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Since the first weeks of the ongoing war in Gaza, the Israeli intention to displace the population of the Strip outside it has emerged, and despite the ebb and flow of American and Western cover for this step, it has remained at the core of the political and military strategy of the occupation until now.
This calls for exploring the roots of this trend, its implementation policies, positions regarding it, and manifestations of resistance to it.
Demographic concern
The Zionist idea is based on the fact that “Palestine is a land without a people, and it will be inhabited by a people without a land.” In order for this idea to become valid for implementation, the land must actually become without a Palestinian people.
It is known that the Israeli settlement pattern is “replacement,” meaning that it is based on expelling the owners of the land and settling in their place. This is what appears in the geography of the cities and settlements of the occupying state, which are based on the ruins of Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948.
Despite this concern, Zionism and the occupying state were unable to fully achieve the goal of displacement.
For factors including:
Palestinian resistance and steadfastness in their land.
Lack of international cover to completely displace them.
The occupation bets for some time on the strategy of integrating and containing or “Israelizing” the Palestinians in the territories occupied in 1948.
To make matters worse for the Israelis, the population growth rate of the Palestinians is very high, which contributed to making their number larger than the Jews within the borders of historic Palestine, according to figures from the Palestinian Department of Statistics.
This is a situation that Israeli politicians and researchers have warned about, describing it as a "demographic bomb" that must be eliminated by any means.
Israeli displacement policies
In light of this aggressive Zionist ideology, the occupying state committed itself to policies that push towards emptying the land of Palestine of its people.
During times of war, it deliberately commits massacres and intimidation, and spreads rumors to push Palestinians to flee their homes, cities, and villages, as happened in the Deir Yassin, Qibya, and Al-Dawayma massacres in 1948.
In times of peace, it adopted many means, including security, economic, and livelihood restrictions, by restricting health and educational services, restricting the movement of Palestinians through hundreds of barriers it set up between the cities and villages of the West Bank, and controlling natural resources and preventing them from exploiting them.
In addition to the imposition of collective punishments, high fines, non-recognition of the Bedouins’ citizenship and their displacement from them, and the adoption of the Absentee Property Law, which enabled the occupation authorities to seize the property of the displaced.
In the settlement negotiations, successive Israeli governments showed strictness regarding the return of refugees to Palestine, and the negotiations revolved around the return of only 50,000 of them, divided over a period of 10 years.
Strictness also appears in the instructions and procedures for “reunification” of families separated between Palestine and outside it.
Efforts to displace the people of the Gaza Strip
The occupation leaders saw the Al-Aqsa Flood operation on October 7 as a strategic strike, the impact of which might be mitigated by bringing about a strategic change in the situation of the Strip, in terms of land, population, or both.
This is done by creating a buffer zone within it, or occupying its entire north and emptying its population, or displacing the people of the Strip, or a large percentage of them, outside Palestine, voluntarily or unwillingly, by land or sea.
This is in addition to the traditional motives, such as achieving the Zionist goal of seizing the land after getting rid of the population, and the desire to get rid of the resistance, or at least reduce its human reservoir, and this enhances its opportunity to seize the gas fields in the waters of Gaza, and neutralize the threat to its projects to extract gas from Mediterranean sea.
In this context, the occupation has created repulsive conditions for the people of the Gaza Strip since its occupation, and has intensified them by besieging Gaza since 2006 following the victory of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in the legislative elections, which prompted the United Nations Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Robert Piper, in 2017, to warn that the Gaza Strip Gaza is on its way to becoming uninhabitable due to the deteriorating humanitarian conditions at all levels.
Displacement in the ongoing war
In the ongoing war on the Gaza Strip, the occupation army adopted a policy of intimidation by tightening the siege to become a comprehensive siege, under which water, food, fuel and electricity were stopped, in addition to bombing aimed at causing large numbers of deaths and a wide range of destruction, including undermining civilian facilities, and everything necessary. To continue life, such as hospitals, schools, and mosques, while showing the kinds of brutality in arresting Palestinians.
One of the goals of this behavior is to push the people of the Gaza Strip to emigrate, and this is a more criminal and cruel reproduction of the models of displacement in 1948 and 1967.
The occupation also used gradual evacuation orders for some areas of the Gaza Strip, leading to their gathering on the border with Egypt as a prelude to their displacement.
On the political level, the occupation government proposed displacement as a solution to the conflict since the beginning of the war, and it was clear from the political speech of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi that there are international demands to facilitate the process of Gazans seeking refuge in Sinai.
On the media level, Israel is working to criminalize all the people of the Gaza Strip to justify their killing and displacement, or to promote that those whom Israel wishes to displace are supporters of the Hamas movement, as stated in the statements of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Displacement put enormous pressure on the city of Rafah (Al Jazeera)
International and Arab positions
Actual complicity of the US administration in displacing the population of the Gaza Strip appeared at the beginning of the war, as US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken tried to promote the idea regionally during his first visit to the region after October 7, and then American enthusiasm to adopt the matter as a declared option declined, but without Exerting sufficient pressure to deter the occupation from this path.
While the majority of Western countries declare their rejection of displacement, many of them have shown a willingness to receive the supposed refugees.
This position and discourse provides a political basis for the continuation of the Israeli displacement strategy, whether voluntarily or involuntarily.
As for Egypt, at the beginning of the war there was a fear of the option of displacement, for no other reason than that it conveys the idea of resistance to Egypt and threatens peace with Israel, according to the statements of the Egyptian President.
However, the constructions that the Egyptian authorities have been building since the beginning of this month in parallel with the city of Rafah - according to the Wall Street Journal and the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights - indicate that they are preparing for this scenario.
This change may be based on adopting a policy of isolating the supposedly displaced people from the rest of the Egyptians, by placing them in special isolation areas similar to the case of the Syrian refugee camps in Jordan.
This will place them in an open-air prison, with the possibility of re-displacing them to countries that accept them after ensuring that they “do not support the resistance.”
As for Jordan, it is sensitive to the displacement of the population of the Gaza Strip, for fear that it will set a precedent that establishes a repeat of the experience in the West Bank, by displacing its people to its lands, which the regime sees as an existential threat to it, due to the fragile demographic balance in the country. However, the Jordanian position remains little impact on The course of events and the positions of the occupation and the United States.
Resistance to displacement
The steadfastness of hundreds of thousands of people in the northern Gaza Strip played a pivotal role in obstructing the displacement project and the plan to occupy the north.
This is one of the motives behind the occupation’s punishment of these people by tightening the siege, in an attempt to subjugate their will to accept displacement, and so that they can be an example to the rest of the people of the Gaza Strip.
In this context, it is possible to understand the position of the Hamas movement to suspend negotiations with the occupation until aid and food supplies are brought into the Strip, especially its north.
The phenomenon of thousands of displaced people returning to their homes in the north and east of the Gaza Strip during the truce period was an indication of the existence of a collective will to resist displacement.
What is noteworthy is that no attempt to penetrate the Egyptian border has been recorded so far, despite the horror of the bombing and the severity of starvation over the course of nearly 4 and a half months.
This is something rare in the history of conflicts and wars, and indicates awareness and keenness to cling to the land, based on the conviction of the small possibility of them returning to their homes if they leave the land of Gaza.
Especially as they witness the occupation government’s refusal to return the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to it.
In conclusion, the battle with the occupation revolves around the population and the land with its sacred things, and the Palestinian resistance constitutes an obstacle to the projects of geographical expansion and demographic emptying that are not limited to the borders of Palestine, and obstructing these projects is not complete without broader Arab and Islamic engagement in confronting them, in a way that provides for the people of Palestine in general. And Gaza in particular, the conditions and components of steadfastness on their land.
Failure in this mission puts the stability of many Arab and Islamic countries at risk, and exposes the legitimacy of their regimes to harm, in light of their inability to protect their national security, the interests of their peoples, and their fundamental values.
Source: Al Jazeera