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| Daniella Weiss, founder of Nachala, an Israeli settlers organization, speaks during a conference on the resettlement of the Gaza Strip, in Beeri, southern Israel, Oct. 21. (Janis Laizans/Reuters) |
| Just a couple miles from Gaza, top Israeli politicians gathered earlier this week and declaimed their grand visions for its future. “If we want it, we can renew settlements in Gaza,” said far-right national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir, telling a gathering of a major settler organization that he would encourage the “voluntary transfer” of Palestinians living in war-stricken Gaza out of the territory and the return of Jewish settlers, including those who were forced out of Gaza by their own government in 2005. “What we have learned this year is that everything is in our hands,” Ben Gvir said, before identifying what he considered the major legacy of militant group Hamas’s terrorist strike on southern Israel more than a year ago. “We are the owners of this land. Yes, we experienced a terrible catastrophe on October 7. But what we need to understand, one year later, is that so many Israelis have changed their thinking. They have changed their mindset. They understand that when Israel acts like the rightful owners of this land, this is what brings results.”
The mindset that he was extolling was a certain streak of ruthlessness in cracking down on its perceived enemies, from Palestinian group Hamas to Hezbollah in Lebanon, where Israel was doing “whatever we want,” as Ben Gvir put it, in its ongoing military operations. It underscores the conviction of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who still speaks of achieving a “total victory” against Israel’s foes even when myriad Western leaders want him to agree to deals ceasing hostilities over both Gaza and Lebanon. “At the end of the day, there is no choice but a diplomatic path,” Laurent Bili, France’s ambassador to the United States, told me this week. “Pursuing a purely military solution could further jeopardize Israel’s security and leave it surrounded only by enemies.” Gaza has essentially been destroyed amid a year of relentless Israeli bombardments, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed — including many women and children — and some 2 million have been displaced amid wave after wave of Israeli offensives. The sprawling humanitarian calamity triggered by the war is getting worse, with Israel squeezing northern Gaza and some 400,000 Palestinians still living amid its ruin. Punishing airstrikes have killed dozens of civilians in recent days, with residents describing areas of northern Gaza as a hellscape of debris and human limbs. Rescue workers told my colleagues that Israeli authorities stymied their efforts to retrieve bodies from cratered buildings, leaving countless dead beneath the rubble. Hospitals are out of medicine, desalination and water pumps have stopped working due to lack of fuel as little to no aid has entered northern Gaza, according to locals and rights groups. “People suffering under the ongoing Israeli siege in North Gaza are rapidly exhausting all available means for their survival,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres tweeted Wednesday.
For the pro-settlement crowd who convened not far from northern Gaza’s blasted neighborhoods, this is providential news. “In less than a year, you will see the Jews come to Gaza and the Arabs disappear,” said Daniella Weiss, one of Israel’s best-known settler leaders, told the assembled crowd earlier this week. Weiss, whose organization Nahala convened the two-day event, is a figure who has spent decades on the extremist fringe of Israeli politics. But here she and her organization stood, granted access to a closed military zone while backed by a phalanx of cabinet members and lawmakers from Netanyahu’s ruling coalition. Activists mused to journalists about the investment opportunities along Gaza’s waterfront. Attendees had erected a set of temporary shelters in commemoration of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, but the symbolism of the act, just a stone’s throw from Gaza, was not lost on anyone. “Today we sit in our temporary housing on this side of the border,” said Rabbi Dovid Fendel from the town of Sderot. “But tomorrow, we will build our permanent housing on the other side of the border.” The depopulation of all or parts of Gaza is not the stated policy of Netanyahu’s government. In discussions this week with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Netanyahu is said to have rejected suggestions that Israel had adopted the mooted “Generals’ plan” — a proposal by retired commanders to force the emptying of northern Gaza through denial of food and increased intensity of bombardment. At the gathering organized by Weiss, it was explicitly embraced. “We are the next stage of the Generals’ Plan,” an attendee told +972 magazine, a left-leaning Israeli news site. “Settlements will bring security for the long term.” Weiss said that, because of the attacks on Oct. 7, “the Arabs in Gaza have lost the right to be here.” The actions of Israel’s military in northern Gaza and the rhetoric coming from the influential Israeli right led to an urgent plea: Top Israeli human rights group B’Tselem declared this week that “the world must stop the ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza.” Its statement continued: “The magnitude of the crimes Israel is currently committing in the northern Gaza Strip in its campaign to empty it of however many residents are left is impossible to describe, not just because hundreds of thousands of people enduring starvation, disease without access to medical care and incessant bombardments and gunfire defies comprehension, but because Israel has cut them off from the world.” Israeli officials say that the current campaign in northern Gaza is intended to prevent Hamas from regrouping in the area. They have issued evacuation notices to those caught in the crossfire, but many residents say there is nowhere safe to go and that some routes south are blocked by Israeli forces.On the other side of Gaza’s borders, there was little sympathy. “We have to speak to them in the only language they understand,” Tally Gotliv, a lawmaker in Netanyahu’s Likud party, said of the Palestinians at the pro-settler event. “Taking their land away from them.” | ||||||||