The Next Sinister Stage of Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza

There's nothing “voluntary” or “humanitarian” about Palestinian migration from Gaza

For 45 days, the Israeli military has pummeled Gaza with unrelenting genocidal violence. The world has stood idle, permitting one of world’s most sophisticated armies to collectively punish one of its most vulnerable populations. Other nations, like the United States, have enabled this genocide as full-fledged co-conspirators.

If shooting crabs in a bucket was a military offensive, Gaza would be it.

The massive death toll, underestimated at 13,000 testifies to that bleak analogy. While the images of apocalyptic destruction, spanning the north of Gaza to the besieged central and southern corridors, illustrate a new world order of dystopia that spells genocide in one of the most densely populated plots of land in the world.   

The militarized genocide in Gaza creates the landscape for its sinister companion: ethnic cleansing. 

Ethnic cleansing, in lay terms, is a project whereby a government uses force or intimidation to expel an ethnic group from a territory – to make way for another ethnic group.  In short, ethnic cleansing is forcible mass displacement, and in Gaza, a strategy that is carried forward by a menacing architecture of explicit and conspicuous violence that precedes but climaxed horrifically during these past 45 days.

While used interchangeably, genocide and ethnic cleansing overlap but are teleologically distinct. Genocide fixates centrally on the people as subjects of elimination, while ethnic cleansing focuses narrowly on the land.  The people, within the ethnic cleansing calculus, are the collateral objects to be expelled and eliminated, while the land remains the central subject of concern – it is the priority, the site of intellectual and physical focus to be occupied, annexed, then remade for another people. And in this instance, Israeli Jewish settlers.

Since October 7^th, this architecture of ethnic cleansing has exploded onto the heads of the 2.3 million Palestinian residents of Gaza. In the form of incessant bombing, stealth ground invasions, humanitarian isolation from the world, and the baleful disconnection of water, food supplies, and Internet to a people besieged, ignored, and even more, flatly vilified as “terrorists.”  This militarized front of the broader ethnic cleansing campaign destroyed mosques and schools, bakeries and homes, critical infrastructure and most infamously, hospitals. 

Hospitals: the very sites where tens of thousands of dying and injured Palestinians flocked for lifesaving care became the principal targets of ungodly military violence, most vividly portrayed by Al Shifa. Ground zero for the “medical ethnic cleansing” program in Gaza, Israel clumsily scapegoated Al Shifa as the site of Hamas’s Command Center, and then brutally transformed the site meant to save lives into a mortuary for mass death.

The lowest point came on November 18^th, when Israel occupied the hospital, then forced hundreds of physicians, staff, and patients to walk out of at gunpoint, waving white flags while rolling off in wheelchairs and hospital beds.  The sites were meant to humiliate and un-dignify Palestinian patients, still bloodied, bandaged and in dire need of medical attention.

This was the plan, all along. Destroying hospitals, and the medical infrastructure at large, was a central component of Israel’s ethnic cleansing program. While hellbent on taking as many lives as possible with missiles, bombs and indiscriminate shelling, the more clandestine strategy of shuddering hospitals and shattering the medical landscape offered a more ominous, more optimal ethnic cleansing strategy.

Palestinians, fleeing closed hospitals and newly injured, needed medical attention.

With nowhere to go for medical treatment, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza in need of vital medical attention would have to flee a land, Gaza, entirely bereft of functional hospitals.  They would have to migrate, en masse, from a native soil barren of water, fuel, and physicians toward a southern border where makeshift hospitals awaited them. 

Far from home, across a border that would transform them from indigenous residents into stateless refugees. Once, and very likely, for good.  

This is the mass exodus the Israeli strategy of medical apartheid calculates when its bombs hospital after hospital, and systematically destroys every cog of a Gazan medical landscape already on unsteady legs before this crisis began. 

However, this unfolding plot of medical ethnic cleansing is hardly the most sinister part of the broader Israeli military program. Its next phase, which is already being peddled by the Netanyahu regime, reflects its most diabolical twist.

Last week, both Netanyahu and his finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, began pushing “voluntary migration” of Palestinian refugees from Gaza as the “right humanitarian solution.”

The messaging spin here is as depraved as it is deceptive. Above all, there is nothing “voluntary” about migration here. Palestinians in Gaza, and beyond, want nothing more than to stay in their land.

However, Israel has emaciated the Strip of anything and everything that makes it inhabitable for its Palestinians residents. And most urgently, destroyed the very hospitals that enable them to remain alive.

Therefore, this migration and mass exodus is not only involuntary, but the direct consequence of the genocidal violence inflicted on Gaza and its network of hospitals by the Israeli military.  There is utterly nothing “voluntary” about it, and framing it as such further exposes a regime misaligned with international law and the truth.

Next, Israel pins the responsibility of absorbing the masses of Palestinians refugees in Gaza in urgent need of humanitarian aid on Arab and western nations.  Smotrich states:

“The reception of [Palestinian] refugees by the countries of the world that really want their best interests, with the support and generous financial assistance of the international community and within the state of Israel, is the only solution that will bring to an end the suffering and pain of Jews and Arabs alike.”

This was the plan all along.

To bomb with open disregard for human life; decimate infrastructure against the accord of international human rights law; emaciate the land from food, fuel and water; blackout the residents from access to Internet and the rest of the world; descend and then destroy the hospitals vitally needed to treat limitless waves of injured, ill, and dying Palestinians; and finally, make the land so insufferable, so uninhabitable, that Palestinians clenching onto their land with whatever they have left to have no choice but to leave.   

To be pushed out of their homes and their land, against the weight of everything within and beyond them, because Israel has annihilated a Gaza that it plans to rebuild only for Israelis. 

Regardless of how Israel spins it, there is nothing “voluntary” or “humanitarian” about this next phase of ethnic cleansing. It is in fact, the very opposite, depicted by a Palestinian “trail of tears” reminiscent of the forced indigenous American exodus out of their native lands.

While the United States and the western nations enabling genocide, ethnic cleansing, and these next sinister phases of it will flank alongside Israel and this diabolical reframing of reality, much of the world has began to see through it and them.

Much of the world sees Israel and its allies as charlatans preaching decency and democracy to the remainder of the world, but defying both in the most brazen, barbaric terms.

They see them as pariah states rattling on about human rights but rapidly rotting at the core.  

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Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and author.  He publishes his daily insights on his socials @khaledbeydoun,