Zionism: 77 years of expulsion
Recently arrived Palestinian refugees in east Jordan, part of a continuing exodus of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 1968.
Hagai El-Ad writes in Haaretz on 10 September 2025:
About two weeks ago, the Israel Defense Forces spokesperson ordered the residents of northern Gaza: ‘Evacuating Gaza City is inevitable’ – as if he were talking about fate or some divine decree.
You don’t need to be a history professor from one of the universities in Gaza we destroyed for this expulsion order to reverberate within a consciousness of scars, memories, longings and sadness. It’s not the first time that Jews have expelled Palestinians here. Historical memory isn’t only history; it’s the ongoing present, and as far as the eye can see, it also extends into the future.
There are both Palestinians and Jews who can’t hear the IDF spokesman without thinking about David Ben-Gurion in 1948: “The Arabs of the Land of Israel have but one function left – to run away.” It seems as if from the dawn of Zionism, that’s all we’ve been able to imagine: their disappearance. After all, as a people without a land, we came to a land with a people.
So, we, the Jews of the Land of Israel, thus had one function left – to drive them away. All the memories, culture, humanity, poetry, libraries, history, and the landscapes of their childhood – are all flattened as one to absolute reduction: they have no meaning. They have but one function left. And that leaves us but one function left. For if that’s what we do here, what meaning do our culture, literature and childhood memories have? Nowadays, they call this military procedure “floor to ceiling.” An empty and flattened future. Here was originally a home, an object with volume. But the home’s ceiling also has but one function left.
This is what the former IDF chief of staff, Herzl Halevi, told his wife on the morning of October 7: “Gaza will be destroyed.” It’s already true of 70 percent of the homes in Gaza, and very soon Gaza City will also “look like Beit Hanoun,” as the defense minister promised. Beit Hanoun, which already looks like Rafah. Rafah, which already looks like the hundreds of their villages after 1948. Their villages that once were surrounded by fields and are now surrounded by our settlements and thousands of their trees that we uprooted.
We have but one function: Zionism – 77 years of “reshaping operations” (as recently coined by the head of Central Command). Not only reshaping the land, but also consciousness – theirs and ours. However, the Palestinians resist that one function that we designated for them. Even when they’re simply sleeping a Palestinian sleep in their Palestinian home or doing Palestinian labor on their Palestinian land, they’re resisting. Palestinians cannot establish here even one faculty of history without it being an act of resistance. Their very existence here is resistance.
So, for us, every Palestinian home is a military post that must be demolished, every Palestinian tree provides cover for an ambush (and must be uprooted), every Palestinian is a terrorist (and must be killed). Not because someone can “scout out our forces” from a house but rather because it represents a floor that has yet to meet a ceiling, a sign of life. The tree is an ambush, not because they’ll hide behind it to throw a stone but rather because it has roots. The Palestinian is a dangerous terrorist because he still hasn’t fulfilled his one function: to run away.
Opposition to this horror barely exists here. And the opposition that exists is weak, defeated. However, there is still a role for trying to prevent consciousness from being shaped into the violent pattern of life here. Opposition to the horror means mourning our death and feeling the pain of the agony of the living – how can we not? It also means seeing a ruined university (that we destroyed), smelling a burned library (that we burned) and understanding that crushed there between the floor and the ceiling is the body of a small child (that we killed).
Many bodies, small and big, bodies of human beings, who had more than one function in life. Maybe that’s what it means to resist this horror: remembering and not forgetting that human beings always – always – have more than one function.
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