Note to Thomas Friedman: It is not only ‘this’ Israeli government that has carried out ethnic cleansing

As the genocide in Gaza continues—70% of all infrastructure destroyed, 500,000 facing immediate forced starvation as blockade continues into its third month, and an average of 30 children killed a day over the past 584 days—a growing chorus of world leaders and institutions now echo what Palestinians have been saying for decades: this is genocide. This is ethnic cleansing. But alongside those admissions comes another narrative, more insidious than silence. It tells us that this is all Netanyahu. That this Israeli government is uniquely extreme. That the settler lynch mobs, the starvation policies, the children burned alive under white phosphorus—none of it reflects “real” Israel.

A perfect example of this argument was recently put forth by Thomas Friedman, who wants you to know that “This Israeli Government Is Not Our Ally.” Friedman would have you believe that this is the first time Israel has turned its back on peace. That it is this particular administration that has hijacked an otherwise righteous project. But on the 77th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba it is essential to understand that in Israel, this government’s actions are not a deviation, they are the doctrine. This is the Nakba continuing, on camera, in real time. Gaza is not Netanyahu’s failure; Gaza is Zionism fulfilled.

Since 1948, every Israeli government has depended on the removal, erasure, and death of Palestinians. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, was clear: “We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.” Moshe Dayan, architect of Israel’s military doctrine, once told the Palestinians under his rule, “You shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave.” Golda Meir said it plainly in 1969: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.”

From Plan Dalet to the massacre at Deir Yassin, from the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians during the Nakba to the destruction of over 400 villages, Israel was never designed to coexist. Was the initial seizure of 78% of historic Palestine meant to foster regional unity? The “peace process” was never a process toward peace, but a process of erasure with better PR.

Friedman’s fantasy of an Israel that once sought peace but has now lost its way is built on the same lie that named our dispossession a “war of independence.” The truth is: independence for Israel has always required catastrophe for us.

What we’re seeing in Gaza is not the breakdown of the Israeli project—it’s its logic taken to its endpoint. Just as Deir Yassin was razed to terrify and drive Palestinians from Jerusalem, today Khan Younis is being emptied by fire. Just as Lydda was ethnically cleansed under direct military orders, Gaza is being depopulated, its people pushed toward the sea, toward the Sinai, toward the grave.

And it is not just the government. When Israel bombed aid convoys and starved Palestinians, settlers protested against the dispersal of food. When an Israeli soldier was arrested for the rape of a Palestinian, it was settlers who rallied for his release. And when Israel is committing genocide, thousands are still choosing to settle on Palestinian land. This is mass complicity. This is a settler society fighting for its supremacy.

Those who tell you otherwise are laundering genocide.

When Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stood before a map of “Greater Israel” that erased Jordan and said, “We’re occupying Gaza to stay,” he wasn’t innovating. He was quoting history. When he said “there is no such thing as the Palestinian people,” he was repeating Meir, not deviating from her. When he called to “wipe out” the village of Huwara, he was merely giving voice to the tactics long used by Israeli forces in villages across the West Bank. The only difference now is the clarity.

And still—Western media, liberal Zionists, even “allies” insist on pretending that this is just a bad episode. That if only Netanyahu were voted out, the soul of Israel could be restored. But the Nakba never stopped. The Nakba evolved into the siege of Gaza. Into the checkpoints, the permits, the military court system, where children are convicted at rates higher than any jurisdiction on Earth. It evolved into “mowing the lawn” every few years, into the slaughter of 500 children in 2014, into the repeated destruction of Jabalia, into snipers aiming for kneecaps at the Great March of Return. It evolved into laws that ban Arabs from living in “community towns,” into the Nation-State Law that declares Israel a Jewish state, only for Jewish people. Into over 65 laws that treat Palestinian citizens of Israel as lesser. It evolved into the new graveyards now being dug behind bombed hospitals in Gaza, and those graveyards then being bombed.

There is no Israel without the displacement of Palestinians.

We are now living through what some call the second Nakba, but it would be more accurate to say: the Nakba never ended. It metastasized. The tents of Rafah are no different than the tents of Ramla. The forced displacement of 1.9 million Gazans today follows the same blueprint of erasure from 1948—erase the land, erase the homes, erase the people, and call it “peace”.

And yet, the world asks us to forget. To believe the lie that this is “new”. That this brutality is an outlier. That it is one man’s fault. But a genocide cannot be blamed on bad leadership. Not when it is systematized. Not when it is ritualized. Not when it is supported, funded, and cheered on by the society that elects these leaders, that sends their sons to drop the bombs.

On Nakba Day, we don’t mourn an event. We mourn a structure. And we fight against its continuity. The international community can keep issuing statements. The U.S. can keep arming the bombs. And the New York Times can keep publishing columns pretending this started in 2023. But we remember 1948, 1956, 2002, 2008, 2014, 2022, 2023, today, and every year in between. We remember the names of villages bulldozed to make way for picnic parks. We remember every child pulled from rubble, every elder made a refugee multiple times over.

We are the descendants of those who refused to vanish, the living proof that their attempts at erasure will never be completed.