The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, January 7, 2024

Notably: Expulsion and expropriation has always been the name of the Israeli game going back to 1948 and before, that Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has called the “Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” in his 2007 book, and what even less radical, more conventional Israeli historians like Benny Morris have conceded in less inflammatory terms: expulsions were very much part of Israel’s making (creation is too biblical a term, it plays into the myth too much, when we should be severing all things biblical from all things Levantine, whether Israeli, Arab or otherwise, crusading Christians included). But denialism, too, is part of Israeli story-telling, more accurately known as propaganda, especially when Israeli bombs demolish lives and wipe out neighborhoods, villages, and now an entire country within a country: Gaza, that concentration camp of 2 million Palestinians whose right to exist Israel has never recognized, and now is un-existing day by day, bomb by bomb. We can continue to pretend that Israel is interested in peace, or even in a two-state solution, that pitiful cliche. Or we can take Israelis at their word, when it slips from time to time: the end game, as Israeli Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have said explicitly, is to expel Palestinians from Gaza and replace them with Jewish settlers. Or, as the Daily Beast reports, going off of an article in Israel’s Times of Israel: “Israeli authorities have reportedly been engaged in secret talks with Congo to “resettle” Palestinians from Gaza in the Central African country. That’s according to The Times of Israel, which cites its Hebrew-language sister site Zman Israel to report that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition is looking at the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well as other countries for the “voluntary” resettlement plan. “Congo will be willing to take in migrants, and we’re in talks with others,” an unnamed source in the security cabinet is quoted as saying. Saudi Arabia has also reportedly been floated as an option. The news comes after the U.S. State Department on Tuesday singled out two far-right Israeli ministers who’ve been pushing to resettle Palestinians outside Gaza, blasting their “inflammatory and irresponsible” rhetoric. While Netanyahu’s office has not officially said it had plans to “resettle” Palestinians, the prime minister reportedly told a meeting last Monday that work is underway to facilitate “voluntary migration” of Palestinians to other countries.” Voluntary. That’s the other special word in the Israeli liturgy. The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who ended up in refugee camps after 1948 and 1967: they left voluntarily, too, according to Israeli mythology. They’re living in those squalid refugee camps to this day, voluntarily. Just like Gazans, living in their open-air prison: voluntarily. So it’s only natural to expect them to seek out voluntary expulsions.

—P.T.

 

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The Arab neighborhoods of Tiberias dominated the road linking the Jewish settlements in the Upper Galilee and the Jordan and Jezreel Valleys. In March 1948, in large measure as a result of Haganah provocations,216 relations between the town’s communities rapidly deteriorated, and the general staff decided to resolve the problem of Tiberias once and for all. On April 12 Haganah units raided the hilltop village of Khirbet Nasir ad Din, which overlooked Tiberias’s Jewish districts. Atrocities were apparently committed, and the villagers fled to Arab Tiberias, sowing panic.217 On the night of April 16 the Haganah attacked the Arab part of town with mortars, and took several houses in close-quarters combat. The British declined to intervene and Arab pleas for help from outside went unheeded. Within twenty-four hours resistance collapsed, and after the Haganah rejected a truce, the notables decided on evacuation. The British imposed a curfew, and the Arab population was trucked out to Jordan and Nazareth. The Jews looted the abandoned quarters.218 Haifa was the next to fall. In late 1947 Haifa had about seventy thousand Jews and an equal number of Arabs, making it, along with Jaffa, the largest Arab concentration in Palestine. The Jews and Arabs had lived there in relative harmony for decades. But relations deteriorated during the first months of the war, with the two sides exchanging shots along the border between the two communities and planting bombs in each other’s neighborhoods. The Haganah’s onslaught, in line with Plan D, came on April 21; Arab disorganization and isolation, and a general feeling of weakness and of Jewish superiority, aggressiveness, and self-confidence, determined the outcome in just twenty-four hours. […] By the time the remaining city notables surrendered to the Haganah, on May 13, only four or five thousand of the eighty thousand inhabitants remained. On May 18, after visiting the conquered town, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: “I couldn’t understand. Why did the inhabitants … leave?”

–From Benny Morris’s Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1998 (1999).

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