During the British Government (1920-1948), the Palestinians had led the great revolt of 1936-1939. To alleviate the situation, the English arrived in Palestine with the proposed division of the Peel Commission in 1937: they offered 17% of the historical territory to the Zionists, which would mean the exile of the 200,000 Palestinians living in that land. The plan did not stop the Palestinians’ revolt or the expulsion took place, but for the first time there was official talk of the mass expulsion of the Palestinians.

A decade later, in late 1947 and in 1948, the Zionist pressure was effective at the United Nations, and the Zionist plan of division brought 56% of Palestine to the Jews, 17% “only” a decade earlier. With the creation of the State of Israel, the Zionists expel 700,000 Palestinians from their lands to the Arab countries of the area, known as Nakba. Israel would have expelled another 300,000 Palestinians from their places of residence in the 1967 war, of which 145,000 were charged in the 1948 war. They would never have the right to return to their peoples.

Following the attack by Hamas on 7 October last, Israeli society is gaining strength in the indictment of the Palestinians in Gaza. The issue has been discussed in the Left Israeli magazine Jewish Current, in which Jonathan Shamir states that the issue still has no political centrality and that neither the army nor the government publicly show an official position in favor. In Israeli society, however, the far-right groups that today have a lot of strength are shaking the issue and increasingly have support among the Israelis. Humanitarian coverage is even being given to the proposal.

On November
13, opposition Liberal Party Members Yesh Atid, Danni Danon and Ram Ben-Barak, from Likud, wrote an article in Wall Street Journal: “International States have a moral obligation and an opportunity to show compassion,” and urged “countries around the world to welcome families from Gaza to show their intention to relocate.”

In 1984 Israeli surveys estimated that 15 per cent of local Jews considered that Palestinians in the occupied territories should be deported to neighbouring countries and forced Arabs to migrate. According to a US survey Pew, in 2016, 48% of Israeli Jews were “in favour of the expulsion of Israeli Arabs” and 79% of Jews should have more rights than non-Jews.

Following the Second Intifada, which began in 2000, Israeli society has moved strongly towards ultra-concentrated and extreme positions on the right, which is evident in many areas, especially in the conflict with the Palestinians, or in attempts to authoritarianism internal life, as is the case with the reform that the Likud Government itself proposed last week to weaken the powers of the Supreme Court.

In this context, the word Nakba has been gaining strength. In the last decade the Israeli media has been full of references to it. In June 2022, for example, the threats by former Transport Minister Yisrael Katz were clear: “Remember 1948, remember the War of Independence and the Nakba. Ask your superiors, your grandparents and your grandmothers, and explain how the Jews will wake up and know how to support themselves and the idea of the Jewish state.”

A few months earlier, retired General Uzi Dayan and former Likud parliamentarian in the Israeli Parliament set out on the same road in statements to the Media 14 Kate on the far right: “The Arab community must be told to be vigilant, even those who do not participate in the attacks. If we come to a civil war situation, the situation ends in a word you already know: Nakba”.

In one
way or another, the repetition of Nakba’s idea often occurs in Israeli society, whether academic or political. After all, it is at the root of the Zionist project so that the Jew can create and live a statue in the territory that gave them “God”, which was essential to expel those who already lived there, the Palestinians. Israel has created millions of Palestinian refugees since their origin, including 81 per cent of the inhabitants of Gaza being refugees or descendants of them, for decades they have been expelled from their homes, but in their heads they are not from Gaza, but from those countries in which those or their ancestors were expelled.

But the expulsion of 1948 was not something that the Zionists should live in shame. Israeli historian Illán Pappé in the exile of London The Idea of Israel. A History of Power and Knowledge. A history of power and knowledge), as the famous book explains, Left and Right Zionism sold for decades the Palestinian “exit” of 1948, except in a few places, which was “voluntary”. According to this Zionist myth, the Palestinians fled their homes and countries because the Arab authorities ordered it. And that's shown in schools.

In the 1990s, an important group of historians reviewed the history of Israel within the historical and ideological current known as post-Zionism. This current made a harsh critique of conventional Zionism and historians questioned the myths of classical Zionism. Pappé was also part of this group of “new historians”. On the basis of existing official data, numerous historical studies of the 1948 war were carried out, but in 1998 many documents of the Israeli Army and The Hague, the Zionist militia of the premature Labour Members of Israel, were declassified, in which historians were able to see clearly the ethnic cleansing carried out in 1948.

As Pappé explains, with regard to the data there was no doubt about the massacre, it was clear what happened, even for the neo-Zionist historians who would appear later, an ideology that was reinforced from the year 2000, together with the Jewish extreme right, that is, the force was key in the Palestinian expulsion of 1948. What was changing was their interpretation. The Neo-Zionist Dean of the History Department of the Hebrew University, Alon Kadish, said that 1948 was “a battle that avoided the second holocaust, winning the righteous to the unjust.” What for the new historians of the 1990s was a violation of human rights against the Palestinians, cruelty and war crime, for neo-Zionist researchers were common acts of war and perhaps indispensable, because then Israel was besieged in Arabs, in a battle of death.

“Humanitarian” expulsion When
the facts of an event are immeasurable, a moralizing view is given to the followers, so that the massacres committed by the Israeli Army were indispensable for David (Israel) to face Goliati (Palestinians, Arabs). That is the historic vision given to the facts. If in 1948 the Palestinian flight was voluntary, today its departure from Gaza will be “humanitarian”.

Important conservative institutions such as the Misgav Institute or the Tikvah Fund are promoting these ideas, and as Nettanel Slyomovics of the Israeli Liberal journal Haaretz says, they redefine this exclusion of population as “moral action”. This is what the article written by this journalist on 17 November says: “At the time, the idea of expelling Arabs was that of Meir Kahane and other ends on the right, and for most Israelis the anathema. Now, for the joy of the right, it is an idea that can give a ‘moral’ solution to war for more and more citizens.”

The recent report by the activist and entrepreneur of Likud Amir Weitmann for the Misgav Institute reads: “Israel should relocate and rehabilitate all Arabs of Gaza in Egypt in exchange for millions of dollars.” In recent weeks there have been many significant people who have turned to the ideas of public exclusion. On 19 November, Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel clearly called for the “relocation of Palestinians from Gaza for humanitarian reasons, outside the List” in the article written in the Jerusalem Post newspaper. Last week he spoke clearly in Parliament: "At the end of the war the government of Hamas falls, there will be no rulers, and the civilian population will depend entirely on humanitarian aid. There will be no work and 60% of peasant lands will become security zones (...) The problem of Gaza is not just our own, the world should support humanitarian migration, it is the only solution I know." According to the media, Zman Yisrael, in Congo – and elsewhere – have been Israeli officials so that this country can welcome migrants.

Parliament’s vicelehendakari, Nissim Vaturi (Likud), also said that “the neighbours of Gaza and Judea and Samaria [Biblical name of the West Bank] ... should be moved for their own benefit.” Far-right finance minister Babel Smtrich, who already agrees with his expulsion, has never concealed it, now also argues for “humanitarian” reasons. The list of repeaters is long in current Israel.

The Idea has been profoundly worked in
the Israeli Government for a long time to make return impossible, and appears in various studies. Last December, Le Monde Diplomatique set out extensively the report of the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence in the Palestinian article, the ghost of expulsion (Palestine, the ghost of expulsion), in which three options were analysed for the inhabitants of Gaza: one, the Gacatarras remain and are governed by the Palestinian Power, two Egyptian Gacatarras, but remain under a government of Gaza. According to the report, the third is the most effective, provided that the “political hierarchy” maintains international pressures and gains support from the US and other partner countries. As detailed in the document, international public opinion is today more prepared, among other things, by the important population movements caused by the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Jonathan Samir explains at Jewish Current that on 30 November Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu entrusted Ron Dermer of the Cabinet of War with the elaboration of a proposal for the relocation of Palestinians in other countries.

In essence, an old ghost is dancing again in Israeli society and among the leaders, and the attack of Sixteen on 7 October is seen by many as an opportunity to realize the dream of Israel the Great. The Israeli army has already managed to displace hundreds of thousands of countries of 2.3 million Palestinians within Gaza from north to south; in general, with bombs as a stimulus, the Palestinians have walked at their will.

With thousands of tons of bombs, Israel has already destroyed the whole of Gaza City and more than half of the buildings throughout the Gaza Strip. Education, healthcare and many other infrastructures are also crushed. The Israeli army has once again expelled most Palestinians from Gaza from their homes and the destruction has made their peoples unsuspected. Turning all gauze into an uninhabitable place, the Israeli authorities may be preparing a “humanitarian” escape corridor to turn Gaza into a “safe place” and take a significant step towards Greater Israel.

It does not seem easy to imagine this today, because theoretically the United States and the European Union are against it. However, this does not appear to be an obstacle to Israel’s being able to carry out its purposes, for many reasons it has already become too great in the Middle East. Who could imagine that the massacres and destruction of Israel in Gaza could be so comfortable and easy – more than 22,000 dead on 2 January in Gaza – in the face of the silent complicity of the international powers? The State Department of EE.UU. He has criticized the call of several Israeli ministers to empty Gaza of Palestinians and return settlers, but the minister of the extreme right for the Israeli National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has clearly answered him on social network X: “With all due respect, we are not another star of the United States. The United States is our best friends, but above all, we have to do the best for the State of Israel.”