In the aftermath of the Hamas attack on October 7, Israel embarked on a violent and bloody campaign against the Palestinian people. Gaza residents have paid the price, with more than 14,000 people killed by indiscriminate Israeli bombing, including more than 5,500 children.
The attack has also spread to the West Bank, where the Israeli army and settlers carry out raids and kill civilians daily; more than 200 people were murdered, thousands were arrested, and dozens more were tortured. Palestinian citizens of Israel have also faced arrests, harassment and economic reprisals in the form of dismissals.
But continued violence is not intended to quench the thirst for “revenge,” as some have suggested. It is systematically moving towards a long-term goal: the complete erasure of Palestinian existence within historic Palestine. This plan was already in preparation before October 7; it simply accelerated.
On Gaza, Israeli officials have been more than clear. There will be a total expulsion of the population. As Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter said on November 11: “We are practically repeating the Nakba, if you like, it is the Nakba of Gaza. »
A leaked internal Ministry of Intelligence document confirmed that the Israeli government is seeking to carry out these threats.
Israeli Nakba projects in the West Bank are also in the spotlight. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that “belts” should be put in place around illegal Israeli settlements, which “Arabs” would be banned from entering.
Earlier this year, he also outlined plans to ensure the territorial continuity of Israeli settlements, which would effectively amount to more expulsions of Palestinians from their lands and their annexation.
For Palestinians of Israeli nationality, who represent 21% of the Israeli population, the project may not be as high profile, but it exists. They too are facing a Nakba, and it too has been brewing for a long time.
Forced eviction postponed
After the creation of the Israeli colonial state in 1948, which led to the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their towns and villages, the Israeli government moved quickly to prevent the return of refugees, which the United Nations had guaranteed in resolution 194 of 1948.
This is why he decided to establish military rule in the Palestinian territories he occupied, where almost 150,000 Palestinians had managed to stay. This special regime aimed not only to prevent any Palestinian from attempting to return home, but also to monitor and persecute the rest of the population, with the ultimate goal of expelling them.
Archival documents, described in Israeli historian Adam Raz’s book The Kafr Qasim Massacre: A Political Biography, showed that a plan was prepared in the early 1950s to expel Palestinians to Jordan, the Lebanon and Sinai in the event of war.
In 1956, when Israel, alongside Britain and France, invaded Egypt in an attempt to take control of the Suez Canal, it saw an opportunity to turn on the rest of the Palestinian population. Israeli border guards attacked the village of Kafr Qasim on the border between Israel and the West Bank, then administered by Jordan, killing 49 people, including 23 children. The attack aimed to sow fear among the Palestinian population and force them to flee – a tactic already employed in 1948.
But it backfired. News of the massacre spread, leading to international pressure on Israeli authorities to reverse their forcible transfer strategy. Furthermore, their own intelligence assessment showed that most of the remaining Palestinians did not pose a major “security” threat.
Over the next decade, military rule over the remaining Palestinians persisted; they were denied the right to movement, civil liberties and basic services. These rights were not granted to them until after 1966. They were also granted Israeli citizenship, but this did not make them equal to the state’s Jewish citizens.
Those who have been displaced have always been denied the right to return home; their lands remained confiscated. Palestinian communities have never benefited from the same level of services as Jewish settlements and towns; they never received the same care from the state in terms of education, health, etc.
Their economic prosperity has been curtailed, condemning many of them to misery and poverty. All this has been accompanied by a strategy of assimilation aimed at erasing Palestinian identity and sense of nationhood and turning Palestinians into a silent, faceless minority with second-class citizenship.
The “transfer strategy” revisited
After the 1950s, the population transfer strategy was put aside, but it was never completely abandoned. In the 2000s, it returned, but in an updated form.
In September 2000, the Second Intifada broke out as the so-called “peace process” failed to achieve a Palestinian state and Israel continued to expand its illegal settlements in the Palestinian territories it occupied in 1967. The trigger was a provocative raid carried out by former Israelis. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon on the grounds of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site.
As Palestinian protests erupted in occupied East Jerusalem and spread to the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians in Israel took to the streets, fully embracing the Palestinian national cause. They organized protest actions which were brutally suppressed by Israeli security forces.
These events shook the Israeli establishment and intelligence services and forced them to reconsider their strategy of assimilating Palestinians in Israel. This is how the transfer strategy was put back on the table and remodeled to adapt to the new reality.
Instead of resorting to massacres to frighten Palestinians into leaving, Israeli authorities decided to disrupt and destroy Palestinian communities from within and thus trigger an exodus.
Economic opportunities for Palestinians declined sharply after 2000, leading to high unemployment. The neglect already suffered by Palestinian communities was further compounded, while Israeli authorities enabled and facilitated the proliferation of organized crime.
At the same time, Israeli authorities pushed to further strengthen apartheid in Israel through legal measures. Perhaps the most important of these is the Jewish Nation-State Law, passed in 2018.
The law declares Israel to be the nation-state of the Jewish people, thereby confirming its status as an ethnocracy and denying the collective rights of Palestinian citizens and their Palestinian identity.
On this basis, Israeli authorities set out to completely suppress non-Jewish national aspirations, including any discussion of land restitution or return to displaced villages or any expression of their identity through cultural, political or economic activities. Even the Palestinian flag has been banned.
The “Unity Uprising” of 2021 – when Palestinians in Israel joined their brothers and sisters in occupied East Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank and Gaza to protest and resist the expulsion of the Palestinian families of Sheikh Jarrah and to the encroachment on Al-Aqsa – the Israeli authorities are even more worried.
Israeli officials have begun to voice their threats against Palestinians in Israel even more clearly. They spoke of a “civil war” and a “new Nakba,” while the Supreme Court ruled in favor of stripping Palestinians of their citizenship for “breach of loyalty.”
A Nakba for Palestinians in Israel
After the Hamas operation on October 7, threats and intimidation against Palestinians in Israel intensified. Ultimatums such as “you must choose to be either Israeli or Hamas terrorists” were frequently repeated in Israeli media. Some commentators have even suggested that “sympathetic” Palestinians should be deported to Gaza.
Suspicions of betrayal and disloyalty against the Palestinian community have become pervasive. There have been hundreds of arrests and detentions for questioning over the past month and a half. The Palestinian rights organization Adalah has registered at least 70 indictments against Palestinians with Israeli citizenship.
In one particularly high-profile case – that of actress Maisa Abd Elhadi – the charge was “incitement to terrorism” for an Instagram post and the Interior Ministry has already requested the revocation of citizenship.
Meanwhile, some Palestinian politicians, such as Mansour Abbas, leader of the Joint List, have embraced this new reality of suspicion and demanded demonstrations of loyalty from the Palestinian community.
Abbas, who previously rejected the label “apartheid” for Israel, criticized protests against the Gaza war and called for the resignation of fellow Knesset MK Iman Khatib-Yassin over her skepticism about the Israeli version of the events of October 7.
All these events show what the Nakba will look like for Palestinians in Israel. The Israeli authorities will continue their policy of allowing the Palestinian community to become unlivable, suppressing any political activity or expression of Palestinian identity.
Those who resist or express their disagreement will be summarily accused of “terrorism” and stripped of their nationality. Those who remained silent would have the choice of either leaving “voluntarily” or meekly accepting the status of oppressed second-class citizens, fully embracing and supporting the Zionist project. Any non-Zionist political presence in Israel will be completely erased.
The Nakba faced by Palestinians with Israeli citizenship may not be as violent and brutal as that experienced by their brothers and sisters in Gaza and the West Bank. But its consequences and ultimate goal are the same: the complete elimination of the Palestinian presence in historic Palestine.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.