Israel's Mission in Gaza: Fulfill the Promise of the Premise
"What can be achieved in this period of storm and stress will be quite unattainable once conditions get stabilized."--Labor Zionist Moshe Shertok, during the 1948 War.
For the past 11 years I’ve studied screenwriting. And one of the admonitions frequently given to baby screenwriters is, “Fulfill the promise of the premise.”
The promise of the premise is what gets theater-goers in their seats after seeing a trailer for a film. Here’s a premise: when a young, innocent farm boy joins a rebellion against an evil galactic empire he’ll draw on strengths within himself he didn’t know he had to lead them to victory.
That premise makes an unspoken promise: action, adventure, sci-fi, a protagonist we can root for, a feel-good ending. Star Wars delivers all of that and more, which is why, nearly 50 years after its premiere, I can use it here as an example and trust that, even if you’re one of the 5 people on the planet who haven’t seen it, you’ll understand my meaning.
The premise of Zionism is two-fold: a) security of the Jewish people in b) a “land without people for a people without land.”
As all of us who have been watching this film unfold for the past 100 years or so know there’s just one teensy-tiny little problem with that premise:
The land has never been without people.
The people are called Palestinians.
The land is called Palestine.
On March 19, 2024, the Guardian reported that Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, entrusted during his Presidency with developing a “Middle East peace plan,” was eyeing the “very valuable” potential of Gaza’s “waterfront property” and suggested Israel should remove civilians while it “cleans up” the Gaza Strip.
He was far from alone. You may have seen this video of an Israeli with an American accent explaining joyfully her and her husband’s intentions to settle in Gaza.
Before 2023 had ended, Harey Zahav, an Israeli real estate company, had circulated ads with maps and graphics for ‘presale’ lots in Gaza. According to Ha’ Aretz, Israel’s answer to the New York Times, “it was meant to be 'a joke' for its followers, but inadvertently caused an international scandal,” Linda Dayan wrote in December.
Israel's government and settler organizations apparently weren't in on the joke.
In November 2023, 11 right-wing organizations launched the "Coalition of Organizations for the Return to the Gaza Strip and All the Settlements of Northern Samaria.” The new coalition plans to rebuild the former Jews-only settlements in Northern Gaza and the northern West Bank.
In December 2023, hundreds of settlement activists gathered for another conference titled "Practical Preparation for Returning to Gaza,” while the Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir stated, "We must promote a solution to encourage the emigration of the [Palestinian] residents of Gaza.” Moshe Saada, a Member of the Knesset, said it was obvious that all the Gazans need to be destroyed.
If this appalls you, and it should, but Zionism doesn’t, please keep reading.
None of this is new. The IDF’s monstrous behavior in Gaza meant to terrorize the population into fleeing their homeland or die has been integral to Zionism from the beginning.
What we are witnessing is an acceleration of the process, and the descent into madness—both of the Israeli government and the IDF—that such a process invariably causes. But—and I cannot state this emphatically enough—this is not an aberration.
In his journal in 1895, the same year that the World Zionist Organization was formed at a conference in Basil, Switzerland, Theodore Herzl, the grandfather of Zionism, wrote with considerably more tact and panache than Netanyahu seems to possess, "We shall try to spirit the penniless [Palestinian] population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it any employment in our own country.”
The “penniless” bit was but one of many ignorant assumptions European Zionists had about Palestinians, but I digress.
Even Israel Zangiwill, a British Zionist organizer credited erroneously with the infamous phrase “a land without people for a people without land,” admitted by 1905 that Palestine was not a “land without people.” Approximately 650,000 Palestinian Christians and Muslims and 55,000 Palestinian Jews lived there at the time.
Well aware of this, Zangiwill stressed, "[We] must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the tribes in possession as our forefathers did or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan and accustomed for centuries to despise us [emphasis mine].” His meaning was taken up by Israel’s founders, although Muslims had not despised Jews for centuries—that was European Christians.
The problem, as Zionists saw it, was two-fold.
First, Zionists, like the rest of their European countrymen, were profoundly racist towards Arabs and had no interest in sharing a country with them.
They assumed Arabs were ignorant, penniless, and backward. So great was Zionist disdain for all things Semitic (irony alert) that once the State of Israel was founded, a public educational curriculum was developed to school Arab Jews out of their Arabism.
If you have ever visited Israel, you may have noticed how Euro-American it feels. Zionists wanted to live in the Arab world, cleansed of everything Arab.
Mizrahi Jews (a term created by Zionists to lump together Jews born in the Arab/Muslim world, including indigenous Palestinian Jews as well as Jews who emigrated to Israel from Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran) were subject to a wide array of insults, ill-treatment, and policy-based de-Arabicization by Ashkenazi Jewish settlers.
In a May 2020 article from The Nation, Mizrahi activist Orly Noy explained her own, and other Mizrahis’ opposition, to Israel’s racist “Nation-State” law. In an interview with writer Jen Marlowe, Noy referenced a 1996 speech by Ehud Barak in which he called Israel a “villa in the middle of the jungle.”
“When this is your self-perception, then your attitude toward the native people of that ‘jungle’—Mizrahis and Palestinians—becomes hostile, says Noy. Palestinians aren’t permitted in the villa at all. Mizrahis are permitted ‘as conditional guests,’ provided they can prove their loyalty. ‘They need to be more patriotic, to get rid of any trace of Arab-hood in their identity, their language, their cultures, their traditions, their history.’
Marlowe cites history that is little known outside Israel, the kinds of discrimination Mizrahi Jews experience, including the kidnapping of Yemeni Jewish babies and their adoption by Ashkenazi families—a racist, colonizing practice stolen from the U.S. which abducted thousands of indigenous children and placed them either with white families or in brutal boarding schools where they were to be forcibly “cleansed” of everything indigenous in their personhood.
Indian Jews in Israel were the first to point out Israel’s white supremacy, but Ethiopian Jews have experienced more than their fair share of it as well.
So the first reason for ethnically cleansing Palestinine through forced exile or death is simply contempt for all things not European. You know, racism.
But the second equally racist but indubitably more relevant matter is simple demography. As John Kerry said, “[W]ith one state, Israel can be Jewish or a democracy but it cannot be both.”
Unless Zionists ethnically cleansed Palestine of Arab Christians and Muslims, they could neither initiate, nor maintain, Euro-Jewish hegemony over the land.
This is the original sin of Zionism, and it remains the reason for everything happening in Gaza—and the West Bank, where Hamas is not in power—during the past six months.
In 1937 the Jewish Agency in Palestine—the de facto Jewish government, pre-Israel—set up a Transfer Committee (“transfer” being the euphemism of the day for ethnic cleansing). It was the job of the Transfer Committee to figure out how to get the Palestinians out of Palestine.
Yosef Weitz, whom Israeli historian Ilan Pappe called “a quintessential Zionist colonialist,” made a summary of a list of the Arab villages that in his opinion must be “cleared out in order to complete Jewish regions. I also made a summary of the places that have land disputes and must be settled by military means.”
Another member of the committee, Alfred Bonne, said that in his opinion "all the Arabs must be removed in ten years.”
I could list one hundred other quotations from these men and other Zionists that say the same thing. To be clear, this was more than 10 years before the U.N. partitioned Palestine into two countries, one predominantly made of Europeans Jews, the other predominantly made up of Palestinian Christians and Muslims.
It was not until November 29th, 1947 that the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181 that would divide Palestine into two vastly unequal states – one Jewish with 56% of the land and one Arab with 42% – even though there were twice as many Arabs as Jews.
The transfer committee, tasked with ethnically cleansing Palestine, was created and acting long before the profound injustice of Resolution 181 led to Arab states invading the newly minted State of Israel in May 1948. Palestinian deaths and flight from their land, often at Israeli gunpoint, cannot be understood as a consequence of that war.
Although David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, was relatively careful in his remarks about ethnic cleansing, not wanting to go down in history as “the great expeller,” according to Israeli historian Benny Morris, he was nonetheless on record in 1938 as saying, "I support compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it."
Israeli historian Simha Flapan, wrote, “[t]hat Ben-Gurion's ultimate aim was to evacuate as much of the Arab population as possible from the Jewish state can hardly be doubted, if only from the variety of means he employed to achieve this purpose: an economic war aimed at destroying Arab transport, commerce, and the supply of foods and raw materials to the urban population; psychological warfare, ranging from "friendly warnings" to outright intimidation and exploitation of panic caused by dissident underground terrorism; and finally, and most decisively, the destruction of whole villages and the eviction of their inhabitants by the army.”
On December 20, 1940, Weitz confided to his diary, “Amongst ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country....The only way is to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, all of them, except perhaps Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not a single village or single tribe must be left...[emphasis mine].”
The war of 1948 was a boon for Zionists devoted to “transfer.” Palestinian historian Nur-el-Deen Masalha writes: “[Weitz] saw in the partition resolution and the coming hostilities the felicitous opportunity to set in motion long-nurtured plans. His diary is replete with injunctions not to ‘miss the opportunities offered by the war’.”
Moshe Shertok, secretary of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency, wrote to Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel, “as for the future, we are equally determined...to explore all possibilities of getting rid, once and for all, of the huge Arab minority which originally threatened us. What can be achieved in this period of storm and stress will be quite unattainable once conditions get stabilized [emphasis mine].”
Ilan Pappé describes what happened next:
“The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties, and goods; expelling residents; demolishing homes; and, finally, planting mines in the rubble to prevent the expelled inhabitants from returning…”
When it was over, 750,000 Arabs had been driven out of Palestine; 531 villages had been destroyed; 70 civilian massacres had taken place and 10-15,000 Palestinians were dead.
Among those were driven out was a man I had the privilege to know and respect years later, Reverend Audeh Rantisi. Audeh was 12 years-old when he and his family were marched at gunpoint from their town, Lydda, on the coastal plain of Palestine, to Ramallah, in the mountainous West Bank, where they became refugees in a region annexed by Jordan after the 1948 war. When I met him he was a married Anglican priest with three daughters, the youngest of whom has since become my adopted sister. Together they ran a home for orphaned and other boys in need in Ramallah.
If you have ever flown into Tel Aviv, you have been on the Rantisis’ land.
At the end of the war, Israel had occupied and annexed 77% of Palestine, as opposed to the already grossly unjust 56% given to the Zionists by the U.N.
By the first half of 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians in total were forcibly expelled or fled outside of their homeland, leaving approximately 150,000 Palestinians inside the 1948 borders of the Israeli state.
Of the 150,000, some 30,000 to 40,000 were internally displaced, forced out of their original homes, or having fled in terror inspired by massacres and threats. Like the 750,000 who were displaced beyond the borders of the new state, Israel prohibited internally displaced Palestinians from returning to their homes.
The Gaza Strip became part of Egypt, and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) became part of Jordan.
During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. They also annexed the Golan Heights (part of Syria) and occupied the Sinai Peninsula, which was eventually returned to Egypt in 1982.
Israel has never annexed the remainder of the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. Both have remained under Israeli military occupation for the past 57 years. The Palestinians living there are governed first and foremost by Israeli military law. Despite the Oslo Accords, Israel retains total control of the region, yet Palestinians do not have any citizenship, and cannot vote in Israeli elections.
Beginning in 1967, Israel moved Jewish Israeli settlers into Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, forcibly taking Palestinian land and water and giving it to the settlers. Jewish settlers are citizens of Israel with voting rights, subject to civil not military law. They can and do carry massive personal weaponry and are generally free to use it against Palestinians without fear of repercussions. They have their own settlers-only roads, and neither curfews nor any other military control of Palestinians applies to them. They can move as freely as an Israeli citizen inside the 1948 borders of Israel.
Palestinians, on the other hand, cannot. They can be arrested (taken hostage) by the Israeli military at any time and held for up to 6 months—renewable indefinitely—without charge or trial simply by Israeli claiming they have security concerns about the person. Children as young as 12 are imprisoned, and the UN has documented Israeli sexual assault of both Palestinian women and men. Israeli human rights organizations have documented Israeli torture of Palestinians in these prisons for more than 30 years.
So Israel wants the land, and wants their citizens to live in the land with full rights as members of the Israeli state, but they do not want the Palestinians who live in those territories—both indigenous and refugees from ‘48—to have the same right to vote in Israeli elections. That is why Israel has engaged in a practice of de facto, rather than de jure, annexation.
And this is why people speak of apartheid. Two peoples living in the same land, two different legal systems, two different sets of rights, one clearly severely subordinate to the other.
It is against international law for a nation to move their own citizenry into land occupied in war. It is against international law for nations to annex land occupied in war.
Further, it is the responsibility of an occupying army to protect the people under occupation.
Israel has flagrantly disregarded both international law, and their responsibility vis-a-vis the Occupied Territories. Another irony alert: these laws were developed in direct response to the Nazi occupations and annexations of Europeans lands during World War 2.
So why does Israel do it? They want the land without the people.
If Palestinians had equal rights with Israelis from the river to the sea, the Zionist state would not long be able to continue privileging one group of people over the other. It would have to become a pluralistic state, multi-religious, with everyone’s national rights and aspirations recognized and respected.
Demography is not on the Zionists’ side. They know this.
I taught high school in Ramallah, a Palestinian city approximately 12 miles north of Jerusalem in the Occupied West Bank from 1992-94. I had previously visited the Occupied Territories and Israel in 1987 and 1988, researching the peace process. After watching the unbelievable “liberal” media coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 1991, I wanted to spend time living in Palestine so I could report first-hand what was happening.
During my time there, I witnessed first-hand the unwritten, unspoken strategy of the occupation: make life unbearable for the Palestinians so they leave, and/or kill them, with or without imprisoning them first. This took many forms.
*Making it difficult, if not impossible, to get permission to add onto one’s house as one’s family, or build a new house for one’s grown son and daughter-in-law (many homes were destroyed or parts of homes walled off because people couldn’t wait any more years to build);
*Using collective punishment (altogether now: “illegal under international”) law against an entire family, town, or region after arresting a Palestinian (usually man or boy) suspected of “terrorism” (read: likely just being a Palestinian male in Palestine);
*Making it difficult-if-not-impossible to get necessary necessary permissions to work;
*Arbitrarily closing roads, setting up checkpoints, demanding people submit to humiliating searches, and in general making it as difficult as possible to get on with daily life;
*Taxing the Palestinians to pay for their own occupation;
*Allowing Israeli settlers to harass, beat and kill Palestinians, including school-children, for any reason whatsoever with no consequences;
*Under Yitzhak Rabin’s Defense Ministry instituting a “break their bones” policy, wherein the army was literally instructed to break the bones of Palestinian men and boys rather than shooting them when they nonviolently protested the occupation because the latter was giving Israel bad press. An Israeli documentary called “Testimony,” which I saw in West Jerusalem, included interviews with soldiers who had served in the Occupied Territories during the first intifada. After showing one soldier footage of himself and others taken by CBS of them breaking the bones of unarmed Palestinians sitting on the ground, the soldier’s response was “What?” He wasn’t moved by the footage at all and explained that this was standard operating procedure under Rabin’s orders.
Almost every Palestinian man and boy I knew had been in prison, with or without charges. Being a Palestinian man de facto means to the occupation forces that one is a “terrorist.” Case in point: to this day, Israel maintains that they have killed between 10,000 and 12,000 Hamas fighters. But the number they’re using is the number of Palestinian MEN killed in Gaza, regardless of political affiliation or militancy.
In 2001, together with my husband, I returned to the Occupied Territories at the invitation of the International Solidarity Movement, an NGO founded by Palestinians and Israelis to create space for non-violent protest during the second intifada. The second intifada grew out of Palestinian frustration with the utter failure of the Oslo Peace Accords of 1994 to improve their situation at all. Indeed, in the years between its signing and my return to the territories, the number of Israeli settlers who had taken over Palestinian land in the West Bank had tripled.
During our month with ISM, we helped move groceries over barricades the Israeli army had randomly constructed at the entrances to villages to prevent the people’s freedom of movement; protested random curfews imposed on the people of Ramallah and El Bireh; observed and documented constant harassment and humiliation of Palestinians by soldiers at one of more than 140 Israeli checkpoints (illegal under the Oslo accords) (my favorite quotation from a soldier, as to why he was making a Palestinian man wait on the side of the road for no reason before crossing: “He must learn to come when I call”), and then nonviolently deconstructed that checkpoint. We were met with tear gas and beatings, and I personally had a soldier point his rifle at my chest during that last action.
Since 1967 Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed hundreds of Palestinians with impunity, imprisoned thousands without charge or trial, stolen their land, hijacked their water, humiliated them, and—in the case of Palestinians from Jerusalem—denied them the right even to experience culture, religious ceremonies, education and commerce in the city of their birth.
It was a creeping genocide, as common and quietly brutal under Labor Zionists as under Likud, the political grandchild of Vladimir Jabotinsky, a pre-state Zionist affectionately referred to as Vladamir Hitler by some in the Labor bloc.
Now, the U.S. Government, American and European Zionists want you to believe Netanyahu is the problem, but the only real problem with Netanyahu is his clumsiness. He has made obvious and manifest to a previously indifferent or unquestioningly Zionist world the brutality Israel has inflicted upon Palestinians for the past 100 years. The boot has never left their necks, it’s just squeezing the life out of them consistently now.
In January 2024, at the "Settlement Brings Security" Conference, 11 of 37 sitting Israeli cabinet ministers, as well as 15 members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, took part. Daniella Weiss, director of Nachala, the right-wing settler organization which sponsored the conference said, "It's the end of the presence of Arabs in Gaza. It's the end....Instead of them, there will be many, many Jews that will return to the settlements, that will build new settlements."
In his Ha’Aretz piece entitled, “An Orgy of Jewish Supremacy and Antidemocratic Euphoria, Encouraged by Netanyahu,” published on January 29th, former advisor to prime ministers Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres Alon Pinkas wrote, "This was not a fringe opposition group: it was the government of Israel in all its political splendor, unabashedly showing its true colors. This was the governing coalition in an orgy of anti-state and antidemocratic euphoria."
But do not let anyone delude you that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians will end with a different government.
It is part of the DNA of Zionism, and will only end with the end of Zionism.
Great condensed version of history and a taste of your personal experience in the occupied West Bank. Now as the lions of war converge the whole world braces for unmitigated destruction of life. Now what?…. I hope you’ve submitted this to the Friends, Common Dreams, JVP, Now put your fingers in the ground around you and let the Earth nourish your tired beautiful spirit. We are all That.
Zionists have an ideological affinity for the land of Palestine. Palestinians are of the land of Palestine. Likewise, the United States has a racist ideology founded on the extermination of the indigenous peoples of North America. If you create a mutual relationship with a place and its people, you can coexist. Otherwise, you are a virus.