Rights and Accountability 19 August 2019
Relatives of Muhammad Abu Namous, one of three Palestinians killed along the Gaza-Israel boundary overnight, mourn during his funeral in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, on 18 August.
APA imagesIsrael is actively encouraging and ready to facilitate mass emigration of Palestinians from Gaza, according to a senior government official.
“Israel is ready to carry the costs of helping Gazans emigrate,” and would potentially use air force bases in Israel for that purpose, The Times of Israel reported on Monday.
The unnamed official, in Kyiv as part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s delegation to Ukraine, added that more than 35,000 Palestinians left the coastal enclave last year.
Two million Palestinians live in the Gaza Strip, which has been subjected to a punishing Israeli economic blockade for 12 years and repeated military offensives.
Residents of the territory have been plunged into poverty and cut off from the rest of Palestine and the wider world.
Every two in three Palestinians in Gaza is a refugee from lands inside what is now Israel. That government forbids them from exercising their right to return as enshrined in international law because they are not Jews.
The senior Israeli official was reported by The Times of Israel as saying that his government is asking countries to absorb Palestinians emigrating from Gaza.
“The official said the National Security Council had been spearheading the effort, with Netanyahu’s blessing, for about a year,” The Times of Israel added. It has also been “discussed in the security cabinet several times.”
No European or Middle Eastern country has agreed to participate in the scheme, according to the publication. The official did not say whether any other governments are cooperating.
The revelation is an example of how ideas that supposedly exist only at the extreme fringes of Israeli politics are often not far from government policy.
During Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, Moshe Feiglin, then deputy speaker of Israel’s parliament, proposed a plan to “concentrate” Palestinians in Gaza in border camps and “exterminate” any who resisted, while destroying all civilian housing and infrastructure.
Feiglin, who represented Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, suggested that “Israel will start searching for emigration destinations and quotas for the refugees from Gaza.”
Increased emigration from Gaza
Emigration from Gaza – including among recent university graduates, who face the highest unemployment rates in the world – has been on the rise.
It is no secret that Israeli leaders have maximalist designs on all of historic Palestine. Making life unbearable to coerce Palestinians to leave their land is the primary motivation of many of Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza.
But Israeli officials generally don’t admit to it or tell media that government offices are executing such plans.
Human rights groups have long stated that the economic blockade on Gaza is an act of collective punishment, imposed after Hamas took control of internal affairs in the territory in 2007. Israel says it is a security measure.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has affirmed that Israel’s siege is an illegal act of collective punishment.
Critics of the blockade contend that Israel’s siege and repeated military assaults on Gaza are aimed at breaking resistance to the occupation.
Since early 2018, more than 200 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed during Great March of Return protests calling for an end to Israel’s siege. Those demonstrations have also demanded that Palestinian refugees be allowed to exercise their right to return.
Israeli occupation forces have killed more than 100 Palestinians in Gaza outside the context of protests during that same period.
Eight Palestinians killed in Gaza
On Saturday, three Palestinians were killed by Israeli helicopter and tank fire along the northern Gaza-Israel boundary.
Israel claimed that the slain men – identified by Gaza’s health ministry as Mahmoud Adel al-Walayda, 24, Muhammad Farid Abu Namous, 27 and Muhammad Samir al-Taramsi, 26 – were armed.
Israeli media reported that the deadly strike on Gaza followed the launch of three rockets from the territory, causing no injuries. A rocket was also reportedly fired from Gaza on Friday and intercepted before it landed in Israel.
The killing of the three men brings to eight the number of Palestinians from Gaza slain by Israel in a single week.
Occupation forces killed four armed Palestinians as they allegedly attempted to breach the Gaza-Israel boundary on 10 August.
The following day, Israeli forces killed another Palestinian who shot at soldiers while he attempted to cross the boundary.
On Monday, factions in Gaza warned Israel that the Strip is “a volcano about to erupt.”
Comments
don't call it "Nazi"
Permalink Peter Purich replied on
I'll just quote this:
'During Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, Moshe Feiglin, then deputy speaker of Israel’s parliament, proposed a plan to “concentrate” Palestinians in Gaza in border camps and “exterminate” any who resisted, while destroying all civilian housing and infrastructure.'
That is all.
Maximalist ambitions
Permalink Frank Dallas replied on
It has been Israel's intention to occupy the whole of Palestine since the birth of Zionism. Arguably since 1882 when the first "settlers" arrived, before Herzl had put his ideas on paper. The British knew it during the Mandate. The Israeli's have stated it on numerous occasions. Yet the fiction is maintained that a two-State solution is desired and possible.
In Manchester, on Sunday, at the rally in commemoration of Peterloo, I spoke to a Palestinian who has gained a Phd in electrical engineering from Manchester University and intends to return to the West Bank to use his skills. He expressed the wish that a two-State solution will be found. What patience. What faith. What trust. What hope. These qualities have been characteristic of the Palestinians since the start of their ordeal. They were slow to respond to Zionist aggression. They expected the USA to live up to its democratic reputation. They expected the "international community" to defend their rights.
The Zionists recognise no right but their own. The native Americans knew the white men spoke with forked tongues. So do the Zionists. They believe that have a genetic, messianic right to the whole of Palestine, at least. And as Weizmann declared, they believe that democracy cannot embrace Jews and Arabs because there is a "qualitative" difference between them. That's racism. Pure and unsullied. That's why Zionism must be attacked at its core: genetic superiority. It's twaddle. As is the idea that anyone can trace the genetic line from 3,500 years ago to today in any way than means anything. God did not give Palestine to the Jews. They stole it from the Palestinians in defiance of guarantees to the contrary. Zionists won through terrorism and thuggery and that's what they continue. Thugs in suits. Let BDS bring them down.
Israel's Plan for Gaza's Misery as Revealed in 2004
Permalink Ian Berman replied on
The Architect of Gaza’s Open-Air Prison in His Own Words
By Ian Berman, May 19, 2018
Demographer and geostrategist Arnon Soffer was the architect of Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza and the complete blockade that followed. In an interview published by the Jerusalem Post titled “It's the Demography, Stupid,” May 21, 2004, Soffer said:
“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 with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. 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.”
Some have suggested that what Soffer predicted was a crisis due to Hamas’ fundamentalist Islam. A closer examination shows that Soffer said that Fundamentalist Islam would increase the problem, not be the source of it. To further analyze the architect’s words, the quote above is examined line by line below.
“When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe.”
Soffer is referring to his own Master Plan in which he had advocated for withdrawing the Israeli presence of colonial settlers and IDF soldiers from Gaza and then sealing the area. This predictably, inevitably, would become the open-air prison of “a closed-off Gaza.” Further he knew that the population would continue to grow while the blockade would prevent access to the additional resources needed. This demographer literally planned for the agony he saw coming.
“Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today,”
Here he has established what he thinks of Palestinians. In Soffer’s mind, they are “animals” even before the onset of such suffering, ……
Continued
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Ethic Cleansing via economy class
Permalink jim replied on
The rest of the world is subject to obedient, reflexive compliance with faux-manufactured minority interests, sub-groups, counter-groups and anti-groups and Israel is free to place entire populations in bombed out concentration camps (that were formerly their homes) and then induce them to leave their homeland with a one-way ticket to their next meal. South Africa was never so cruel.