My highlights – and my emphasis – from the article:
“Hamas’s operation Al-Aqsa Flood of 7 October has given Israel’s far right, which dominates the government Binyamin Netanyahu formed in late 2022, the ideal opportunity to implement their plan for a Greater Israel that includes the West Bank and Gaza, in other words, the whole of British Mandate Palestine.”
“The political-ideological lineage of the Likud party … can be traced back to a fascist-inspired strain of ‘revisionist Zionism’ which emerged in the interwar period.”
Annexing the occupied territories after 1967 and granting their inhabitants Israeli citizenship would have endangered Israel’s Jewishness; annexing them without granting such a right would have undermined its democracy (an ‘ethnic democracy’, according to Israeli sociologist Sammy Smooha) by formalising apartheid.
Likud opposed this plan and kept pushing for the annexation of the two newly occupied territories and their complete colonisation, not limiting themselves to the areas targeted under the Allon Plan in Judea and Samaria.”
“The PLO leadership agreed to temporarily abandon its previously non-negotiable conditions: the eventual withdrawal of the Israeli army from all Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 and the ultimate dismantling of the settlements, a process which would begin with the halting of their expansion.” This enabled the birth of Oslo accords.
In 2005 “Netanyahu, who was Sharon’s finance minister, resigned from the government in protest at the withdrawal from Gaza. He cited security reasons, while playing up to Likud’s hardline base and the settler movement.
In December 2022 he formed “an alliance with two parties of the religious Zionist far right which even Israeli Holocaust historian Daniel Blatman has called ‘neo-Nazi’.”
“The current Israeli government is … dominated by politicians committed to realising a Greater Israel through the annexation of the territories conquered in 1967 and the expulsion of their indigenous populations.
Al-Aqsa Flood was immediately exploited by the entire Israeli far right to push for the implementation of their expansionist plan.”
Titled ‘Options for a Policy Regarding Gaza’s Civilian Population’ (8), the paper – finalised on 13 October – considers three alternatives: (a) the population remaining in Gaza and the import[ation] of Palestinian Authority (PA) rule; (b) the population remaining in Gaza along with the emergence of a local Arab authority (to be set up by Israel); and (c) the evacuation of the civilian population from Gaza to Sinai.”
Option (c) is favoured by the intelligence ministry… The paper then describes how the transfer of the Gazan population would be carried out… That explains why the Israeli army ordered Gazans in the north to move south.
Egypt’s refusal prompted the intelligence minister, Gila Gamliel, on 19 November to call on the international community to take in the Palestinians from Gaza and pay for their ‘voluntary resettlement’ around the world, rather than mobilise funds for the reconstruction of the enclave.
Washington, however, has been unequivocal in its opposition to the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza.
Biden reaffirms “his preference for a two-state solution and called for a united Gaza and West Bank under a ‘revitalised’ Palestinian Authority. This is the option favoured by most Western governments, but also by Moscow and Beijing and most Arab states. It is supported by some of the Israeli opposition.” This means the revival of Oslo process.
However, “a Palestinian state created within the framework of the Oslo accords could only be a Bantustan dependent on the goodwill of Israel – far from the minimum conditions without which no peaceful settlement could be accepted by the Palestinians.”
“For now, the real endgame in Gaza will be determined by the evolution of fighting on the ground and international pressure on Israel.”
Ali Jadallah · Anadolu · Getty |
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