Gaza Transfer
By Abdul Hussain Shaban
Academic and Lawyer
“As an “Israeli” Jew, a descendant of the Holocaust survivors, I believe that the comparison, between the circumstances in Palestine and those that preceded the Holocaust, is not only justified, but also necessary, as “Israel” has become ideologically prepared to carry out genocide against the Palestinians at the present time.” This is what Amitai Ben Abba, an “Israeli” writer of speculative stories which anticipates the future, wrote in 2018, while he was watching television, and saw a picture of Netanyahu and Trump smiling calmly, while the Palestinians were carrying their dead, on the other side, and how similar today is to yesterday, when we listened to Netanyahu and Biden bidding against each other regarding punishment of Palestine in Gaza.
Since the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation, on October 7, the “Israeli” escalation has taken an unprecedented turn, by implementing a major process of transfer, ethnic displacement, and demographic change, which some thought that it had decreased since the mid-seventies, and if it continued , it took a Soft and individualistic way, even if it included tens of thousands of people.
The transfer process today appears, with maximum force, from the gate of Gaza, which the “Israeli” occupier is working to empty its population, in order to what he called the start of a land war. “Israel” has found the opportunity to carry out the public forced evacuation process, with international cover, and great sympathy from the western countries, especially the United States, Britain, France, Germany and others, with the employment of a successful propaganda to support this barbaric war.
There is a fear that forced evacuation in Gaza will be a gateway to reviving plans for an “alternative homeland.” The residents of Gaza, after living under a devastating siege since 2007, are today deprived of their basic needs of water, food, medicine, and electricity. They live injailed in a large prison, and on top of that, they are forced to leave under bombardment.
Indeed, the convoys of martyrs increase during the evacuation process, as well as the “Israeli” forces do not hesitate to throw bombs overhead, without any regard to the rules of international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions of 1949.
It is not unlikely that the process of transferring Gaza is a prelude to a broader transfer, which may include the West Bank at a later stage. For the “Israelis”, every Palestinian is a potential resistance, and thus all Palestinians will become terrorists wherever they are, according to this point of view, and if the plan of Transfer succeeds, then “Israel” will become “clean” and “pure,” according to the Jewish State Law, which was passed by the Knesset on July 19, 2018, and which defined “Israel” as “the nation-state of the Jewish people.”
The story of transfer is not new, as it began before the establishment of the State of “Israel” by the militias, and it means a set of operations and procedures to deport the largest number of Arab residents, in order to replace them with Jews, which is what Theodor Herzl theorized in his book “The Jewish State” in 1896, and what it was decided at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, which followed in 1897.
For these reasons, “Israel” sought to obstruct any efforts to implement Resolution 194, issued by the United Nations General Assembly in December, 1948, regarding “the right of the Palestinians to return to their homes…”, and if Resolution 181, that was issued by the United Nations, and known as the Partition Resolution, granted the Jews about 54% of the area of historical Palestine, then after 1967 it occupied what remained of it, including the eastern part of Al-Quds Al-Sharif, and issued laws and decisions to confiscate the property of absentees and build settlements, which also leads to the construction of the apartheid wall, and calls rose to deport Arabs from the eastern side of the Jordan River to the Jordanian territory.
The slogan “Palestine is a land without a people for a people without a land”, which was promoted by the Jewish thinker Israel Zangwill, and which was proposed by the British Lord Shaftesbury, was not meaningless. It was worked on to become a fact, and today it is being applied in Gaza in its ugliest form, with measures classified by international law as “Genocide,” “crimes against humanity,” and “war crimes.”
During the 1948 war, 531 villages were destroyed, and more than half of the Palestine’s population was displaced and after the aggression of June 5, 1967, “Israel” practiced what was called the “quiet transfer”, bringing the number of evacuated Palestinians to more than a quarter of a million, and about 140,000 Palestinian resident of the West Bank were prevented to return to their cities and villages, after staying abroad for three and a half years. The occupation authorities used what they called the “open bridges policy” to expel tens of thousands of Jerusalemites “makdesiyeen”, who left the city for a period of more than 7 years abroad. Suffice it to point out that the number of Christians in Jerusalem, on the eve of the establishment of “Israel”, was more than 50 thousand people, while their number today is less than 5 thousand.
Just as “Israel” practiced black propaganda in the past, it practices it today through “creeping transfer” in Gaza, after horrific massacres, a method it used in about 25 massacres, most notably the “Deir Yassin” massacre in 1948, and the “Kafr Qasem” massacre in 1956.