Israel has made no secret of it: it has embarked on a genocidal plan to “create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable.” And Joe Biden is its accomplice.
by Seth Ackerman
Part 3 - “Stay and Starve, or Leave”
The reason the carnage is as great as it is is that Israel is trying to kill or expel as much of the Palestinian population of Gaza as possible. Its direct attacks on civilians are part of a larger plan: to create “conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable,” as Maj.-Gen. Giora Eiland, an adviser to Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant, put it. “Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, compelling tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Egypt or the Gulf,” the adviser wrote in October.
In the policy jargon of the Israeli government, this is referred to as “voluntary emigration.” It will be presented as a choice: in Eiland’s words, “The people should be told that they have two choices: to stay and to starve, or to leave.”
The “voluntary emigration” plan is not just a hypothetical scenario. It is government policy — although, as the pro–Benjamin Netanyahu newspaper Israel Hayom reported in December, “It is not discussed in these forums [official meetings of the Security Cabinet] due to its obvious explosiveness.” The plan was explored in an October 17 paper by an influential think tank close to the Netanyahu government, which spoke of “a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip.”
The same conclusions were advanced in an internal Intelligence Ministry paper, which found that the “transfer of Gaza residents to Sinai” could “provide positive and long-lasting strategic results.” According to Israel Hayom, the prime minister has tasked his confidant, Ron Dermer, the minister of strategic affairs, to “examine ways to thin out Gaza’s population to a minimum.” At a party caucus meeting of Knesset deputies in late December, Netanyahu personally pledged that he was working to “ensure that those who want to leave Gaza to a third country can do so,” according to news site Israel Hayom, adding that the matter “needs to be settled” because it had “strategic importance for the day after the war.”
These objectives are widely understood within the Israeli government and military. “Whoever returns here, if they return here after, will find scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future,” said the deputy head of the Civil Administration, Col. Yogev Bar-Shesht, on November 4. “All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately,” said Energy and Infrastructure Minister Yisrael Katz on October 13. “They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.” “We are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” said Avi Dichter, the former head of Israel’s internal security agency, on Israel’s Channel 12 news, in a reference to the 1948 mass expulsion of Palestinians.
By law, Israel’s supreme authority in national security matters is the inner ministerial grouping known as the Security Cabinet; its decisions are binding policy. Dichter and Katz are currently members, as are Netanyahu and Dermer. Adding the two extremist ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, at least six of the fourteen members of the Security Cabinet are on record as being in favor of “voluntary emigration”; only three are generally believed to be opposed to it — Gadi Eisenkot, Benny Gantz, and Yoav Gallant.
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