Israel's Ethnic Cleansing of the Palestinians, 1968-1993
By hook or by crook, Israel sought to keep Palestinians out of Palestine. This is a brief history of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, 1968-1993.
Gaza, 1972. source
In 1968, Israel embarked on a journey to uproot Palestinians from their homes in the occupied Palestinian territories. Israel pushed out tens of thousands of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip from 1968-1970, then forcibly expelled another 38,000 Palestinian refugees in Gaza in 1971 and tried to compel the rest to give up their refugee status or leave the refugee camps throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In addition, throughout the period under discussion, Israel deported thousands of Palestinians and weaponized the population registry to prevent hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who left Gaza or the West Bank from returning. By hook or by crook, Israel sought to keep Palestinians out of Palestine. This is a brief history of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, 1968-1993.
Depopulation via Carrots
After the June 1967 War, Israeli leaders met to determine the fate of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. They settled on the Allon Plan, which called for the “resettlement” of 350,000 Gazan refugees in northern Sinai and the West Bank. For most Israeli leaders, the question was not, should they stay or should they go. The question was, how to remove them and how much force to use in the process.
By 1968, Israel’s plan coalesced around incentives for Palestinians, especially the refugees, to leave Gaza for the West Bank or Jordan. Israel focused on Gaza because some 60% of the population were refugees at the time, as compared to only 10% in the West Bank, and Israel was obsessed with the refugees. Recall, only two decades prior, Israel had stripped them of their means of livelihood, confiscated their property, placed land mines around Gaza preventing their return home, and shot and killed thousands who braved the journey anyways. Many were separated from their families and most were forced into abysmal conditions with no political rights, freedom of movement or economic opportunity. No surprise they wanted to return home and thus, no surprise, Israel saw their existence on Israel’s doorstep as an existential threat to Jewish domination.
For about a year, Israel’s depopulation plan was working. Thousands of Palestinians left every month via a secret government resettlement agency in 1968. Israeli agents recruited Palestinian collaborators, who went around Gaza’s refugee camps promising money and foreign passports to permanently leave the Strip. By June, some 20,000 fled and by the end of the year Israel managed to push out some 32,300 Gazan Palestinians. Most of them were relocated to the West Bank or Jordan and were required to sign a form declaring their departure was voluntary and that return would not be allowed. Nothing screams voluntary departure like a forced declaration of permanent exile.
Israel’s goal was to send them to Jordan, although it settled for the West Bank as feasibility was always a key question regarding population transfer. It was easier to push Palestinians to areas close to the border with Jordan than it was to force them across it. Thus, in late 1967, Israel began offering construction jobs to Gazan Palestinians near Jericho in the Jordan Valley only a few miles from the Allenby Bridge border. “It is easy to walk eastward,” explained then Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan’s senior advisor Zvi Zur in October 1967.
But, in late 1968, Jordan banned Gazans, and the rush soon turned to a trickle. New destination countries were needed.
And so, in 1969, Israel signed a secret agreement with Paraguay’s dictator, Alfredo Stroessner to "resettle" 60,000 Gazan Palestinians in Paraguay. Stroessner earned notoriety for making his country a safe haven for Nazi war criminals, placing him on a long list of autocrats and Nazi sympathizers with close ties to Israel.
An Israeli agency promised farmland, property or help in obtaining new passports and jobs, promises that often went unfulfilled, despite Palestinian protests at the Israeli embassy in Paraguay. This culminated in the assassination of the secretary of the Israeli ambassador by a Palestinian in Paraguay in 1970, putting an abrupt end to Israel’s attempt to relocate Palestinians abroad.
Israel pursued similar agreements with Brazil, Libya, Canada and Australia, but only managed to compel a few hundred of Palestinian refugee families in Gaza to accept one-way tickets out of the country.
By August 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir realized the plan was doomed to fail. Anyone who believed all the Palestinian refugees would “pack their belongings and leave in a caravan” was “delusional,” in her words. For Meir, Palestinians were not going to depart Gaza voluntarily en masse, but they could still be uprooted by force.
Depopulation via Carrots and Sticks
And so Israel’s depopulation plan shifted from carrot to stick in 1970. In the summer of 1971, the Israeli military, led by Ariel Sharon, went on a campaign to "thin out" the Palestinian refugee population in the Gaza Strip, killing hundreds and deporting 12,000 relatives of suspected Palestinian militants, mostly to north Sinai. In addition, Israeli forces uprooted nearly 16,000 more Palestinians in the refugee camps of Jabalia, Shati, Nuseirat, and Maghazi. Of those expelled, 2,150 families were forced to el-Arish, Egypt, while a small number went to the West Bank.
Israel’s expulsions were accompanied by mass home demolitions to prevent return. Israeli forces destroyed shelters of about 2,400 families under the guise of widening streets and alleyways to build some 200 miles of patrol roads. In the process, Israel also raided houses, carried out mass arrests and imposed prolonged curfews. Palestinian men were rounded up and forced to stand waist-deep in the Mediterranean Sea for hours on end. Some refugees fled to Egypt or the West Bank, while most found improvised housing in Gaza.
In total, some 38,000 Palestinian refugees were uprooted and displaced in 1971.
Then-Israeli ambassador to the US Yitzhak Rabin confirmed the goal of the operation was the liquidation of Gaza’s Palestinian refugees via "a natural shifting of population to the East Bank. [...] the problem of the refugees of the Gaza Strip should not be solved in Gaza or al-Arish [Sinai] but mainly in the East Bank,” by which he meant Jordan.
Expectedly, Israel justified its expulsions as beneficial to the local population. "The intention is to remove thousands of people for whom the Strip is too narrow and too poor," the military administrator of the Occupied Territories Shlomo Gazit said in 1971. In the words of colonel Shmuel Liran, Israel was bringing “some light and space into the camps,” regurgitated by the Washington Post as “Israel Begins Resettling Gaza Arabs into Better Homes.” Israel presented itself as benevolent, alleviating overcrowding and improving housing conditions for Palestinians. Not surprisingly, though, Israel’s destruction of the housing stock led to — wait for it — not less but more overcrowding in Gaza’s refugee camps.
In addition to expelling Gaza’s refugees, Israel also sought to erase the idea they existed at all. “We hope that within a couple of years, they [...] will no longer think of themselves as refugees,” as then Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan put it in 1971.
Thus, Palestinian refugee camps and refugee ID cards themselves became targets. Israel offered subsidies, grants and even employment to Palestinian refugees in Gaza in the 1970s if they would give up their UNRWA refugee ID cards, thereby renouncing their right to return. Israel also tried to integrate the physical geography of Palestinian refugee camps in both Gaza and the West Bank into their neighboring towns (1, 2).
But, as the Israelis would discover, few Palestinians surrendered their refugee ID cards, few tied their belief in the right to return to the physical geography of the Gaza Strip, and few Palestinian leaders in Gaza cooperated with Israel’s schemes, which mostly ended in failure.
In 1972, a group of Palestinian elders in Rafah told the Israeli military authorities: “In the name of all the refugees, we, the mukhtars, cannot agree to buy or have on rent such [new Israeli-built] houses [outside the camps] because we are still refugees and we, the refugees, are satisfied with our respective existing shelters provided to us by UNRWA.”
The project to thin out the refugee camps accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s. Thousands of Palestinians from the Jabalia, Rafah and Khan Younis camps were “relocated” to two new housing projects, called “Brazil” and “Canada,” in 1972-73, while a third phase of the human transfers took place in 1975-76. Then, in the late 1970s and 1980s, Israel compelled tens of thousands more to leave the camps (1, 2). UNRWA reported that from 1967-1989, some 27,590 Palestinians in Gaza left the refugee camps for the housing projects outside of them. They were required to demolish their structures or shelters inside the refugee camps in order to obtain housing outside of them. Once they left, Israel appropriated the destroyed shelters as state property, turning some of them into -- wait for it -- military outposts.
Source p.151.
By the 1980s, Israeli officials realized the birth rates in the camps were greater than the relocations out of them. Mass depopulation was a fantasy, and so instead of offering carrots to leave, Israel imposed sticks on Palestinians who stayed. Thus, in 1982, it became illegal to sell, buy, rent, mortgage, transfer, expand or improve existing shelters. The idea was stringent regulations preventing the Palestinians from improving housing conditions would push the refugees out.
Altogether, between 1967 and 1989, the Israeli army destroyed at least 22,230 rooms and displaced 63,000 people from Palestine’s refugee camps. But, despite Israel’s best attempts to wipe the Palestinian refugees camps off the map, they continued to grow, as did opposition to Israel’s belligerent military occupation.
As always, though, forced transfer was allowable in the name of security. Israel’s last major displacement campaign during the period under discussion took place in 1982-83, when Israel uprooted several thousand Palestinians living along the Gaza-Egypt border. This time, the excuse for demolition was to build a 50-meter wide security zone in the border area. The Israeli army bulldozed houses and orchards in Rafah, and also destroyed many homes in the Shati and Deir al-Balah refugee camps, forcing thousands to flee.
Depopulation via Deportation
Israel deported as many as 2,000 Palestinians from occupied territories during the period under discussion. This included some 1,180 Palestinians from 1967-1977 and then many hundreds more from 1985-1993. Here is a year-by-year breakdown:
B’tselem report, 1993. Source
For Israel, anyone who resisted Israeli domination was a target for deportation, including various forms of unarmed, non-violent resistance. Israel deported political activists for purported allegiances to Jordan or for public opposition to Israeli occupation. Israel deported school principals and supervisors who protested censorship of textbooks, teachers and students who initiated school strikes, attorneys who organized lawyers' strikes, and even mayors for crimes committed by their constituents.
In May 1980, for instance, Israel deported 3 pro-PLO Palestinian leaders in the West Bank, the Mayor of Hebron, Fahd Qawasmeh, religious leader Rajab Tamimi, and the mayor of Halhoul, Muhammad Milhem, after unknown Palestinian fighters shot and killed 6 Jews in Hebron. The policy could be described as: deportation owing to proximity to unlawful armed resistance.
As part of a new “Iron Fist" policy adopted by Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Israel expelled another 82 Palestinians between 1985-1989, mostly to Jordan (1, 2, 3). Israeli officials told some of the deportees that since their ID cards had expired while they were in prison, they lost their residency rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, including two trade unionists, a journalist and a former member of the al-Bireh municipal council. The policy could be described as: deportation owing to failure to break out of prison to renew one’s permit to be a stateless, occupied person.
But, for Israel’s right, the deportations were always insufficient. Geula Cohen, a leader of the right-wing Tehiya Party, lamented that hundreds rather than dozens of Palestinian political activists should have been deported. The rabbi and academic Shubert Spero called for more expulsions in January 1989. “Anyone found guilty of throwing stones or gasoline bottles should be deported, regardless of his age or the success of his efforts,” he wrote.
Then, in December 1992, following an attack on Israeli security forces, Israel’s Rabin government deported 415 alleged members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad to South Lebanon for 1-2 years, in what amounted to the largest mass deportation in two decades. Nevermind Israeli authorities deported at least 16 people unaffiliated with either group out of their own admission. Nevermind that the 415 Palestinians were deported as a form of collective punishment, since no evidence was presented linking any particular individual to the attack. And nevermind that even had all of them been convicted of horrendous crimes in a fair court of law, it would still be illegal to deport them, since the deportation of persons living in territories occupied in war is a violation of international law.
Depopulation via Residency Denial or Revocation
Israel also kept Palestinians out of Palestine through the denial and revocation of residency permits. Israel went from accepting 33% of Palestinian reunification requests in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to less than 10% by the mid-1970s and 1980s, to less than 1% by the mid-late 1980s, preventing hundreds of thousands of West Bank and Gaza Palestinian parents and children from living together in Palestine. Israel’s policy could be described as depopulation by forcing Palestinians to choose between their family and their homeland.
Israel also secretly stripped residency rights of more than 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza and 140,000 in the West Bank from 1967-1994. Palestinians in the West Bank who traveled abroad were required to leave their identity card at the border in exchange for a 3-year exit permit that could be renewed three times, each time for one year. But Palestinians who failed to return to the border within six months after their permit expired would be stripped of their residency with no prior notice. Call it expulsion via administrative fiat.
Israel also ethnically cleansed some 3,000 Palestinians from Jerusalem between 1967-1994. Immediately after it occupied Jerusalem in the June 1967 War, Israel annexed some 70 square kilometers of the West Bank into Jerusalem, but did not grant the Palestinians living in that territory citizenship. It was a textbook case of Israel’s lust for “the land, but without the people living on it.” Instead, those living in the territory annexed to Jerusalem were given permanent residency status which can be withdrawn if Palestinians settle outside of Jerusalem. Moreover, this status does not automatically pass to one’s children or non-resident spouses and it can be revoked at the Interior Ministry’s discretion. The policy of stripping Palestinians in Jerusalem of their residency status amounted to "forcible transfers," according to Human Rights Watch.
By the 1980s, many voices in Israel were once again calling for the “transfer” of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to Jordan or for the establishment of an “alternative homeland” for them there. When the American-Israeli fascist Meir Kahane called for the expulsion of Palestinians from “the Land of Israel,” apologists said Kahane was fringe. But, within a few years, many embraced the idea: the former minister Yosef Shapira, former deputy minister of defense Michael Dakel, former Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, the Tehiya party, Gush Emunim, the majority of settlers, and over 30% of the Israeli population did not object to the idea of “transfer.”
Israel’s depopulation policies shifted over the years, ranging from carrots to sticks and deportations to capricious and arbitrary administrative decrees. In many cases, such as Israel’s partnership in Paraguay, or Israel’s resettlement agencies and agents in the Gaza Strip, or Israel’s policy of revoking residency status of Palestinians who traveled abroad, Israel sought to keep its plans secret, owing to Israel’s long standing desire to “do Zionism quietly.” Alas, the methods changed, and the amount of force fluctuated, but the underlying logic of Zionism did not: a Palestine free of Palestinians.