Israel’s current genocide in Gaza and recently announced plans to occupy Gaza City are both part of a long and tortured history of Israeli military occupations of the tiny strip.
Whenever we imagine that Israel’s genocide has reached its nadir, the country plumbs new depths of evil. Israel’s genocidal energy in Gaza seems bottomless.
On Thursday, nearly two years into the genocide, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Fox News that Israel intends to take military control of the entire Gaza Strip. On Friday, Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan to occupy Gaza City, which will involve the mass displacement of “all Palestinian civilians from Gaza City.”
If implemented, the planned reoccupation, which comes exactly twenty years after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005, will unleash Israel’s third military occupation of Gaza, culminating a decades-long history marked by brutal violence, mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing, and endless displacements. Not that Israel is not already an occupying force in Gaza. According to the United Nations, Israel is still occupying Gaza, because it continues to control the territory by land, air, and sea. Freely touting its ethnic cleansing schemes there, now Israel wants Gaza without its people. It’s a settler-colonial campaign branded as military occupation.
Gaza is not a state in conflict with Israel. It’s the largest refugee camp on earth. Squeezed in a tiny sliver of land (1.3 percent of Palestine), the majority of its two million people live in cramped refugee camps, most of which have been in existence for over seven decades.
It started during the Nakba, the mass displacement of Palestinians at Israel’s founding in 1948 when over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their land and homes in Israel and made lifetime refugees. Nearly 250,000 of those uprooted flooded into Gaza, the last surviving Palestinian city along the Mediterranean coast, tripling its population overnight and rendering it a colossal refugee camp squashed between desert and sea. Providing shelter to the displaced inhabitants of over 250 razed Palestinian towns and villages, Gaza became a Noah’s ark for Palestine after the Nakba.
The tragedy was so profound that the United Nations set up that year a special agency to provide aid to Palestinian refugees, the United Nations Relief for Palestinian Refugees, which was shortly succeeded by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and soon moved its headquarters to Gaza City.
Most of the refugees who flooded into Gaza came from towns and villages in central and southern Palestine and from northern parts as far as Galilee. But those from villages around Gaza had to endure the tragedy of being displaced within sight of their lost lands and homes. As Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan later confessed,
Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushu’a in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.
Those settlements, built on the ruins of uprooted Palestinians, served as a constant reminder of the Nakba. To cite the late Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, voice of the Palestinian refugees: “Nahal Oz was a military settlement founded by the Nahal units of the Israeli army to harass Palestinian farmers who had been driven out of their villages and had become refugees in Gaza.”
Over the next seven decades, Gaza’s bleak refugee reality would set into motion a long and tortured history of Israeli military occupations of the tiny strip.
Israel’s Brutal Invasions
In November 1956, embarking on its first occupation of Gaza, Israeli forces invaded the territory by launching military raids on its impoverished refugee camps. The occupation took place during Tripartite Aggression against Egypt, which was then controlling Gaza. It started with a series of horrific massacres. Israeli soldiers entered Khan Yunis and collected all adult males from their homes and shot them at their doorsteps and in the streets, killing at least 520 people.
Even Rafah in the south was not safe from Israeli invasions and mass slaughter. On November 12, Israeli forces invaded the refugee camps in Rafah, rounded up male residents, and killed and wounded hundreds of people in cold blood. The bodies of the victims were dumped in the district of Tell Zurab, west of Rafah, where families had to risk curfews to pick up the bodies of loved ones and bury them, though most of the burials were carried out without identification. The bloodshed, known as the Rafah massacre, sent waves of horror through the camps.
And so Gaza got a first taste of what an Israeli occupation was like: thousands of civilians were killed and wounded throughout the whole Gaza Strip, and hundreds of prisoners summarily executed. The carnage was described by the Red Cross as “scenes of terror.” It was so appalling that E. L. M. Burns, the head of the UN observer mission in Gaza, warned that Israel’s atrocities there intended to wipe out Gaza’s refugee population, which according to international law, amounted to an act of genocide.
Because Gaza was essentially a massive refugee camp of displaced Palestinians who were expelled from their homes inside Israel during the Nakba, Israel became the first occupying power in history that uprooted a native population, chased it into exile, and occupied it. (Isarel’s invasion of Lebanon in the early 1980s would mete out the same fate to Palestinian refugees there, culminating in the horrific Sabra and Shatila massacre, which was also condemned by the UN as “an act of genocide.”)
Even Israeli military leaders like Dayan were forced to admit that grim reality. As he confessed that year: “What can we say against their terrible hatred of us? For eight years, they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their lands and villages, where they and their forefathers dwelled, into our home.”
But the Nakba was only the beginning. Unsatisfied with uprooting Palestinians, Israel would routinely invade Gaza, wreak horror, and carry out a series of massacres. Frequently after 1948, Israeli forces would raid Gaza’s refugee camps, slaughtering and displacing thousands of refugees, and demolishing their homes and camps. In January 1949, with the bloody memory of the Nakba still fresh in Gaza, Israeli forces bombed food distribution centers in Deir al-Balah and Khan Yunis at peak hours, killing hundreds of Palestinians. Those refugees who attempted to return to their homes, labeled by Israel as “infiltrators,” were routinely shot on sight by Israeli soldiers.
In August 1953, an Israeli military unit, led by Ariel Sharon, the future prime minister of Israel, invaded the Bureij refugee camp and killed some fifty people in their beds. According to UN officials, Israeli forces threw bombs through the windows of huts where Palestinian refugees were sleeping and shot at those who tried to flee. The massacre was described by a UN commission as an “appalling case of deliberate mass murder.”
Those repeated massacres were part of a wider Israeli campaign to ethnically cleanse Gaza’s refugee population. Following the Nakba, Israel’s founders, including David Ben-Gurion, foresaw the risk of concentrating hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in a coastal strip straddled between the Negev and Sinai deserts with no real way out and no hope for escape or dispersion. Haunted by Gaza’s refugee population and the prospect of Palestinian right of return, and fearing the spectacle of “waves of refugees marching on Israel from Gaza,” Israel attempted to solve the crisis by wiping it out.
When that failed, Israel moved to reoccupy Gaza.
Massacre Upon Massacre
In 1967, war again broke out and Israel invaded Gaza for the second time. It was no easy feat: it took Israel six days to win the war but four years to take control of Gaza. The resistance spurred a second exodus, as tens of thousands of refugees, still traumatized by the memory of the first occupation, were forced to flee the coastal strip to Jordan and Egypt — never to return. Israel’s second and decades-long occupation of Gaza was underway.
The refugee population of Gaza continued to haunt Israeli leaders after 1967. Transfer plans abounded. During Israel’s prolonged occupation of Gaza — which placed refugees under the control of the very forces that had uprooted them two decades earlier — Israeli leaders, notably Levi Eshkol and Dayan, contemplated transferring Gaza refugees to the West Bank, or Sinai in Egypt, or Iraq, or an Arab country in North Africa (the “Libyan Operation”). They even hatched a secret plan, the “Moshe Dayan plan,” to transfer Gazan refugees to Latin America by air, though luckily for the people of Gaza, the plan was deemed costly and unfeasible.
Unsatisfied with military occupation, Israeli forces moved quickly to uproot Palestinians in Gaza, demolish their homes and seize their land, and build Jewish settlements on the ruins of displaced refugees. The settlements prospered while Palestinians suffered under occupation.
Even peace proved costly for Gaza’s refugees. The 1979 Camp David Accords closed off Gaza’s border with Egypt, dividing families by barbed wires, causing further population displacements and house demolitions along the newly demarcated border, depriving Gaza’s fishermen of their traditional access to Egyptian territorial waters. The destruction of Israeli settlements in Sinai was further compensated by an upsurge in settlement activity in Gaza.
During the second intifada, after nearly four decades of protracted occupation, Israel seemingly withdrew from Gaza, leaving behind over one million camped refugees. When its forces left the coastal strip, Israeli leaders were confident they had finally swept Gaza’s refugee crisis under the rug of “disengagement.”
Meanwhile, Israel continued to control Gaza’s frontier posts, airspace, and territorial waters. Declaring the impoverished enclave a “hostile territory” and viewing its refugee population as a security threat of “existential” proportions that required disproportionate force, Israel routinely subjected Gaza to collective punishment. It continued to subject its population to military operations and invasions. Israel’s pullout was branded to the outside world as a concession, the end of occupation, and the fulfillment of Israel’s obligations toward Gaza and its refugees.
In reality, the withdrawal made the refugee population an easy target for its military incursions and conquests, with entire sections of the camps declared no-go areas for the Israeli patrols. Meanwhile, Israel moved its settlers to new settlements in the West Bank and around Gaza, and before long, Gaza was placed under total siege.
For nearly two decades, Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, while routinely assaulting and raiding its population — a brutal chapter that would culminate in the ongoing genocide. All that time, the refugees of Gaza had to suffer the horrifying fate of living under the yoke of the very forces that had ethnically cleansed them decades earlier. Bombarded, under siege, penned in a slaughterhouse, and trapped in an iron cage fashioned by Israel, the refugees of Gaza have come to fathom the depth of their tragedy: there is one thing worse than being displaced, and that is not being able to leave. Many still fear that leaving would amount to a second Nakba, which Israeli leaders have been so determined to carry out.
Every year or so after the Nakba, Israeli forces would invade Gaza. For decades, Israel would subject Gaza to a brutal series of military invasions and occupations, raids and offenses, military incursions and administrations, bombing campaigns and air strikes, repeated massacres and mass displacements, a yearslong blockade that is still in place, and an ongoing genocide with no end in sight.
Israel’s brutality in Gaza has often spawned resistance. Owing to its refugee history, Gaza was the birthplace of the first intifada, known as the stone uprising, which broke out in Jabalya refugee camp (nicknamed “Vietnam Camp”), and was led by unarmed young Palestinians who were born refugees and grew up under Israeli occupation. Gaza then became the symbolic battlefield of the second intifada when, at a crossroads near Bureij refugee camp, twelve-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah was shot dead in his father’s arms, the iconic image of the uprising.
According to French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu, Israel has waged at least fifteen wars on Gaza since the Nakba, which has resulted in the near annihilation of Gaza’s 4,000-year-old civilization. In the five wars it has waged on Gaza since the blockade, Israel has killed hundreds of thousands Palestinians while displacing over two million others. In summer 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, Israeli forces slaughtered over two thousand Palestinians in Gaza. Two Palestinian popular uprisings, or intifadas, were brutally suppressed by Israel. Even when seven years ago Palestinians staged a symbolic March of Return within the sealed walls of Gaza, to commemorate the Nakba, they were mercilessly slaughtered by Israel in the hundreds, including children flying kites. Today nearly two years into the Gaza genocide, those past massacres have become a daily spectacle in Gaza.
The tragic irony is that the refugees in Gaza now being slaughtered and displaced were created in the heat of war by Israel itself more than seventy-seven years ago. Except this time, the refugees have nowhere left to go.
Yet Israel’s obsession with Gaza’s refugees is not completely misplaced and will certainly be met with Palestinian steadfastness. As Khoury put it: “For seventy years the refugees have not stopped knocking on the gates of Gaza, which are locked with hatred and death, and they will continue to knock on them until the locks are broken, and Palestine will reach out its hands to its people who return to it invaded by the water and mud of the earth, and build from their death a gate to life.”