https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-transfer-plan-banality-ethnic-cleansing
Gaza transfer plan: The banality of ethnic cleansing
All those who support the “voluntary migration” proposal should understand: the Palestinian people are not going anywhere.
The fact that polls show overwhelming support among Jewish Israelis for the idea of expelling Palestinians from Gaza is horrifying, and it demands deep soul-searching - especially for a people who suffered the barbarities of the Holocaust, racism and mass murder.
Their willingness today to adopt a concept that echoes these horrors reflects a serious moral distortion.
The notion of population transfer is not new in Israel. Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose extremist ideology has increasingly been brought back into the mainstream, advocated for this half a century ago.
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The concept gained momentum with the addition of Itamar Ben Gvir to Israel’s far-right government (he has since resigned from cabinet in protest over the Gaza ceasefire).
The aspiration to empty Palestine of its indigenous inhabitants has not just persisted for decades; it is actively gaining legitimacy. How is it possible that those whose own people stood on the brink of extermination are now adopting the very methods used to victimise them?
Universal condemnation
For US President Donald Trump, ethnic cleansing is not just a theoretical term or a subject for intellectual discussion. It is backed by official statements from senior Israeli politicians, some of them government ministers, who have openly called for forced expulsions or even dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who enthusiastically supports Trump’s delusional and dangerous population transfer plan, is advocating a notion that has been universally condemned across history: the banality of ethnic cleansing.
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Former US President Joe Biden normalised genocide. Now, Trump is trying to normalise ethnic cleansing. But the Palestinian people will never surrender: they always rise.
Unfortunately, this problem transcends politics. When opinion polls show that an overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis support Trump’s proposal, it means that a racist and authoritarian view has become the norm.
For a people whose national identity was largely built on their own experience of cruel victimisation and forced deportation in Europe, such crimes are apparently now viewed as a legitimate solution.
At a time when key voices in Israel are broadcasting that “there are no uninvolved people in Gaza” - failing to differentiate armed men from civilians, including women and children - the moral abyss into which Israeli society has descended is laid bare. To proceed based on such a conviction is not only a moral betrayal, but also a blatant violation of international law.
As Israeli pundits normalise and justify the mass killing of children with such terrible claims, they are backed by most of the country’s legislators, with only a few exceptions.
The cynical use of the memory of the Holocaust to justify similar crimes against other people is one of the most serious distortions of modern history. Israel often reminds the world of its duty to remember the Holocaust, to fight its denial, and to prevent similar atrocities.
But at the same time, Israel promotes a policy that runs entirely counter to these principles. How can one demand international recognition of past atrocities, while simultaneously aiming to erase another people from their homeland?
Rhetoric of occupation
The idea that everyone in Gaza is guilty aims to justify harming innocent civilians. This is the rhetoric of an occupying army that treats every Palestinian as an enemy to be subdued, expelled or eliminated.
It is thus permissible to shoot and kill 23-year-old Sundus Shelby, who was eight months pregnant, in Tulkarm in the occupied West Bank because “she looked suspiciously at the ground”, without anyone in Israel evidently being moved. Nor was any reaction forthcoming from the wartime broadcast studios, whose focus is purely on security.
These attitudes do not exist in a vacuum. They permeate public consciousness and become policy on the ground.
In Gaza, the incessant shelling, deliberate starvation of the population, demolition of homes, and cutting of electricity and water supplies - all are direct expressions of that policy, which aims to break the will of the Palestinian people and bring them to the brink of collapse.
But the Palestinian people are not passive victims. History has demonstrated that even in the face of occupation, oppression and displacement, the national will and desire for justice remain strong.
Even if tens of thousands of Palestinians were expelled, this would not comprise a solution. Ethnic cleansing was also carried out in 1948, with some 530 Palestinian villages destroyed and their residents expelled or killed.
Egypt and Jordan were wise to reject the delusional proposals of Trump, who sees the Israel-Palestine conflict as a real-estate matter. He imagines that it can be solved by “taking over” and rebuilding Gaza - and in this, he enjoys the support not only of Israel’s messianic right, but also of its political centre and part of the left. Woe to a political opposition of this kind, which has failed in parliamentary terms as well as morally.
The Palestinian people will not be expelled. Not in Gaza, nor in the occupied West Bank. Ethnic cleansing is a war crime that has been repeatedly judged by history, and the same will happen this time.
We need a unified position and an operative plan from the Arab and Islamic world, but also from the rest of the world, which bears responsibility for the devastation of Gaza after green-lighting a series of Israeli war crimes. There is still room for sanity to prevail over the banality of evil.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.