“It would be good if Gaza would be swallowed up by the sea, but that’s impossible,” said the then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1992. In the fever of ongoing conflict, this quote is a reminder of the particular contempt that Israel’s political-military elite have long retained for the Gaza Strip and its people, a sentiment which has escaped closer scrutiny.

Many outside observers appear to have forgotten the political and social consequences of five successive wars on the Strip (in 2009, 2012, 2014, 2021, and 2022) that wiped out hundreds of families and, before those, a longstanding colonial tradition that fractured Palestinian society. The unfortunate consequence is that Gaza’s current ongoing tragedy is being portrayed in a historical vacuum.

Israel’s war on Gaza in the past two decades has been part of a wider political project—ongoing since the 1948 Nakba and before—that seeks to remove the Palestinian presence from Historical Palestine. It is essential to remember this project as Israel bombards defenceless civilians, religious sites, and healthcare and educational facilities, while creating the conditions for mass starvation and disease.

Ghassan Abu Sitta, a Palestinian surgeon who has been treating victims of the Israeli siege and bombing at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in the Strip and who gave his testimony at the South Africa International Court of Justice hearing, did not stop at the observation that “[t]his is a war unlike any and its aim is to make Gaza uninhabitable”. Instead, he proceeded to state that what is happening now is a continuation of the Nakba.

The implications of this continued Nakba do not only apply to Gazans but also extend to West Bank Palestinians, including Jerusalemites, and even Palestinian citizens of Israel. One must not consider Israel’s current actions as a particularly egregious “excess” or an abrupt departure from established Zionist practice. Rather, it is essential to place these actions in the wider historical context and to see the current practices of population “transfer” and depopulation as being synonymous with pre-existing Zionist theory and state practice.

Gaza’s Depopulation: The Colonial Context
Fighting Hamas is only a pretext for Israel to destroy Gaza and displace its people. It is guided by Zionist policy that aims to eliminate Palestinians and replace them with settlers, and has been in the works for years, if not decades.

In providing immediate historical context, it is essential to remember that after Hamas seized control of the Strip in 2007, Israel informed U.S. officials that it sought to bring the Gazan economy to the “brink of collapse” by causing it to “function at the lowest level possible”. Buffer zones were constructed on agricultural land and the Strip’s access to the sea was limited. These and other challenges to basic human survival led the United Nations to predict that the Strip would soon be “unliveable”. During the ongoing war on Gaza, Israel continued this project by destroying nearly 70 percent of the Strip’s civilian facilities and infrastructure.

A leaked “concept paper” from the Israeli Intelligence Ministry on October 13 proposed that the 2.3 million Gazans should be transferred into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula as a way of addressing humanitarian needs. The document suggested residents should live in tents before being permanently settled and prevented from returning to the Strip.

In an Al-Jazeera interview on October 13, Danny Ayalon, Israel’s former deputy foreign minister, responded to the collective punishment and indiscriminate bombardment of civilians in Gaza by observing:

We told the Gazan people to clear the area temporarily, so we can go and take Hamas out, and then, of course, they can come back… We don’t tell Gazans to go to the beaches or drown themselves … No, God forbid … Go to the Sinai Desert. There is a huge expanse, almost endless space in the Sinai Desert just on the other side of Gaza.

Israeli officials are no longer trying to conceal their intentions to remove the Palestinians. In 2021, the Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, responsible for administering the West Bank, said that the first prime minister of Israel, who instigated the 1948 Nakba, should have “finished the job” by removing all Israeli Arabs when the country was formed. In addition to expressing support for a shoot-to-kill policy, Smotrich has also denied the existence of a Palestinian culture, history, and even people. In speaking at a Paris conference, he stood behind a podium covered with a banner of the Israeli flag and a map of “Greater Israel” that included Jordan.

Similar statements have been made with regard to the West Bank. For example, on October 27, settlers in the West Bank distributed leaflets in Salfit City about a “major Nakba” that warned Palestinians: “By God, we will descend upon your heads with a great catastrophe soon. You have the last chance to escape to Jordan in an organized manner.”

Meanwhile, Ben Gvir, the Israeli National Security Minister, has called on Palestinians in the West Bank to emigrate, and his party “Jewish Power” continues to call for the “transfer of the enemy, an exchange of populations, and any other way that will help the enemy leave our country”.

The 2020 U.S–Israeli “Peace to Prosperity Plan”, which the Trump administration established and publicly announced without consulting Palestinians, shows how determined Israel is to complete its settler colonial project and to force the agreement on Palestinians, on the model of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ‘[w]hether [Palestinians] accept it or not, it’s going to happen’.

Under this plan, Israel was permitted to disregard all relevant UN resolutions, annex Area C (including settlements and the Jordan Valley), establish Jerusalem as its united capital, and make “peace” synonymous with its own security needs. However, it is insufficient on a number of key aspects: in fact, the plan is very much in the lineage of the “colonial” Oslo Accords, which enshrined Israeli security concerns as the basis of peace.

The Oslo Accords fragmented the land and led to political division, weakening Palestinian unity and encouraging Palestinians to leave their homes. The unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2007 perpetuated the division between Palestinians by isolating them into either Gaza or the West Bank, thus pushing them into different categories with different concerns and needs.

This is similar to the case of Jerusalem, which Israel isolated from other Palestinians. Jeruselamites, since 1967, are alien residents struggling to keep their homes in the face of discriminatory laws that aim to revoke their residency and expel them from the city and, in some cases, from the country, as in the case of Salah Hamouri.

The securitized, neo-liberal “peace” suggested in the “Peace to Prosperity” plan substantially predates the Trump administration and includes the 2007 donor reform agenda, under which the United States allocated more than 392 million dollars to the Palestinian Authority (almost one-third of whose entire budget is committed to the security forces) with the aim of enhancing its counter-terrorism capabilities. Focusing on security coordination deepened Palestinian division. The PA, reliant on international funding and functioning in this neoliberal context, was prevented from challenging the ongoing colonization project and from taking any action to hold Israel accountable.

Before this, members of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox and far right had openly stated their intention to construct further settlements to build “Greater Israel”. During former U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel in March 2013, municipal representatives within the occupied territories prepared a nine-step plan that laid out their vision for the colonization of the West Bank. Step five of the plan clearly states an intention to create a situation in which it “becomes clear to the international community that another state west of the Jordan River is not viable”.

Naftali Bennett, the then-Israeli education minister, tweeted that there is “no need for a third Palestinian state beyond Jordan and Gaza”. The colonial “divide-and-rule” tactic is an Israeli policy that is publicly admitted by officials. Smotrich stated in an interview in 2015 that the PA is “a burden” and Hamas is “an asset”.

As part of this divide-and-rule strategy, Israeli policy actors have come to realize the potential of Hamas as a means through which to divide the Palestinian national movement. In 2014, Netanyahu warned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that he must choose between peace with Israel or peace with Hamas; five years later, Netanyahu changed tracks and permitted Qatar to transfer money to Hamas with the deliberate aim of impeding the establishment of a Palestinian state.

The Historical Context
In a November 18 press conference, Netanyahu spelled out his intellectual and political debt to his late father, a distinguished historian, and to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, one of the most influential Zionist ideologues. Netanyahu explained: “From both of them I learned a fundamental principle of leading a military-diplomatic campaign. It is impossible to establish military victory without diplomatic backing, and it is impossible to establish diplomatic backing without turning both to leaders and to public opinion in their countries.”

This is ironic, given that Netanyahu rejects all diplomatic efforts and insists on total security control over the Occupied Territory while the war on Gaza and settler attacks on the West Bank Palestinians continue.

Jabotinsky, Netanyahu’s inspiration, became the leader of the right-wing part of the Zionist movement in 1904. Just over two decades later he established a new revisionist party and an associated youth movement (Betar), which sought to establish a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan River. In 1937, Irgun, a Jewish underground organization founded in 1931, became Betar’s military wing and carried out terrorist attacks against British and Palestinian targets in the Mandate’s “late” period, including the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel on July 22, 1946 and the notorious Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948.

These were not egregious excesses, but were very much consistent with Jabotinsky’s article “The Iron Wall”. In 1923, he wrote,

Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement…All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes…Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.

Other than his disregard for their advice on diplomacy, Netanyhu’s thinking is very much aligned with the founders of the Israeli state and the long-established Zionist project to empty the Palestinian territory of its population.

Perhaps the clearest and most far-reaching Palestinian account of transfer in Zionist thought was provided by Professor Nur Masalha’s seminal 1992 book, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Examining Israeli state archives, Masalha reveals how Zionists have been proposing the transfer and expulsion of Palestinians since the 1880s.

This project of depopulation continued beyond 1948. After the 1967 War, Israeli ministers discussed different potential locations for transfer, including the Sinai Desert and neighbouring Arab countries. General (and later, Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon, head of the IDF Southern Command after the 1967 War, sought to resolve the Strip’s refugee problem by reducing or removing the refugee camps.

Home demolitions were justified to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) under the pretexts of widening roads to enable better patrolling and improving water and electricity. Around 2,000 homes were demolished and 16,000 people displaced, including some to the Sinai Desert, in 1971. In the period from 2000-2004, the Israeli army demolished more than 2,500 homes in the south of the Strip (mostly in Rafah) to build a wall along the Egyptian border.

Recent declassified documents indicate that this goal of expulsion has remained present in Israeli policy and place Reuven Aloni, the deputy director-general of the Israel Lands Administration, on record as saying, in reference to Palestinian citizens in Israel: “A day will come, in another ten, fifteen, or twenty years…when the basic solution will be a matter of transferring the Arabs. I think that we should think about this as a final goal.”

Israel has cited different pretexts for this ongoing transfer and depopulation. For example, security and military pretences were used to justify Hebron’s Kiryat Arab settlement. In a July 1973 interview with Time, Moshe Dayan, the-then Defence Minister, remarked that this settlement meant “[t]here is no more Palestine. [It is] Finished”. Measures introduced after the Baruch Goldstein massacre in February 1994, including the division of the city into H1 and H2 areas, and the imposition of checkpoints, barriers, and closed military zones, have functioned as an outgrowth of Israel’s depopulation policies.

The Israeli army has also used temporary evacuation as a depopulation tactic, most notably in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley. The ultimate aim, which can be traced back to the 1967 Allon Plan, is to annex this part of the West Bank. A declassified document from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon shows how the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and U.S. president Ronald Reagan discussed the future status of Palestinian refugees. While Begin favoured transfer to Libya, Iraq, or Syria, Reagan preferred granting them Lebanese citizenship. The goal, always, was to expel.

Building an Alternative Future
Palestinians, in responding to Israel’s colonization activities and ongoing attacks, have not only led protests, but have also insisted on placing the events in the Gaza Strip within the wider historical context.

Palestinians have always sought to align with international anti-colonial movements and to work with solidarity groups across the world to assert Palestinian demands for freedom and justice. In doing so, Palestinians have taken a leadership role in networking, advocacy, and lobbying activities.

The B.D.S. (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement has emerged as an important part of this transnational struggle. The internet and social media have enabled Palestinians and solidarity groups to reach audiences across the world and undertake political advocacy while explaining the Palestinian narrative. Social media has also made it possible to provide “hands-on” guidelines for practical support and actions.

Israeli-Palestinian solidarity groups, however, have shrunk as Israeli public opinion has shifted farther right and non-recognition, including transfer, has become a standard part of Israel’s political discourse.

The few Israelis still involved in Palestinian solidarity activities are harassed and in some cases jailed, such as the history teacher Meir Baruchin, who was accused of treason, jailed for four days, and held in solitary confinement after criticizing the killing of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip. Dissent, including calling for a ceasefire, is becoming increasingly criminalized.

As the notion of a two-state solution fades into the political background, Palestinians and some Israelis have begun to search for alternatives. The One Democratic State Campaign, which is a Palestinian-led initiative established in 2018 by Palestinian and Israeli-Jewish activists, intellectuals, and academics, envisions a single democratic state in Historical Palestine, the dismantling of the colonial Zionist apparatus, and the establishment of a political arrangement in which Palestinians and Israeli Jews are equal and enjoy an equal entitlement to cultural, economic, and social justice.

The campaign seeks to position itself within a wider global human liberation movement, including progressive forces in the Arab World. Ultimately, they and other activists have come to realize that the essential choice is between an apartheid state or a democratic alternative based on equal rights for all.