The forced evacuation of southern Gaza: the next stage of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine

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Palestinians flee towards the southern Gaza Strip on Salah al-Din Street in Bureij, Gaza Strip, Saturday, November 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Fatima Shbair)

On Thursday, Israeli forces dropped leaflets on the main towns of southern Gaza, including Khan Younis, ordering people to evacuate or face death. The displacement of the population of southern Gaza is the next stage of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, carried out by Israel with the support of the American and European imperialist powers. One area at a time, Gaza is being depopulated by a combination of mass expulsions, massacres and starvation.

It is evident that the October 7 attacks were used as a pretext by Israel to implement a long-planned plan for the systematic depopulation of Palestine, which began in northern Gaza and now extends to southern Gaza. Gaza and will continue to continue. the West Bank.

“You saw what happened to Gaza City,” Mark Regev, senior adviser to the Israeli prime minister, told Sky News. “Khan Younis is also a center of Hamas activity. We ask civilians to leave the area for your own safety. We don’t want to see you caught in the crossfire.

By “what happened to Gaza City,” Regev refers to the systematic bombings that destroyed or damaged 40 percent of northern Gaza’s homes and destroyed its health care, food distribution and treatment systems. the water. All bakeries in Gaza have been closed and no wheat is available at any price. There is no food, no water, no medical care.

Nearly three-quarters of Gaza’s population, or 1.5 million people, have been internally displaced. The official death toll, which has not been updated for five days due to the collapse of the health system, stands at more than 11,000. During the Israeli assault on Al Hospital -Shifa, 40 patients, including four babies, died due to lack of electricity.

Regev’s comments were accompanied by a graphic highlighting an area occupying a third of Gaza, from which Palestinians are being asked to evacuate. Combined with the previous demand that Palestinians migrate from northern Gaza to the south, at least four-fifths of the country is transformed into a free-fire zone, with the southernmost town of Rafah the only remaining refuge. But even “safe” areas are continually bombarded by Israeli forces.

Last month, the publication in Hebrew Mekomit published a document leaked by the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence, which calls on Israel to “evacuate the civilian population to Sinai,” where they will live in tent cities and will not be able to return home. Behind the scenes, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has been pressuring Egypt to allow the expulsion of the Palestinian population to the Sinai Desert.

But today, Israeli politicians are discussing these plans not in secret but in public. Last weekend, Israeli security cabinet member and agriculture minister Avi Dichter, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, said: “We are now deploying the Nakba in Gaza.” The Nakba, meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass expulsion of around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their country in 1948.

In The ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé describes how the Zionist movement implemented a deliberate plan (“Plan Dalet”) aimed at expelling the Palestinian population from what would become Israel. Official Israeli historiography would later claim that the Palestinian people left “voluntarily,” but this was a lie.

“Clashes with local Palestinian militias,” Pappé writes, “provided the perfect context and pretext to implement the ideological vision of an ethnically purified Palestine. Zionist policy was initially based on retaliation against Palestinian attacks in February 1947, and transformed into an initiative to ethnic cleansing the country as a whole in March 1948.

Pappé explained that this plan has been in the works for decades. “The goal has always been, and still remains, to have as much Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians as possible,” he said in 2004. It is this plan that is being implemented today. artwork.

Israeli officials call for another “voluntary” expulsion of Palestinians. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Tuesday called for “voluntary immigration of Arabs from Gaza to countries around the world,” which constitutes the “good humanitarian solution.” He added: “Welcoming refugees by countries around the world that truly want their interests… is the only solution that will end the suffering and pain of Jews and Arabs.” »

In its genocidal actions, Israel enjoys the full support of the Biden administration and the European imperialist powers. On November 9, Biden said there was “no possibility” of a ceasefire in Gaza. On November 7, the White House categorically asserted that the administration had “no red lines” regarding the number of civilians Israel would be allowed to kill. After each bombing of a school, hospital and refugee camp, the Biden administration declared that Israel had the “right to defend itself.”

The extension of the “free fire zone” to southern Gaza and the assault on Al-Shifa Hospital were preceded by the “March for Israel”, during which the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties chanted “No ceasefire!

American imperialism’s massive embrace of the Israeli genocide reveals, forever, the lie that American foreign policy has anything to do with “human rights.” Throughout the 1990s, the United States used allegations of “ethnic cleansing” to justify its military interventions in the Balkans, culminating with the bombing of Serbia in 1999. But the Biden administration’s systematic encouragement of ethnic cleansing of Israel makes clear that the feigned concern for “human rights” was nothing more than a pretext for its stated goal of dissolving Yugoslavia in order to bring the Balkans under the domination of the United States and the NATO.

Similarly, with US imperialism’s wars against Russia in Ukraine and military buildup against China, the US is accusing its targets of genocide. In April, Biden was asked: “Have you seen enough evidence to declare genocide in Ukraine?” to which he replied: “Yes, I called it genocide. It has become increasingly clear that Putin is simply trying to erase the very idea of ​​being – of being able to be Ukrainian.” The United States accuses China of perpetrating “genocide” against its Muslim population in Xinjiang province. All of these claims have been exposed as nothing more than propaganda covers for US military action.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza sparked massive opposition around the world. Millions of people took to the streets on every habitable continent, including hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating in the United States and other NATO countries.

But these mass protests have only deepened the Biden administration’s intransigence in facilitating Israeli genocide. This week, Capitol Police attacked a group of protesters at the Democratic National Committee, injuring six people, while major tech platforms, including Twitter and TikTok, removed statements of political opposition to the Israeli genocide.

We must learn lessons from it. The governments responsible for Israel’s actions cannot be convinced to change course. Ending the Israeli genocide requires building a mass movement within the working class aimed at breaking the power of the financial oligarchy and ending the capitalist system that is the root cause of the war.

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