Why Israel’s plans to forcibly depopulate Gaza won’t work

The Israeli war cabinet approved the creation of a special agency to organize the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza on Sunday. It was in line with the announced plan of U.S. President Donald Trump to expel Palestinians from the Strip, even though the U.S. has since backed down from it. Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the cabinet was briefed on the “international dimensions” of creating the special agency and that Israel’s Defense Ministry under Israel Katz would oversee the creation and implementation of the expulsion plans.

Katz indicated that the Ministry will implement the plan within a local and international “legal” framework, in coordination with international organizations and other countries. It added that it will establish the necessary infrastructure to transfer so many Palestinians out of Gaza.

The idea of establishing a special body to transfer Palestinians from Gaza is not new. In 1971, Israel started a plan to “thin out” Gaza’s population by contacting Palestinians and offering to transfer them to Egypt — and threatening to demolish their homes if they refused.

But this time, Israel’s attempt is different; it is explicit, public, and enjoys the full support of the U.S. More importantly, this time is willing to go all the way to accomplish its displacement agenda. But it also won’t work in eliminating Palestinian resistance, even if Gaza is ethnically cleansed.

The background: a war to control all of Palestine

The creation of a special body to expel Palestinians from Gaza has been called for by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich for months as part of his counter-proposal to a ceasefire. On Monday, the Israeli government said in a statement that the U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, affirmed to Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call that Washington “undoubtedly” supports Israel’s policies. And just last week, Israeli media reported that Israel is currently preparing plans to permanently occupy Gaza and control its population.

All of these plans take place as Israel escalates its wide-ranging military operation in the northern West Bank, especially in the cities of Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas, expelling at least 40,000 Palestinians from their homes. In November, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that driving Palestinians out of Gaza through “voluntary migration” would “set a precedent” to do the same in the West Bank later. In this context, the latest plans to create a special bureau are not isolated from Israel’s plans to impose its control over all of Palestine, including its plans to annex the West Bank. This is also in line with Israel’s “Nation-state law” passed in the Knesset in 2018, which stipulates that the right of self-determination between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea will be exclusive to the Jewish people.

The decision is the latest episode in Israel’s attempts to expel Palestinians from Gaza, which intensified after October 7, 2023. In the last two months before the ceasefire deal in Gaza, Israel focused on emptying northern Gaza of Palestinians through a complete siege, starvation, destruction of civilian infrastructure, and daily bombardment. It was a massive operation known as the “Generals’ Plan.” Meanwhile, Israeli settler groups endorsed by Israeli far-right ministers and lawmakers continued to call for allowing Israeli resettlement of Gaza.

The recent push: Israel is obliterating Palestinian self-governance in Gaza

Not only has Israel destroyed all civilian infrastructure in the Strip and obliterated the health and education systems, but it has also assassinated leaders and directors of civil services, especially in the law and order department. Last year, it was with the assassination of the head of Gaza’s police operations, Faiq Mabhouh, who was in charge of securing the distribution of humanitarian aid in north Gaza. 

Since Israel resumed its campaign against Gaza last week, it assassinated a number of civil and political leaders in the Hamas government, including the coordinator of government action in Gaza, the Deputy Minister of Justice, the Deputy Minister of Interior, and the head of the Security Service. On Tuesday, the Palestinian Civil Defense in Rafah announced that Israeli forces abducted 15 first responders. Israel also continues to hold captive the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital, Dr. Husam Abu Safiyeh, and a number of medics and doctors who were abducted from the north Gaza medical center.

All these practices fall in line with the strategy of dismantling civil services, and with them the capacity of Gaza’s society to reorganize and rebuild itself. All this points in one direction: ending the collective presence of Palestinians in Gaza.

Despite the demographic replacement rhetoric of the Israeli far right, this time there is another factor that feeds Israel’s efforts to displace Palestinians from Gaza: Israel has decided that its ongoing battle with the Palestinian resistance in Gaza will be its last.

Israel’s ‘Gaza problem’ and the source of resistance

Israel’s dilemma in dealing with Palestinian resistance has always been that, contrary to regular armies, irregular resistance forces are part of the social fabric of the occupied population. Resistance groups don’t embed themselves in the population, as Israel continuously claims, but stem from the population itself. 

The members of Palestinian militant groups come from the same neighborhoods, homes, families, and communities where they operate. Israel’s favorite strategy for decades has been the same policy made into a doctrine by its former chief of staff, Gady Eizenkot, in the wake of the 2006 Lebanon war — the “Dahiya doctrine.” It consists of targeting the civilian population and its infrastructure until either the resistance gives up, or the population turns against it. 

Absent either of that happening, Israel has decided to put an end to thise episode of resistance by completely uprooting it — and all Palestinians with it.

In 1982, after years of failed attempts to deter the Palestinian resistance in Lebanon’s refugee camps, which raided Israeli positions from south Lebanon, Israel decided to uproot the Palestine Liberation Organization from Lebanon. Following three months of siege and bombardment on Beirut, the PLO accepted to move all its leadership and thousands of its fighters out of Lebanon by sea.

Halfway through the Gaza genocide, Israelis were hoping that Hamas would go the route of the “Lebanon model.” In 1982, the exit of Palestinian forces from Lebanon was an easy solution, because Palestinians were operating in a host country, which despite all the sympathy of its people with the Palestinian cause, wasn’t theirs. The civil war in Lebanon was also symptomatic of the fact that part of Lebanese society didn’t want Lebanon to continue to be a base for Palestinian resistance activity.

The same cannot happen in Gaza. 

The years that followed the PLO’s exit from Lebanon saw an intense effort by Palestinian leaders and organizations to bring the center of the Palestinian national movement back to Palestine. For the leadership of the PLO, it meant engaging in negotiations which culminated in the Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority. But for other Palestinian forces, it meant building the basis for Palestinian resistance inside the occupied territories. That direction eventually led to the explosion of all kinds of Palestinian civil and militant activism during the First Intifada between 1987 and 1993. During that time, Hamas was born.

The October 7 attacks were the latest episode of a long history of confrontation between Israel and the overwhelmingly-refugee population of Gaza, dating back decades before Hamas was created. 

According to documents revealed by the BBC in October 2023 and reported by Israeli media last year, the Israeli plans to displace thousands of Palestinians from Gaza in 1971 came after a wave of Palestinian resistance activity that resulted in the killing of 43 Israeli soldiers and wounding 336 more, while Israel killed some 240 Palestinians and wounded 878 between 1968 and 1971.

At the time, Gaza had a population of 385,000 Palestinians, mostly refugees from 1948 and their descendants. Israel launched a plan to “thin out” Gaza’s population in order to reduce resistance activity, dismantling entire parts of refugee camps, and transferring at least 10,000 Palestinians out of Gaza, especially to the then-Israeli-occupied Sinai desert. Many were families of Palestinian militants, and most weren’t suspected of any activity themselves. This campaign was documented by Anne Irfan and has been referenced by Israeli media outlets multiple times.

Israel is determined to make this time the final round of confrontation with Gaza’s resistance as a historical phenomenon, which is deeper, older, and more complex than Hamas as an organization. For that, Israeli leaders want to apply the Beirut model and uproot the social base for any resistance in the future.

Gaza is not Beirut

A crucial point escapes the minds of Israeli leaders and their allies in Washington. Gaza is not a host country for Palestinians. Applying the Lebanese model won’t work unless the entire population is displaced. Gaza’s society is much more than the material infrastructure that can be destroyed with explosives — it is a social fabric and a sense of identity rooted in the place itself. An entire civilization cannot simply be dismantled like a group of squatters or illegal immigrants.

Most importantly, Gazans have nowhere else to go. Arab countries were willing to receive the Palestinian fighters who left Lebanon in 1982 because they were moving away from Palestine’s borders and, therefore, away from armed struggle, while there was a U.S.-led political project on the way to start negotiations under Reagan. This time, there is no political horizon, and moving Palestinians anywhere out of Gaza would mean laying the grounds for a more radical Palestinian wave of resistance from the countries that Gazans would be sent to. No country wants to be confronted with such a scenario in its own territory.

The Palestinians who took up arms against Israel in Lebanon before 1982 were the children of those expelled in 1948. Israel had to go after them 33 years later and, as a result, turned Lebanon into an active party in the conflict to this day.

The important variable here is not geography. It doesn’t matter if Palestinians find themselves at the borders of their homeland or thousands of miles away. What makes the difference is the political horizon ahead. After 1982, there was a political project for a Palestinian state as part of the two-state solution. After 1948 — just like today — there was none. This is what makes resistance inevitable.

What Israel and its sponsors still can’t accept is that the Palestinian struggle is not a security matter, but a political issue. Palestinians fight for their rights, and as long as their rights aren’t achieved, they will continue fighting. 

Any mega-projects to change geography, demographics, or the cosmos itself, without a political solution that includes the basic rights of an entire people, will fail.