Here is the plan for Gaza's annihilation
What 'voluntary emigration' really means
“A searing indictment of the brutality and atrocities inflicted on the Palestinians of Gaza and the collaboration of powerful nations in their murder.”
BLOWING UP EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL:
ISRAEL’S EXTERMINATION OF GAZA
IS OUT NOW
AT THE KNESSET BACK in April, Bezalel Smotrich was feeling pensive. A surprise, because the simple act of thought often seems difficult for Israel’s tiny finance minister. Yet there he was, running the numbers, doing the sums. “If we take out ten thousand a day, it will take six months,” he mused. “If we take out five thousand a day it will take a year.” Smotrich was talking about the Palestinians of Gaza. By “take out” he meant “expel.” The other meaning applies too. Of all the contemptible things said in this epoch of destruction and incitement, his statement barely ranked. Yet Smotrich prefers it when his enemies are just figures, datapoints to be toyed with. It is always worrying when think-tankers start thinking tanks; even more so when exterminators begin working their spreadsheets.
The annihilation of Gaza is entering a new phase. Fresh violence beckons, a further frontier of cruelty. That things might become worse for besieged and starving Palestinians is barely thinkable, barely endurable. Israel has a new government agency. Earlier this year the security cabinet established the “Voluntary Emigration Bureau” under Israel Katz’s defense ministry. The Bureau’s budget, says Smotrich, is “not an obstacle.” Its purpose is to build the facilities necessary to make Gazans leave their homeland and never return.
The entire population has already left their homes, shunted at gunpoint around the Strip dozens of times, apartment blocks and farmland and universities—everything, really—dynamited behind them. This time, Palestinians are being told as a matter of Israeli government policy to disappear from Gaza completely. Alongside the armored compounds built by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to control the delivery of aid and kettle the surviving population into makeshift hunger camps, the Voluntary Emigration Bureau completes the mechanism by which Gaza will be wiped out. For those Israel cannot kill or starve outright, they offer deportation without hope of restoration. Here are the options: Death or Exile.
Long after a terrible massacre is done, historians trouble their souls wondering if there was a masterplan—a schematic the perpetrators followed, a blueprint they could trace. Who knew and when? Who gave the orders, controlled the apparatus? Who built public consent? We need not fear secrecy, this time. We only need to pay attention. There is a blueprint for Gaza; they tell you about it openly. “This is the plan,” boasts Benjamin Netanyahu. “We do not hide it.”
THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE Bureau was cautious and friendly, slick with the sweet language of beneficence. The Bureau would help, Katz said, only those Palestinians “interested in relocating to third countries.” Their passage would be “safe and supervised,” through the Kerem Shalom crossing, then on to Ramon airport or the harbour town of Ashdod. Supposedly infrastructure will be built to handle thousands of people at a time. In the name of the agency itself and in its rhetoric, “voluntary” is the word stressed most. “The actual idea of allowing for Gazans who want to leave, to leave—what’s wrong with that?” asks Netanyahu, innocently.
Because it is a grotesque euphemism. The key to understanding the use of this term “voluntary” can be found in a statement made by a low-ranking Likud minister at the International Convention Centre in Jerusalem early last year. Like Smotrich’s “ten thousand a day,” it went mostly unnoticed. The minister’s name is Shlomo Karhi, and he suggested the Palestinians should leave. A “voluntary emigration,” he called it. Everyone understood his meaning; the audience was the gathered strength of the settler movement. But with a wink Karhi elaborated: “voluntary” is “a state you impose on someone until they give their consent.”
This land is pitted with more explosive ordnance than was dropped on Dresden,
Hamburg, and London combined during the Second World War.
On April 26 three generations of the al-Khour family were slain in a single strike on their home in al-Sabra, west of the Old City. Dr Alaa al-Najjar works at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. In late May, nine of her children were killed in a targeted bombing; al-Najjar’s husband died a week later. This land is pitted with more explosive ordnance than was dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during the Second World War. Anywhere between five and ten percent of that load failed to detonate. Gaza is a graveyard, as well as a minefield. “I’ve come to learn that survival is just another word for staying inside the pain,” writes the Palestinian journalist Mohammed Mhawish,
I’ve sat with people who don’t run anymore when leaflets fall from the sky, I remember talking to a woman in Khan Younis who told me she stayed in her home after the first warnings. Her name was Sameera and she was sixty-two. Her husband was too sick to walk and she couldn’t carry him. “If we leave, we die on the road. If we stay, we die here,” she said. “At least here I know the ground. I know which walls will fall on me.” She didn’t say it with fear. There was simply no fear left.
Airstrikes are one method—a guillotine’s edge hanging over every person. Demolitions are another. Neighbourhoods have been erased. Cities have been erased. You can now see the Mediterranean from central Rafah. That place no longer exists. Jabalia, in the north, no longer exists. Hunger is another method. So too is humiliation. And displacement: by the end of May, eighty percent of Gaza was either under the direct control of the IDF or subject to evacuation orders. The army has given up pretending that al-Mawasi, on the coast, is a “safe zone.” Nowhere is safe. This is the “state” being “imposed” on the Palestinians. Israel’s government awaits their “consent.”
LIKE THE WORD “EXODUS,” the term “voluntary” has a grim history in this part of the world, a special charge. After 1967 the Israeli secret services used covert cash bribes to pressure Gazans to flee. To Canada, to Paraguay—wherever. The operation was such a well-held secret that when Meir Kahane—the thuggish extremist and leader of the Kach party—self-emigrated from the United States to Israel, he could claim that only he was willing to say what others wouldn’t. Kahane wrote a book from prison in the mid-1980s (with the user-friendly title They Must Go) in which he boasted of sending letters to “several thousand Arabs offering them an opportunity [via cash and visas]…to emigrate voluntarily” (my emphasis). If Israel was to avoid becoming another Northern Ireland riven with demographic neuroses, Kahane suggested one route: “The emigration of Arabs…Immediate transfer…Separation. Only separation.” To the New York Times Kahane proudly declared the solution to the Palestinian “problem” was to “throw them out.”
Open talk of expulsion was, like Kahane himself, strongly suppressed in Israel for a long time. The Kach party was banned. “Voluntary emigration” was so taboo a subject that even Itamar Ben-Gvir, Kahane’s closest ideological heir, was shy of talking about it. As late as November 2022, one month before the election that would see him invited to join Netanyahu’s government, Ben-Gvir was resoundingly heckled by his own supporters for showing insufficient deference to Kahane’s memory. Ben-Gvir pudgily declared that he did not support “the deportation of all the Arabs.” He was booed, back then. Now he is embraced by American lawmakers, visits Yale under armed guard, holds Netanyahu’s government hostage, and howls “Annihilate, smash, eradicate, erase, crush, shatter, burn, be cruel, punish, ruin, crush. Annihilate!”
The experience of the past twenty months has taught Israel’s politicians and its officers impunity: there is no action they could order that goes too far, no strategy they can dream up that might be too extreme.
The Voluntary Emigration Bureau is a culmination. A crescendo. Every other plan for expulsion and depopulation has been funnelled into its ambition. As early as five days after October 7, the Israeli intelligence ministry described a “sterile zone” in Sinai from which there could be “no hope of returning.” The Likud-linked Misgav Institute issued a similar proposal for the forced “transfer” of the Palestinians. There was a scheme suggesting the United States should make foreign aid to countries like Iraq and Turkey conditional on their accepting thousands of deportees. The kind of unctuous, sickly language found in Israel Katz’s announcement of the Bureau was first trialled in a column for the Wall Street Journal written by Danny Danon, Israel’s permanent delegate the UN. “The world,” Danon said in November 2023, “should offer a haven for…Gazan families who have expressed a desire to relocate.”
Donald Trump’s now-infamous demand for a “riviera of the Middle East” on February 5 wasn’t even the first time he had suggested the total clearance of the Strip. Two weeks earlier Trump thought it would be best to “clean out that whole thing” and have Egypt or Jordan take in the exiles. Where did he get this idea? Perhaps his son-in-law. In March of 2024 Jared Kushner publicly suggested Gaza’s waterfront property “could be very valuable…I would just bulldoze something in the Negev [desert], I would try to move people in there.” All of these criminal plans find their fulfilment, their apotheosis, in this new agency.
The definitive proof—if more were needed—that the Palestinians are being offered expulsion under punishment of death is Israel Katz’s assurance that the Bureau will be “subject to Israeli and international law.” This is a threat, not comfort. Presumably they will cling to “international law” with the same fanaticism which has seen them breach nearly every one of its codes over the last nineteen months; the same deference when they ignored the International Court of Justice’s order not to invade Rafah last year; the same trembling awe before the power of the law which allowed them to ignore the warrants issued by the International Criminal Court that turned Netanyahu and Katz’s predecessor Yoav Gallant into wanted men.
ONLY TWO THINGS STAND in Israel’s way. Gazans themselves have responded with a black humour impossible to imagine among their circumstances. The only place they are willing to go, they say, are the villages inside Israel from which they were expelled in 1948. “Here I am, living in the land of my ancestors,” a young girl named Ritaj al-Saeed told Al Jazeera. “We won’t leave even if they want to kill us…[My tent] is more precious than all the homes and palaces of the world.”
And Netanyahu has yet to find a “third country” which might accept any exiles. Indonesia, Egypt, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Qatar have all been approached. Trump tried pitching the Libyans. All have so far refused. Their refusal or Netanyahu’s practical failure are less than important than what these plans suggest about Israeli intent: if it is possible, they will work to achieve it. Even if no country ever accepts two million refugees, there is still the other part of the Death or Exile combo. Without the Exile, it’s still just Death.
How did we get here? How did we come to be hurtling towards, as the Sarajevo Declaration puts it, “a dangerous precipice, the front edge of which is in Palestine”? The experience of the past twenty months has taught Israel’s politicians and its officers impunity: there is no action they could order that goes too far, no strategy they can dream up that might be too extreme. Each additional method of destruction—terror-bombing, a total blockade, targeted assassinations, the seizure of territory—was a checkpoint where Israel’s allies, creditors, and armorers might’ve held up a firm hand and said “Enough.” But no line was drawn, no punishment given.
The state demands its own checkpoints be respected – in the West Bank, along the Netzarim and Morag corridors in Gaza; it does not recognise any others. And what they have done has worked well for them, so far. We are about to see what horrors are set free on the other side of the gate.