The Israeli government’s demand that more than one million Palestinians leave their homes in northern Gaza and flee south has horrific echoes of the past.
I worked as a journalist in the region in the 1990s, and in recent years I have spent a great deal of time in Gaza and Israel, researching the history of Gaza’s 2.3 million refugees. Almost everyone in Gaza is a refugee from one of 200 Arab villages, then in southern Palestine, that were destroyed by Israeli forces in 1948 when the Jewish state came into being. What remains of some of these villages lies within 10 miles of the Gaza boundary. Some refugees can even see their land through the fence.
The first phase of Israel’s revenge for Hamas’s atrocities – the intense aerial bombardment of the past few days – was easy to predict. Every innocent Palestinian in Gaza was bound to pay the appalling price, and thousands already have.
However, I did not predict that this time the west would not only let it happen – as it has several times before – but cheer Israel on, sending arms and effectively promising impunity from international law, abandoning the Palestinians to their plight.
With the green light from Israel’s allies, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Friday that 1.1 million Gazans were to be “evacuated” from the north to the south of Gaza. Netanyahu wants us to believe his prime concern is to keep civilians out of danger during the expected ground invasion from the north, which is presumably how he plans to finally “crush” Hamas. Such empty claims – at the time of writing, 1,800 Palestinians have already been killed – are made in the hope of immunising Israel against accusations of war crimes. Driving one million people south will cause ever more horror, and we all know by now that there is no safe place for civilians to flee to or to shelter.
When Israeli forces “cleansed” the nearby villages in 1948, the process started with the same psychological warfare we see today, warnings to flee, the dropping of leaflets, and threats of what might happen if they didn’t. Villages were generally shelled before ground troops went in; many civilians were killed, and there were massacres. The village was usually surrounded, with one exit left open for Palestinians to flee through. Survivors eventually went to the Gaza Strip, as it was deemed a safe area. United Nations Resolution 194, passed in December 1948, granted them a right to return. Israel refused.
If Netanyahu’s continues with his “evacuation” plan, history and events on the ground tell us that after the warnings and bombings we are already seeing, the refugees will flee, as they did in 1948. The one potential exit for them is into Egypt. Although Egypt is strongly opposed to accepting refugees, knowing it would be collaborating in permanent ethnic cleansing, this could change if the humanitarian crisis at its borders escalates. If Gazans do indeed flood over into the Sinai, they may not be allowed back.
The risks for Netanyahu are huge, not least because of the Israeli hostages inside Gaza. But given that his political future looks almost certainly over anyway, he may calculate that he has nothing to lose. And the Israeli right has long pressed for expelling Gaza’s population into the Sinai.
In other words, should the west and other influential actors not move to halt this “evacuation”, a process of ethnic cleansing could be under way, bringing with it the risks of a regional conflagration.
As with Israel’s expulsions in 1948, today’s leadership will then project a narrative saying that there is no safe future for Israel unless the entire population of Gaza is permanently expelled. Negotiation will then begin about whether the refugees have a right to return to Gaza, which was already a place of exile.
This scenario may sound overly apocalyptic, but as Palestinian refugees know only too well, it is not. Israel has long hoped that the story of its ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages of 1948 would be forgotten. From the first days of the 1948 flight, Israel devised its own narrative of those events, claiming the Palestinians fled under orders of the Arab leadership. When they tried to return to their villages after the war, they were labelled “infiltrators” and then “terrorists”.
Since Israel and Egypt blockaded Gaza in 2006-7, cutting it off from the world, Israel has seen reason to hope that the story of 1948 would remain hidden, too. Archives have been blocked, and the last remains of villages destroyed. But many Gazans today not only remember 1948, but feel as if they are back in it.
I have spoken to friends inside the strip who say they are determined not to be uprooted a second time, and that they would rather stay put in their houses and die there.
“I will not move. I will be killed in my house with my family,” one mother, Adalah, who lives in central Gaza, told me. Their house sits on the beach with a view out to sea, where Israeli gunboats patrol. Adalah told me she had gathered all her family in the house so they could die together.
Sarah Helm is a former Middle East correspondent and diplomatic editor of the Independent
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