This is Palestine, in Your Inbox, making sense of the darkest day in Palestinian history.

How to establish a Jewish state in a land that is overwhelming Palestinian Arab?

Zionist thinkers from the 1890s until 1948 asked themselves the same question: How to establish a Jewish state in a land that is mostly non-Jews? 

Many understood the severity of the dilemma. The Palestinian Arabs were a people with deep roots in the country, possessing a bourgeoning 🇵🇸 national identity 🇵🇸 and culture with no desire to submit to Jewish domination.

This led many (most?) Zionist leaders, including Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha'am, Israel Zangwill, Arthur Rupin, M. Smilansky, L. Motzkin, Yosef Weitz, Chaim Weizmann, M. Usshishkin, D. Ben Gurion, Moshe Shertok—to believe it would be required to expel the Arabs of Palestine in order to establish a Jewish State, at the time politely referred to as “transfer.”

Then, in 1948, when the British abandoned Palestine, a golden opportunity presented itself.

War has long provided a pretext for atrocities, and Palestine was no exception: From November 1947 to November 1948, Zionist forces managed to uproot 750,000 Palestinians from their homes & destroy 500 Palestinian villages. In the years after the war, Israeli forces killed thousands more Palestinians trying to return to their homes to reclaim lost property.

Meanwhile, the state of Israel continued to expel Palestinians even after the fighting had ended. From November 1948 through the final agreement with Syria & Lebanon in the summer of 1949, Israeli focused expelled the residents of another 36 Palestinian villages.

Then, in 1967, war returned to Palestine, and so did the mass expulsions. Another 300,000 Palestinians were depopulated from Imwas, Yalo, Bayt Nuba, Surit, Beit Awwa, Beit Mirsem, Shuyukh, Jiftlik, Agarith & Huseirat during and after the June 1967 War.

Atrocities were harder to commit during peacetime, and so naturally the expulsions slowed, but continued nevertheless. From 1968-1971, the Israeli military deported another 615 Gazan residents. In August 1971 alone, the Israeli military uprooted another 400 Palestinians families from Gaza in order to build 200 miles of security roads. The displaced Palestinian families were forced to relocate to el-Arish, Egypt. In total, from 1967-1987, some 2,000 Palestinians were expelled from the occupied Palestinian Territories.

For Israel, Palestinians cause two problems: a security problem (they often protest their expulsions) and a demographic problem (they are of the incorrect ethnic / national / ancestral / religious group).

In Jerusalem, in particular, it was the later problem that led to so many expulsions. Between June 1967 - 2016, Israel revoked the residency status of at least 14,595 Palestinians from East Jerusalem. This amounted to "forcible transfers," according to Human Rights Watch.

In 1992, as the First Intifada continued to lead to more bloodshed, Israel continued its policy of expulsions. Between December 1992 and March 1993, Israel deported another 415 Gazan Palestinians it deemed security threats.

The evolution of Israel's expulsion policies, 1993-present

The First Intifada led to a shift in the calculus for Israel’s political leaders. It became clear that Israel could not control the lives of millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories forever.

The result was the Oslo Process, a series of agreements Israel signed with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (the PLO), carried out between 1993-2000.

Oslo re-oriented Israel’s policy of depopulating Palestine. Recall that the idea of Oslo was that Israel would carve out cantons in the Occupied Territories densely populated with Palestinians (“area A”) and transfer control of the internal affairs of those areas to the Palestinians.

Israel’s expulsion strategy evolved. Instead, the idea was to push Palestinians from the less densely populated areas (Area B and C) into more densely populated areas (Area A).

This is currently happening throughout the West Bank in real time, in places like Khan al-Ahmar, Masafer Yatta, Khirbet Humsah, Ein Samiya, Ras al-Tin, Humsa, and many other areas (here).

Just to get as sense for how intense the pressure is on Palestinians in Area C, between 2016-2018, Israel issued 100 times more home demolition orders as they did building permits to Palestinians in Area C West Bank.

Palestinians are being crowded into smaller & smaller cantons. For Israel, this minimizes the security threat and maximizes the amount of land destined for Jewish flourishing.

In fact, the logic has an intricate hierarchy, and a corresponding set of military orders and laws to push Palestinian unidirectionally from one geography to another, the ultimate destination being outside of historic Palestine:

Leave Israel or Jerusalem and go to the West Bank —> once in the West Bank, go from Areas B & C to Area A —> from Area A of the West Bank to Jordan or Gaza —> and from Gaza to Egypt or the Mediterranean Sea (here, here & here).

One of the more unreported trends over the past few years has been a mass exodus out of Gaza. “Everyone in Gaza knows someone who has left,” I was told by a half dozen Palestinians in Gaza on a recent visit.

Instead of direct expulsion abroad, as was the case from 1948-1993, the route to expulsion has become more circuitous, but still unidirectional: Palestinians can go from places Israel wants to keep forever (Jerusalem), to places Israel cannot keep (e.g. Gaza), but can nevertheless control.

Alas, what we are witnessing is the most calamitous tragedy to befall Palestine in its history. 1.4 million Palestinians have been expelled from their homes—already twice the number expelled in 1948—with a death count now at 7,000, the vast majority civilians.

The people of Gaza are now counting not the weeks or days, but the minutes.

Sending all my love

-Zach