Tag: Palestinians

Zionist Think Tank Publishes Plans for Gaza’s Ethnic Cleansing

Below is a lengthy excerpt from a recent article at the Grayzone. titled “Zionist Think Tank Publishes Blueprint for Palestinian Genocide.” It is written by Kit Klarenburg.

The article is both shocking and entirely believable.

What we are watching today in Gaza is a modern instance of genocide. The goal is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, and eventually from the West Bank, as well.

The excerpt begins here:

As Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza entered its third week, leaving over 5000 dead and at least one million residents displaced, a Tel Aviv-based think tank published a blueprint for self-proclaimed Jewish state’s final solution.

In a white paper released over a week after the Hamas-led surprise attack on Israeli military bases and kibbutzes, The Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy outlined “a plan for resettlement and final rehabilitation in Egypt of the entire population of Gaza,” based on the “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip” that Israel’s latest assault on the besieged costal enclave provided.

Published in Hebrew on the organization’s website, the paper was authored by

Smoke and flames billow after Israeli forces struck a high-rise tower in Gaza City, October 7, 2023. Palestinian militants have begun a “war” against Israel which they infiltrated by air, sea and land from the blockaded Gaza Strip, Israeli officials said, a major escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Photo by Ali Hamad apaimages

Amir Weitman, “an investment manager and visiting researcher” at the Institute who also leads the libertarian caucus of Israel’s ruling Likud Party. The document began by noting that there are 10 million vacant housing units in neighboring Egypt that could be “immediately” filled with Palestinians. Weitman then assured readers that the “sustainable plan…aligns well with the economic and geopolitical interests of the State of Israel, Egypt, the USA and Saudi Arabia.”

Weitman’s ethnic cleansing proposal echoes forced transfer plans advanced in recent days by former Israeli officials while capitalizing on evacuation orders delivered to the entire civilian population of northern Gaza by the Israeli military.

Weitman’s sinister blueprint imagined Israel purchasing these properties at a cost of $5 – 8 billion dollars, a whopping price-tag that reflects just 1 – 1.5 percent of Israel’s GDP.

“These sums of money [required to cleanse Gaza] in relation to the Israeli economy, are minimal,” Weitman posits. “Investing individual billions of dollars to solve this difficult issue is an innovative, cheap and sustainable solution.”

Weitman acknowledged that his plan virtually amounts to Israel “buying the Gaza Strip,” arguing the move would be “a very worthwhile investment” for Zionists because it would “add a lot of value over time.” He asserted local “land conditions” in the area would provide “many” Israeli settlers a high standard of living, therefore allowing for an expansion of settlements in Gush Dan near the Egyptian border, giving “a tremendous impetus to settlement in the Negev.”

In December 2021, Tel Aviv approved plans to establish four settlements in the Negev to house 3,000 settler families.

Though Egypt has so far rejected Israeli pressure for a mass exodus of Gaza

A section of the Gaza border-fence

residents through the southern Rafah crossing, Weitman argued Cairo will welcome the mass exodus of Palestinian refugees  as “an immediate stimulus” that will “provide a tremendous and immediate benefit to al-Sisi’s regime.” 

Weitman claimed that Cairo’s major creditors — including France, Germany and Saudi Arabia — are likely to welcome a revitalized Egyptian economy, courtesy of “Israeli investment” in the Palestinians’ permanent removal. He surmizes that Western Europe will welcome “the transfer of the entire Gaza population to Egypt,” because it will significantly “reduce the risk of illegal immigration…a tremendous advantage.” Meanwhile, he expects Riyadh to embrace the move because the “evacuation of the Gaza Strip means the elimination of a significant ally of Iran.”

The ethnic cleansing of Gaza would mean an end to “ceaseless, repeated rounds of fighting, which inflame the fires of hatred against Israel.” Moreover, “closing the Gaza issue will ensure a stable and increased supply of Israeli gas to Egypt and its liquefaction,” from the vast reserves seized by Israel near Gaza’s shores.

Palestinians in turn are expected to jump at the chance to be forcibly transferred from their homes rather than “living in poverty under the rule of Hamas.” It is therefore necessary for Israel to “create the right conditions” for them to “immigrate” from Gaza to Cairo. Weitman noted that Gaza’s two million inhabitants “constitute less than 2% of the total Egyptian population, which today already includes 9 million refugees. A drop in the ocean.”

The paper ominously concluded: “There is no doubt that in order for this plan to come to fruition, many conditions must exist at the same time. Currently, these conditions are met and it is unclear when such an opportunity will arise again, if ever. This is the time to act. Now.” . . . 

. . . In 2004, Zionist demographer Arnon Sofer of Haifa University laid out detailed plans for the isolation of Gaza directly to Ariel Sharon’s government. This entailed withdrawing Israeli forces from the area entirely and constructing a stringent system of surveillance and security to ensure nothing and no one went in or out without Zionist proviso. He predicted a perpetual bloodbath:

“When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today…The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day…the only thing that concerns me is how to ensure the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.”

The Institute has put forward a clean and easy fantasy of achieving the same goal put forward by Sofer. For it to succeed, all Palestinians have to do is put down their weapons and head toward the desert of permanent exile. . . 

Read the entire article here.

Another Response to Russell Moore and His Complaint Against “Bothsidesism”

This is my second post made in response to an article by Dr. Russell Moore, of Christianity Today magazine. My first response, issued quickly late last Wednesday night, was a reply to Moore’s previous editorial, “American Christians Should Stand with Israel Under Attack.”

Now I am at it again.

Several days ago, I received a request from my friend Steve, who pastors a church in Northwest Washington. He sent me a new article from Russell Moore’s Newsletter and asked if I might write a response. Dr. Moore’s  second article is titled “’Bothsidesism’ About Hamas Is a Moral Failure.”

Although Dr. Moore does not clearly define what he means by “bothsidesism,” he does clearly insist that there is only one moral position to take when viewing the current war between Israel and Hamas: Hamas is a terrorist organization that launched “a vicious and unprecedented attack” against Israel. Any attempt to explain Hamas’ motivations, anything that sounds like excuse-making or a justification for terrorism, has entered “a morally dangerous place” leading to “hackery,” according to Moore.

So, please excuse me while I put on my hackery hat for a moment.

One of the first lessons I learned in graduate school is that I cannot pretend to understand an issue until I have first examined all of the evidence available for all sides of a question. Knowing only how to defend one side – my side – of an argument demonstrates that I do not understand the argument well enough to talk about it. What are the strengths of the opposing views? Why are others convinced of things that I am not? Why do I think that my arguments are sufficiently convincing that I can, in good conscience, persuade others to share my opinion rather than anyone else’s?

It’s called being educated. Others may call it bothsidesism. I call it the essential foundation of a well-considered opinion.

Only after I am sufficiently educated on a subject (whether a question of war or a doctrinal controversy) am I in a position to then form a moral judgment about the matter at hand. Ill-informed, knee-jerk judgments are cheap and easy, especially when they keep us singing the same moralistic tune as all the other folks in our favorite community choir.

Condemning a well-considered educational process as bothsidesism is only a high-falutin, moralistic sounding way of dismissing the importance of knowing what one is talking about.

Explanation is not the same as making excuses. To excuse Hamas is one thing – a completely unacceptable thing. But explaining the motives behind Hamas terrorism is another thing altogether; something that can easily coexist with moral outrage over Hamas’ actions.

So, on the one hand, Dr. Moore is right. Our first response to Hamas’ slaughter of Israeli civilians can only be condemnation. All the innocent victims, their families and friends deserve our deepest sympathies and whatever humanitarian assistance we can provide in their hour of need.

On the other hand, I am able to walk and chew gum at the same time. My second response is to insist that we apply the terrorism label even-handedly.

Terrorism is commonly defined as the use of violence against civilians to achieve a political or military aim. By that measure, the Hamas attack on October 7th was a massive act of terrorism. Firing Hamas rockets (which typically lack a guidance system) into Israeli territory is terrorism.

But it is pure, unadulterated, blind prejudice not to recognize that the Israeli government practices terrorism against the Palestinian people on a daily basis, and has done so for decades. Israeli leaders boasted about their deliberate terrorism when their defense minister promised to “wipe out” the “human animals” living in Gaza.

Israel commits terrorism when they slaughter over 3,000 human beings, including more than 1,000 children, while bombing the residential neighborhoods of Gaza.

Israel has committed crimes against humanity for over 16 years by imposing a strict military blockade around Gaza, reducing the population to extreme, dehumanizing living conditions as an act of collective punishment.

The Israeli sociologist, Baruch Kimmerling, once described Gaza as “the largest concentration camp” in the world. Can you blame the inmates of a concentration camp for eventually attacking the prison guards who starve them, bomb them, and dehumanize them daily?

Israel is a settler-colonial, apartheid state that continues the state-sponsored land theft begun in 1948. The official government term is “Judaization.” All throughout Israel and the West Bank “legal” mechanisms are applied to dispossess Palestinian land-owners and replace them with Jewish settlers, settlers who frequently attack and kill innocent Palestinian civilians. (For more on the role of the Israeli military in Israel’s Judaization process, see my book Like Birds in a Cage.)

I can’t help but wonder if Dr. Moore has ever expressed the same moral clarity in writing an editorial condemning Israeli war crimes as he now possesses in condemning the recent Hamas attacks. At several points in his essay, he offers the bland bromide that we cannot grant “unthinking acceptance of anything the modern state of Israel does,” but when and where has Dr. Moore ever publicly criticized Israeli actions in the way he now justifiably criticizes Hamas?

I am happy to be corrected, but I suspect that he never has. In general, Israeli crimes are quietly accepted. Only Palestinian crimes are condemned.

So, excuse me while I find Dr. Moore’s warnings about bothsidesism to be a one-sided excuse for poo-pooing those who are working to describe an educated appraisal of the way war crimes beget war crimes.

It’s long past time to extend our criticisms even-handedly to both sides. For Hamas and Israel are both guilty. While Israelis and Palestinians are all suffering.

Watch My Interview with Stephen Sizer

The Rev. Stephen Sizer is a vicar with the Church of England who has been a strong advocate for Palestinian human rights for many years.

He is also a staunch disciple of Jesus Christ who vividly examplifies what it means to love one’s enemies.

As a result of Stephen’s witness to loving his neighbors in Palestine, he has also suffered a great deal of persecution and unjust suffering at the hands of the pro-Israel lobby in England.

I was pleased as punch when he asked me to do an interview about my new book with him on his podcast. Take a look:

 

 

Jonathan Cook Talks About the Ongoing Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Jonathan Cook is a British journalist living in Israel. Today he has an excellent post at Consortium News about the long-term, ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The current war is only the latest chapter in a heartbreaking, 75-year story.

Yes, the Hamas attack against Israel was a horrible war crime and deserves

The results of Israeli bombing in Gaza

to be condemned. Yet, it was a crime committed in response to 75 years of war crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinian people.

Here is an excerpt:

The missing context for what’s happening in Gaza is that Israel has been working night-and-day to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people from their homeland since even before Israel become a state — when it was known as the Zionist movement.

Israel didn’t just cleanse Palestinians in 1948, when it was founded as a Western colonial project, and again under cover of a regional war in 1967. It also worked to ethnically cleanse Palestinians every day between those dates and afterwards. The aim was to move them off their historic lands and either expel them beyond Israel’s new, expanded borders or concentrate them into small ghettos inside those borders — as a holding measure until they could be expelled outside the borders.

The “settler” project, as we call it, is a misnomer. It’s really Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme. Israel even has a special word for it in Hebrew: “Judaisation,” or making the land Jewish. It is official government policy.

Gaza was the largest of the Palestinian reservations created by Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme and the most overcrowded. To stop the inhabitants spilling out, Israel built a fence-barrier in the early 1990s to pen them in. Then when policing became too hard from within the prison, Israel pulled back in 2005 to the outer perimeter barrier.

Read the rest of the article here.

Ali Abunimah: “Israel is Reaping Exactly What They Have Sown”

Ali Abunimah is the co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of two excellent books: The Battle for Justice in Palestine, and  One Country: A Bold-Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.  I have read them both.

In this recent interview with Al Jazeera English, Mr. Abunimah concisely describes the root causes of the current wave of violence in Israel-Palestine.

Workable solutions can only arise from honest analysis of the real problems.

 

Orly Noy: “Our Humanity is Being Put to the Test”

Orly Noy is an Israeli journalist writing from Israel. Her latest piece at +972 Magazine is titled, “Our Humanity is Being Put to the Test.”

Yes, the attack on Israel was a vile crime. Now, Israel’s response reveals the criminality (or humanity) of its own society.

Below is an excerpt:

Morality is never a privilege, a luxury, an accessory that we can don when it’s convenient or remove when less so. Morality isn’t an indulgence we can’t afford during a catastrophe.

Insisting on morality is an insistence on context, without which this horrible violence loses its meaning and gets reduced to “human animals that want to destroy us for no reason.” To insist on morality and context is not to justify a crime. On the contrary – it is to ensure our understanding of reality includes all of the factors that contribute to it, so that we can more effectively change it.

If Hamas’ crimes justify unmitigated destruction through the collective punishment of the people of Gaza, what morality can we claim to condemn Hamas, especially given the harm Israel has inflicted there over the years? 

Read the entire article here.

No. We Cannot Stand with Israel. That Has Always Been Part of Israel’s Problem

Every western power you can shake a stick at is pledging to “stand with Israel” in its new war against the people of Gaza and Hamas.

With the catastrophic Israeli death toll topping 900, with 100s more missing and taken as hostages, the well-polished rhetoric of Israel’s fight for civilization is now on display. It will be a war of light against darkness, we are told.

Innocent, ennobled Israeli victims will take up their weapons and fight “with purity of arms” against the unwashed, barbarian hoards inhabiting the Gaza Strip.

Earlier yesterday, the Israeli defense minister announced that Israel had been attacked “by human animals.” Thus, justifying Israel’s impending savage response as it pays the Palestinians back in kind, inhumanity for inhumanity.

Such rhetoric is not new. In fact, Israeli politicians have a long history of making degrading, dehumanizing remarks against the 5.4 million Palestinians who are kept under lock and key in the dungeons otherwise known as the Occupied Territories (consisting of Gaza and the West Bank).

Yes, people are right to point out that the Hamas attack against Israeli civilians was a war crime. But when have these defenders of Israeli virtue ever cried out against the perpetual war crimes committed against the people of Gaza?

50% of the Gazan population are children. The median age is 16. It is one of the most densely populated pieces of real estate on earth, denser than Tokyo.

For the past 16 years Israel has walled these people off from the rest of the world, literally encircling all 2.2 million behind a hi-tech military fence, complete with sniper towers and automated, high powered semi-automatic machine guns.

Israel has boasted about calculating the number of calories needed to sustain the population at a near starvation level. And the minimal caloric intake is enforced. A military blockade keeps a stranglehold on everything and everyone entering or leaving the Strip.

In past bombing campaigns, Israel has already destroyed all infrastructure, including power plants and water purification facilities. Native industries have been demolished. Unemployment is 60%. Only a small fraction of the available drinking water is fit for human consumption.

So, when anyone, whether politician or church leader, heartily invokes the pledge of “standing with Israel” as that country prepares to lay siege against 1.1 million malnourished, impoverished children and their family members, struggling as best they can to survive in a nearly impossible situation, I am forced to call a time out.

Israel boasts about planning its own war crimes, and now our leaders tell us it’s time to stand with Israel?

Excuse me?!

For 56 years the Palestinian people have been suffering under Israel’s military dictatorship.

For 16 years the people of Gaza have been suffocated – nearly to death – by a military blockade, from which it is impossible for them to escape.

When has the west ever objected? When have we protested? When has the US called Israel to account for its brutal mistreatment of our fellow human beings?

Are Israeli lives more precious than Palestinian lives? While paying pious, vapid lip-service to human rights, the western states certainly behave as if Israel were merely conducting innocent experiments on laboratory animals, not Mengele-like violations on 2.2 million precious Bearers of God’s Image.

In the last 10 months alone, approximately 250 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. How loudly – and when and where, exactly? – did President Biden, or any other western leader, lament over the flagrant killings of those people, including the 40 innocent Palestinian children included in that death toll? When were condolences sent to their grieving mothers and fathers?

Israelis curse the home-made rockets, sans guidance systems, that rain down on southern Israel from Gaza. Where was their grief when Israeli missiles bombarded the densely populated Jenin refugee camp only months ago? Oh, I remember, they were cheering and applauding for that exercise in slaughter.

Israelis grieve over the images of families torn apart as they are kidnapped and taken away to secret locations under Hamas control.

But this is daily life for Palestinians in the West Bank. Night raids are the norm. Family members are regularly ripped from each other’s’ arms as children are “disappeared” into IDF prison facilities. This is the typical state of affairs in Palestinian homes suffering under Israeli military occupation.

So, No. It is not time to stand with Israel.

It is long past time to confront Israel with the obvious question: What the bloody hell did you expect would happen?

Israel’s New Legal Changes Removes the Last Obstacle to Limitless Settler Expansion

Massive protests continue in Israel even though the series of judicial review laws being protested have successfully begun to be passed.

Here is the best overview I have seen of the different issues involved, produced by VPRO, the Dutch Public Broadcasting Service.

It is fairly well rounded and allows the viewer to hear voices that are typically left out of the American conversation. It offers a good perspective on what all the anger and uproar has been about, and why it will not end anytime soon.

My only complaint, which is actually a major flaw, is that no Palestinian Israelis are allowed to speak for themselves.

Here are my suggestions of what to look for:

Notice the arrogance and entitlement of the Jewish settlers-colonizers. Like early American pioneers, they are blind to the legitimate claims of the native people, the Palestinians. They simply presume to have a divine right to take as much land as they want, wherever, whenever, from whomever they wish. What in the world do biblical stories about Abrahamic land purchases have to do with Israeli land theft today????

Notice the legal benefits that the current judicial reforms will offer to these settlers-colonists. This point is highlighted towards the end of the 30-minute documentary. I suspect that THIS is the primary, driving force behind the push for this new legislation. The Supreme Court can no longer impede settler expansion in the Occupied Territory.

Notice the stratification of Israeli society. Not only is there a wide divide between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. There is also a considerable divide between Ashkenazi Jews of European descent and Mizrahi Jews of Arab descent. This discussion begins at the 17:00 minute mark. Even though they are often treated as second-class citizens by the Ashkenazi, the Mizrahi tend to be among the most vehement Zionists. Note how they refer to Ashkenazis as a “white elite.”

Notice the hero of the piece Netta Amar-Schiff. She appears at the 25:45 mark. She is a Jewish Israeli human rights lawyer who defends the rights of embattled Palestinians in the face of ever-expanding Israeli encroachment. Netta says it plainly, “Occupation and democracy do not go together.” One of the great failures of the current protest movement is its the omission of this key perspective from their demonstrations.

You will never hear about any of these issues or perspectives on a Christian news network. You’re unlike to hear it on the mainstream networks, for that matter.

Telling the Truth About Israel Can Get You Fired. Just Ask Katie Halper.

Katie Halper is an independent journalist and political commentator. Until last week, Ms. Halper was a visiting host on the news program The Hill.

That is, she WAS a regular guest on the show until she was summarily fired for reading her editorial spot explaining the details of Israeli apartheid.

Yes, Israel IS an apartheid state. It has always been an apartheid state, since day one. There is NO non-apartheid phase in Israel’s history because Israel was founded as a Jewish supremacist state.

If this is new information to you, then I encourage you to read my new book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People (Cascade, 2021).

But the pro-Israel, pro-Zionist public relations machine works very hard to hide this fact from the rest of the world.

They have been working particularly hard in recent years since Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem have all published their own reports extensively cataloguing the ins-and-outs of Israel’s comprehensive, systemic, apartheid regime.

I will let Ms. Halper explain it all for you:

Lessons from “One of the Most Brutal Military Tyrannies in the World” — Israel

Israeli journalist Gideon Levy critiques the work of Israel’s spy agency, Shin Bet in the most recent edition of the Jerusalem daily, Haaretz. The article is

Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy

titled “Israel’s Stasi Preaches Morality.”

Below is an excerpt explaining why Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza will forever resist Israeli oppression:

. . . It is difficult to assess the real balance – how many terror attacks the Shin Bet thwarts and how many attacks it motivates with its unchecked activities. But when Bar boasts of 2,000 recent arrests, it’s clear there are more than a few innocent people among them, and people who will be radicalized by their very detention.

In a reality in which every night, soldiers accompanied by dogs terrorize people sleeping in their homes and snatch citizens from their beds at the behest of the Shin Bet, without any legal supervision of course, and in a reality where hundreds of people are detained without trial for months and years, also by order of the Shin Bet, it is clear that the damage is enormous. The most serious consequence is turning Israeli democracy into one of the most brutal military tyrannies in the world, even if only in its own backyard.

The Shin Bet barely operates in sovereign Israel. But what it is doing in the occupied territories, which are an inseparable part of Israel, apparently forever, makes it impossible to define Israel as a democracy anymore, certainly not when it is clear that this is not a temporary situation. There is no evil with which the Israeli Stasi – in the territories the Shin Bet is the Stasi in every way, with more advanced technology than the infamous East German organization had – is unfamiliar.

Just this week I met, at the Al-Arroub refugee camp, an 11-year-old boy who lost an eye to an IDF bullet. Now he has also been defined as a security risk, who is barred from entering Israel for treatment at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center on the order of the Shin Bet. Last week, two cancer patients in the Gaza Strip died; they were unable to receive treatments in Israel in time because the Shin Bet denied them entry for two months.

Click here to read the entire article.