At all points it is taken for granted that fewer Palestinians—not counting those already slain—will live in their homeland once the Israelis are through with them. To call this “moral and humane” or a “voluntary migration” smells of pre-emptive self-defence against the shackles of international law. But you can trust the settlers and their allies to say what others wouldn’t dare. At the Jerusalem conference in January, Israeli communications minister Shlomo Karhi described exactly and clearly what they mean: “‘voluntary,’” Karhi explained, is “a state you impose [on someone] until they give their consent.”
If Benjamin Netanyahu had proposed any concrete plans for Gaza’s future, there would be room for fewer wild annihilatory schemes from others. He has not. No doubt when the government does unveil its proposal, it will contain the cruelty so openly displayed elsewhere, simply sheathed in the salving language of appeasement and reasonableness. It is in this gap that the settler movement operates. “Netanyahu left us an opening,” Daniella Weiss said in January. “He invites this pressure.” And it is from Weiss and her close colleague Yossi Dagan, the West Bank overlord, that the real threat comes. When they publish their maps, pins carefully placed on Gaza City, Khan Younis, and Rafah, their intent is backed by decades of experience as the deniable, unofficial, paramilitary arm of Israel’s nation-building project.
In one of the government’s few clear statements of post-war intent, defense minister Yoav Gallant, freshly censured by the International Court of Justice, said Israel would not reoccupy Gaza. Promises like these, of course, are made to be broken; he also insisted on “military freedom of operation”—a security regime very much like that in the West Bank, which makes life hellish for Palestinians and emboldens the settlers who supplant them. The clearance of Palestinians from their homes and farms in Judea and Samaria usually begins with the designation of territory as “survey land,” “state land,” “closed military zones,” or “firing zones”—categories approved by the courts and enforced by the army. In a morbid sense, this typical faux-legal process has already been achieved in Gaza by dumb bombs and dynamite, no orders or writs required.