The online magazine +972 has published a 10-page policy paper produced by Israel’s Intelligence Ministry which argues that the only solution to the current war with Gaza is wholesale Palestinian population transfer.
According to the report, all the people of Gaza must be removed from their homes, relocated to the Sinai desert, and then redistributed as refugees throughout hospitable nations.
The document (which is included within the +972 article; you can read it for yourself) is remarkable for its colonial hubris and moral blindness.
Members of the Israeli establishment are conducting serious conversations about the best ways to stage manage, i.e., manipulate and control, the lives of 2.3 million native people.
The goal is to eliminate the inconvenience these uncooperative Palestinians pose to Israel’s settler-colonial status quo.
Since Palestinians continue to resist their colonization, the colonizing power — blinded by its imperial privilege and nationalistic arrogance — can only think to intensify its historic criminality.
Folks, population transfer is a war crime. It was a war crime in 1948. It remains a war crime today.
Here are some select excerpts from the +972 article. It is titled “Expell all Palestinians from Gaza, recommends Israeli gov’t ministry.” The author is Yuval Abraham. (All emphasis is mine):
The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence is recommending the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, according to an official document revealed in full for the first time by +972’s partner site Local Call yesterday.
The 10-page document, dated Oct. 13, 2023, bears the logo of the Intelligence Ministry — a small governmental body that produces policy research and shares its proposals with intelligence agencies, the army, and other ministries. It assesses three options regarding the future of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in the framework of the current war, and recommends a full population transfer as its preferred course of action. It also calls on Israel to enlist the international community in support of this endeavor. The document, whose authenticity was confirmed by the ministry, has been translated into English in full here on +972 . . .
The document recommends that Israel act to “evacuate the civilian population to Sinai” during the war; establish tent cities and later more permanent cities in the northern Sinai that will absorb the expelled population; and then create “a sterile zone of several kilometers … within Egypt, and [prevent] the return of the population to activities/residences near the border with Israel.” At the same time, governments around the world, led by the United States, must be mobilized to implement the move. . .
The transfer plan is divided into several stages. In the first stage, action must be taken so that the population of Gaza “evacuates south,” while the air strikes focus on the northern Gaza Strip. In the second stage, a ground incursion into Gaza will begin, leading to the occupation of the entire Strip from north to south, and the “cleansing of the underground bunkers of Hamas fighters.”
Concurrently with the re-occupation of Gaza, Palestinian civilians will be moved into Egyptian territory, and not be allowed to return. “It is important to leave the travel routes to the south open to enable the evacuation of the civilian population toward Rafah,” the document states. . .
Last week, the Misgav Institute, a right-wing think tank headed by Meir Ben-Shabbat, a close associate of Prime Minister Netanyahu and a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, published a position paper that similarly called for the forced transfer of Gaza’s population to the Sinai. The institute recently deleted the post from Twitter and from its website after drawing strong international censure. . .
You can read the entire piece here.
