Is it 'resettlement' or ethnic cleansing in Gaza?

Sooner or later, Israel's war in Gaza will end. What will become of Gazans?

Some prominent Israeli leaders have an idea: Put all those suffering people somewhere else. "What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration," Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in an interview this week. "If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after will be totally different."

The comments drew a quick rebuke from U.S. officials, Reuters reported. "We have been clear, consistent, and unequivocal that Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land," the State Department said in a statement, "with Hamas no longer in control of its future and with no terror groups able to threaten Israel." But some critics see resettlement talk by Smotrich and his colleagues as evidence of a darker plan for Gaza: ethnic cleansing.

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Among Israeli leaders, the "idea of massive ethnic cleansing — the war crime of forced displacement — is still very much an idea," said Kenneth Roth, a former head of Human Rights Watch, in an interview with Al Jazeera. Smotrich, though, responded to the criticism by doubling down: Israel "cannot afford a reality where four minutes away from our communities there is a hotbed of hatred and terrorism," he said, offering a different term for his hope to displace Gazans: "Voluntary migration." 

What the commentators said

"Israel is making most of Gaza uninhabitable for the foreseeable future," Michelle Goldberg observed at The New York Times. Some Israeli leaders "seem to be counting on" the possibility that "evacuation might come to appear to be a necessary last resort." Pro-Israel Democrats in the United States are backing a war to remove Hamas in Gaza. "But increasingly, it looks as if America is underwriting a war to remove Gazans from Gaza."

"Israel is not in the business of ethnic cleansing," Jason Shvili argued in Israel Hayom, a publication seen as friendly to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel arguably has a "historical claim" to lands in Gaza, but the forcible resettlement of its people is an "immoral pipedream." Talk of such resettlement runs the risk of reinforcing dangerous old claims about the Zionist state. "The myth that Israel forcibly removed the Palestinian people from their land is one of the biggest lies told about the Jewish state," Svili wrote. "Israel did not ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in the past and must not do so in the future."

Israel has a history of creating "facts on the ground" that are difficult to undo, Tariq Kenney-Shawa wrote at the Los Angeles Times. In the West Bank, Israeli settlements have had the effect of "carving up land that would have served as the heart of a future Palestinian state into isolated islands." By "destroying critical infrastructure and bulldozing huge swaths of land entirely," Israel is accomplishing "the ethnic cleansing of Gaza."

What next?

Around 70% of Gazans live there now because of the "forced exodus" of Palestinians from Israeli territories during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, NBC News reported. "They heard the stories from their parents and grandparents and now they're living it, that same experience," said Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. But there's a question of where Palestinians would go if forced to flee — Egypt has declined, for fears of facilitating an ethnic cleansing. That makes the idea of forced resettlement "very impractical" said one expert. But it's not clear many Gaza refugees will have much choice but to leave permanently: "What are they going to have to return back to?" 

One person with a big say in what happens next: Netanyahu. But the Israeli leader "has stayed mostly silent on his postwar vision," The Times of Israel reported. Netanyahu reportedly "harshly warned cabinet members to mind their words" after resettlement talk started to surface in December. But he's staying cagey on the actual plan. "As regards the day after, first let's get to the day after," Netanyahu said on Saturday. "First, let's destroy Hamas."