Israeli extremists have a plan for the day after the genocide

Under the slogan ‘Gaza is ours, forever’, a large number of Israeli extremists and right-wing politicians gathered on October 20 and 21 in the settlement of Be’eri, near the border region with Gaza.

The group represented the who’s who of the Israeli right, far right and ultranationalists. She included Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir, May Golan and Bezalel Smotrich, as well ten MCs of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.

The event, titled “Preparing to Resettle Gaza,” was organized by one of Israel’s most extreme settler movements, Nachala, led by the infamous Daniella Weiss.

To understand how extremist this 79-year-old settler is, consider this: On June 27, the Canadian government, while one of the staunchest supporters of Netanyahu and his wars, imposed sanctions were imposed against her for her “role in facilitating (…) acts of violence by Israeli extremist settlers against Palestinian civilians.”

However, the hate-filled conference was merely the culmination of a years-long effort to build an argument for why Israel should ethnically cleanse Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and restore illegal settlements.

However, the story does not start on October 7. In 2005, Israel decided to redeploy his troops from the small coastal area. That was the beginning of the hermetic Israeli siege of the Strip, which led to several wars and ultimately the events of October 7 and the ongoing genocide.

Although the number of Jewish settlers was evacuated The number of fifteen illegal settlements dismantled was quite small (8,500). The sense of betrayal felt by the settlers caused deep divisions in Israeli society.

Chaotic scenes of colonists acting violently DELETED from the Gush Katif settlement bloc in Gaza caused a national crisis in Israel, and was compared to the violent evacuation of the illegal Sinai settlement of Yamit, which Israel dismantled in April 1982 as part of an earlier agreement with Egypt. But why this crisis?

Israel is a settler-colonial society, which has linked its colonial expansion to religious dictates and prophecies. The forced departure from Gaza must therefore have seemed to most of these settlers to be both a national betrayal and a sacrilege.

This is why Gaza resettlement became the immediate rallying cry for Israeli settlers. Compared to their limited share of political power during the 2005 realignment, today’s extremists are now de facto the decision makers.

Although the military remains unclear about its strategic objectives in Gaza, the settlers have always been aware of the nature of their mission: the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Gaza and the reconstruction of the settlements.

Soon, people like Weiss and many of her supporters began calling on Israelis to join the recolonization campaign. “Register, register, you are in Gaza,” Weiss told an audience of supporters last March, joyfully declaring that 500 families had already registered, according to a CNN report.

Weiss and Nachala do not act independently of the overall objective of the country’s leading politicians. For example, on the first day of the war, October 7, 2023, Netanyahu made his intentions are clear: “I say to the people of Gaza: leave now, because we will act with force everywhere.”

On October 17 a position paper introduced by Israel’s Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, called for the “relocation and permanent settlement of the entire Gaza population.”

The report saw in the war “a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip” to the Sinai Desert. Later that same month, the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence itself became involved, along with the Israeli news channel Calcalist publish a document recommending the transfer of Gaza residents to Sinai.

On November 14, the extreme right-wing minister Smotrich spoke spoke of ‘voluntary migration’. The media reported in December said that Netanyahu himself had told members of the Likud party that Israel’s real challenge is finding “countries willing to accept these countries,” meaning the people of Gaza.

Conferences were organized to rally support around the idea of ​​ethnically cleansing Palestinians. The first major conference was held last December by a coalition of settler movements. “A house on the beach is not a dream,” an advertisement for the announced meeting. The ‘beach’ here is a reference to Gaza beach.

Even Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, took his chance. In March he has spoke of Gaza’s “highly valuable waterfront property,” forcing Israel to remove civilians and “clean up the Strip.”

The ongoing so-called General Plan, aimed at the extermination and ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza, is only the military component of the settlers’ vision of ‘Gaza is ours forever’.

But if Israel has failed in the past to maintain its settlements in the rebellious Strip under more manageable conditions, will it succeed now?

The colonists are already aware of the challenge ahead of them. This is why they continually link their colonization of Gaza with the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian residents of the Strip.

However, Israel’s success and failure will ultimately be determined by this maxim: As long as the Palestinian people fight back, Weiss and her fellow extremists will not find safety in Gaza.

The indigenous people of Gaza have lived in that historic land for thousands of years. If the genocide didn’t drive them from their land, nothing else will.