursion, warned that entering the city was a ‘death trap’. He also estimated that approximately a dozen IDF troops will die, and hundreds will suffer. This week, the Defence Ministry stated that it expects some 50,000 people to be treated for PTSD by 2028.
This is a bleak vision for Israelis and Palestinians. If things are already not depressing enough, Netanyahu warned that Israelis must adjust to the notion that ‘our country is like Sparta’. In the end, of course, Sparta was defeated.
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