The Israeli government’s demand that more than one million Palestinians leave their homes in northern Gaza and flee south has horrific echoes of the past.
I worked as a journalist in the region in the 1990s, and in recent years I have spent a great deal of time in Gaza and Israel, researching the history of Gaza’s 2.3 million refugees. Almost everyone in Gaza is a refugee from one of 200 Arab villages, then in southern Palestine, that were destroyed by Israeli forces in 1948 when the Jewish state came into being. What remains of some of these villages lies within 10 miles of the Gaza boundary. Some refugees can even see their land through the fence.
The first phase of Israel’s revenge for Hamas’s atrocities – the intense aerial bombardment of the past few days – was easy to predict. Every innocent Palestinian in Gaza was bound to pay the appalling price, and thousands already have.
However, I did not predict that this time the west would not only let it happen – as it has several times before – but cheer Israel on, sending arms and effectively promising impunity from international law, abandoning the Palestinians to their plight.
With the green light from Israel’s allies, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Friday that 1.1 million Gazans were to be “evacuated” from the north to the south of Gaza. Netanyahu wants us to believe his prime concern is to keep civilians out of danger during the expected ground invasion from the north, which is presumably how he plans to finally “crush” Hamas. Such empty claims – at the time of writing, 1,800 Palestinians have already been killed – are made in the hope of immunising Israel against accusations of war crimes. Driving one million people south will cause ever more horror, and we all know by now that there is no safe place for civilians to flee to or to shelter.