Eyewitness report: Echoes of the Nakbah

Nakba 1948, Jaramana Refugee Camp, Damascus, Syria, Image Public Domain

Toine van Teeffelen, a friend and Pax Christi Partner at the Arab Education Institute in Bethlehem writes today:

Many Palestinians, when seeing on the media a large UNRWA tent camp as now has been erected near Khan Younis in the south of Gaza, think of the Nakba (disaster) of 1948 when over 700.000 Palestinians were forced to flee from Palestine and never had a chance to return to their homes.

The image of a crying woman in front of an extensive tent camp is engraved in many Palestinians' consciousness.

After the massacre by Hamas in south Israel that left 1,400 Israelis dead, the Israeli government declared war on Hamas and the army spokesperson Daniel Hagari ominously declared that, "Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings," adding "the emphasis" is "on damage and not on accuracy." The vast majority of the present Gaza residents are descendants of those Nakba refugees.

The warning to Palestinians in Gaza were two words: "Leave now". Many were afraid for another round of massacres, ethnic cleansing and expulsion. The Israeli army publicized a map of Gaza with two large arrows downwards. In the days afterwards more than a million Gazans fled from the north to the south, while a substantial minority remained where they lived, including the most vulnerable such as those staying in hospitals.

Some felt that in the south circumstances were barely any better than in the north. A few days ago the UN said that everywhere in Gaza people have to live on a ration of one litre water instead of the normal 15 litres a person needs. Some decided to return to the north despite the huge risks.

Fear under the population is increasing now for what is to come. Yesterday the Israeli army spokesperson announced that attacks will be deepened and increased in preparation for "the next stage of the war."

Egypt, bordering Gaza, has been pressed by the US and other western states to accept Palestinian refugees fleeing the crisis. Various western governments have even tried to make a deal with Egypt by offering economic incentives for them to let in Palestinians, according to the Egyptian news site Mada Masr, an independent news outlet in the country. Egypt's decision not to accept such a scenario of a mass of Palestinian refugees coming in is clearly based on security considerations. The present Arab summit that took place this weekend in Cairo seems in part intended to create a consensus against the Palestinian "transfer" from Gaza to the Egyptian Sinai desert.

The idea of resettling Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai is not new. In the mid-1950s, the UN came with a plan to transfer thousands of Palestinian refugees in Gaza to Sinai's north-western region, a project that was received with popular anger and refusal. After the June war in 1967 - the war, in which Israeli forces captured more of Palestine, including Gaza - the so-called Allon Plan of the Israeli politician Yigal Allon, which was widely seen as future Israeli policy, saw the Gaza Strip being annexed to Israel.

A partial annexation of Northern Gaza territory looks now in the cards, with many Palestinians who fled to the south possibly unable to return to their homes in North-Gaza. On Wednesday morning, the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Eli Cohen said on Israeli army radio that "At the end of this war, not only will Hamas no longer be in Gaza, the territory of Gaza will also decrease." A former minister, Gideon Sa'ar, said something similar in an interview on Saturday with Israel's Channel 12 News: "Whoever starts a war against Israel must lose territory."

Such an Israeli move is in line with what Harvard professor Sara Roy documented in 2012, that Israeli-imposed buffer zones had at the time already absorbed "nearly 14 percent of Gaza's total land and at least 48 percent of [its] total arable land."

Land Robbery in the West Bank

The so-called ongoing Nakba is here in the West Bank applied to a much smaller numbers of Palestinians than in Gaza but in some cases to a larger territory. It concerns hundreds of Bedouins living in area C in the West Bank countryside which is completely controlled by Israel and which constitutes over 60% of the West Bank. The hundreds of Israeli settlements and outposts are located there. So-called Israeli "herder" settlers guarding flocks have taken in about 5 years' time control of 10% of Area C and 6% of the entire West Bank, chasing away Bedouin communities from their land.

Over the last year alone, 110 sq km was effectively annexed by settlers on herding outposts. All the built-up settlement areas constructed since 1967 cover only 80 sq km. During the last two weeks this process of land robbery has much accelerated, especially to the east of Ramallah and south of Hebron.

People in the West Bank living in confrontation areas are much afraid. During the last two weeks about 90 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, and thousands injured. The West Bank intercity roads are controlled by the settlers as Palestinians are presently locked up in the cities and villages.

Yesterday Haaretz featured an article titled "The IDF Took Away Weapons From Gaza Border Communities in Recent Years, and Armed West Bank Settlers in the Thousands." Palestinians find it actually nowadays very difficult to distinguish between a settler and a soldier. As many Israeli soldiers have been transported to Gaza, soldiers in the West Bank are by and large settler-reservists.

One story which goes around in the West Bank relates to that happened Thursday over a week ago in an area east of Ramallah. A Bedouin community was assaulted, as reported in again Haaretz and Times of Israel: "The abuse lasted almost a whole day. Soldiers and settlers detained and handcuffed three Palestinians from the West Bank village Wadi as-Seeq, and for hours, according to the Palestinians, they were severely beaten, stripped to their underwear, and photographed handcuffed, in their underwear. Their captors urinated on two of them and extinguished burning cigarettes on them. There was even an attempt to penetrate one of them with an object."

Such assaults and torture aim to become a story that circulates and makes people afraid of more ongoing Nakba scenes so that people are more prepared to flee. This actually happened too during the Nakba itself in 1948.

Netanyahu's life project

During the last few decades, it was Netanyahu's life project to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state in West Bank, Gaza and East-Jerusalem as envisioned and ritually supported by most of the international community though never politically enforced. A main Israeli tool was to keep West Bank and Gaza politically divided, the West Bank controlled by the Palestinian Authority and Gaza by Hamas.

The Israeli media are presently full of stories about how Netanyahu's policies since 2009 have actually enabled Hamas to survive, despite the siege of Gaza. The historian Adam Raz sardonically states at the end of a historical overview in Haaretz this weekend: "There will be a lot of talk and pyrotechnics about the current 'war against terror', but sustaining Hamas is more important to Netanyahu than a few dead kibbutzniks."

The political alternative to a Palestinian state which now prevails goes in the direction of an apartheid system with open or silent Nakba population transfers in Gaza as well as the West Bank. Larger concentrations of the Palestinian population come to live in smaller territories which are in different degrees isolated from each other and from Jerusalem and Israel.

This is the dangerous internal "escalation" of the conflict which has until now received relatively scant attention compared to the chances and dangers of an external, regional escalation.

Bethlehem, 22/10/2023