Dispatch #123 White Lesbian Age 71 Considers Israel’s Evident Plans for Cleansing Palestinians from the Gaza Strip
- Kathleen A. Maloy
- Jan 10, 2024
- 4 min read
January 10th 2024
1085 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President
13 Days Until the 2024 Presidential Primaries Begin
565 Days Since Supreme Court Ruled Women Don’t Have Human Rights
In his January 7th essay in the New York Times titled “What Will Happen to Gaza’s People?” Peter Beinart discusses the evidence for this strategy:
But there are signs that some members of the Israeli government do indeed have a strategy, or at least a preference, for what happens next. It’s implicit in the kind of war Israel has waged, which has made Gaza largely unlivable. And a growing number of Israeli officials are saying it out loud: They don’t want to force just Hamas out of Gaza. They want many of Gaza’s people to leave, too.
The calls for population transfers started long before Gaza was reduced to the ruins that it is today. Six days after Hamas’s massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7, the Intelligence Ministry proposed permanently relocating Gazans to the Sinai region of Egypt. On Nov. 14, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said he supported “the voluntary emigration of Gaza Arabs to countries around the world.” Five days later, Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel endorsed “the voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza, for humanitarian reasons, outside of the Strip. The Israel Hayom newspaper reported on Nov. 30 that Mr. Netanyahu had asked Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, one of his closest confidants, to develop a plan to “thin” the population in Gaza “to a minimum” by prying open Egypt’s doors and opening up sea routes to other countries. Mr. Netanyahu also reportedly urged President Biden and the leaders of Britain and France to push Egypt to admit hundreds of thousands of Gazan refugees.
At a meeting of his Likud party on Dec. 25, Mr. Netanyahu was urged by a legislator to put into place a team to facilitate the “voluntary” departure of Palestinians from Gaza. The prime minister reportedly replied that the government was “working on” finding countries willing to take them.
Similar comments from Israel’s national security minister followed, with The Times of Israel asserting on Wednesday that voluntary resettlement from Gaza is gradually becoming “a key official policy of the government.”
Some might dismiss this talk of population transfer as wartime bluster. But on the ground, it is already well underway: Gaza is becoming uninhabitable. According to the United Nations, an estimated 85 percent of Gaza’s people are now displaced. Even if they could return to their homes, many would have little to go back to since, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal, nearly 70 percent of Gaza’s housing is damaged or destroyed.
More than 22,000 Gazans have been killed in the conflict so far, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, and many more are in acute danger. According to the Gaza director of affairs for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, 40 percent of the Strip’s residents are at risk of famine. Given the collapse of Gaza’s sanitation and medical systems, as much as a quarter of Gaza’s people could die within the year, mostly from disease or lack of access to medical care, according to a recent estimate by Prof. Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh. www.nytimes.com/2024/01/07/opinion/israel-gaza-war.html
It’s not just bullets and bombs. I have never seen health organisations as worried as they are about disease in Gaza www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/29/health-organisations-disease-gaza-population-outbreaks-conflict
Famine, drought and epidemics a 'triangle of death in Gaza' Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant tells the Wall Street Journal that it can 'copy and paste' the devastation in Gaza into Beirut www.middleeasteye.net/live/live-israel-palestine-gaza-war-hamas-conflict
In his opinion essay published in the Wall Street Journal on December 25th, Netanyahu stated his three prerequisites for peace: destroy Hamas, demilitarize Gaza and deradicalize the whole of Palestinian society. www.wsj.com/articles/benjamin-netanyahu-our-three-prerequisites Destroying Hamas represents a contradiction in terms, ignoring that Hamas is about resistance by oppressed people. Deradicalize Palestinian society – remove their desire for liberation, freedom, human rights? Netanyahu is the classic brutal colonizer who dehumanizes the colonized and whose response to resistance is to kill colonized and/or break them, to make life so horrific that the colonized give up.
In his January 8th appearance on Democracy Now! titled “Huge Miscalculation”: Biden’s Refusal to Push for Gaza Ceasefire Could Drag U.S. into Middle East War, Trita Parsi discusses factors contributing to Biden’s position. One factor concerns the mainstream media’s failure to mention that the Houthis and other groups have stated they will deescalate their attacks if there is a ceasefire.
The fact that it is not mentioned in most mainstream media is highly problematic, because it leaves the public with the wrong impression, that the only way Biden can deescalate is by further escalating the situation by increasing the deterrence and attacking, whether it’s the Houthis or the Iraqi militias. The option of actually going for a ceasefire to deescalate doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the mainstream media, and that’s a major mistake, I think. www.democracynow.org/2024/1/8/gaza_israel_wider_war_trita_parsi
Coverage of Gaza war in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel Analysis Shows A quantitative analysis shows major newspapers skewed their coverage toward Israeli narratives in the first six weeks of the assault on Gaza. https://theintercept.com/2024/01/09/newspapers-israel-palestine-bias-new-york-times/
Screams without proof: questions for NYT about shoddy ‘Hamas mass rape’ report https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/10/questions-nyt-hamas-rape-report/
WHO facing ‘near insurmountable challenges’ in Gaza aid delivery The UN says it remains ‘ready’ to deliver aid to Gaza, calls on Israel to approve access requests.
Israel cages Palestinian towns in West Bank with iron gates The movement of Palestinians is severely constricted as Israeli army erects gates and barriers at entrances of towns and villages. www.middleeasteye.net/news/war-gaza-israel-cages-palestinian-towns-west-bank-iron-gates
Don’t believe Haaretz and the NYT. Israeli society fully supports the Gaza genocide.
Haaretz and the New York Times are peddling fantasies about how genocidal incitement in Israel is only coming from an extremist fringe. But evidence shows there is near universal support across Israeli society for the genocide in Gaza.
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