Netanyahu allies push to recolonize Gaza as US election nears

Michael F. Brown Rights and Accountability 29 October 2024

Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and Antony Blinken seated with flags behind them

Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken are complicit in Israel’s war crimes and genocide in Gaza.

Al Drago Pool via CNP

In the final few days before the 2024 presidential election in the United States, prominent agencies and officials with the United Nations are warning – again – of the horrors unfolding in Gaza.

They are describing the situation with what should be alarming language, perhaps even for a complicit Democratic administration funding the carnage. “The darkest moment of [the] Gaza conflict is unfolding”; the “entire population of north Gaza is at risk of dying”; “nowhere is safe in Gaza”; and this is “an attempt to erase Palestinians from history.”

Historian and analyst Assal Rad, who compiled these warnings, notes: “UN agencies are shouting from the rooftops about Israeli atrocities while the US ignores them.”

Simultaneously, prominent Israeli politicians are pushing for a return of settlers to Gaza in violation of international law.

An editorial last week in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz asks if Israel has “begun implementing the program of siege and starvation advocated by Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland, often called ‘the Generals’ Plan.’”

The editorial adds: “For cabinet members who view the war as a historic opportunity to return to the Gaza Strip, Eiland’s plan is the silver platter on which renewed Jewish settlement in the Strip will be served.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the US Congress in July that “Israel does not seek to resettle Gaza.” But his Likud party certainly does support settlements and Netanyahu can be expected to change his stated position on Gaza settlements if his governing coalition is at stake.

Netanyahu’s history and wording choices certainly don’t rule out the possibility he will embrace Gaza settlement, whether under a Trump administration or a Harris administration.

Conference of Gaza colonizers

The organization Nachala and members of the Likud party coordinated and hosted a two-day conference near Gaza earlier this month promoting a return of Israeli settlers to the coastal strip of territory. The organization envisions a much larger Israel.

Nachala leader Daniella Weiss reported 700 families signing up to colonize Gaza.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security from the Jewish Power party, part of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition, declared: “If we want it, we can renew settlements in Gaza.”

He described recolonization – Israel departed Gaza in 2005 after nearly 40 years of establishing apartheid conditions inside the Gaza bantustan – as “the best and most moral solution, not by force but by telling them: ‘We’re giving you the option, leave to other countries, the land of Israel is ours.’”

His vision is one of ethnic cleansing and furthering the Nakba when some 800,000 Palestinians were forced out by Zionist militias and the Israeli army. Many of those refugees ended up in Gaza and their descendants are being killed and forced out again today.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a segregationist who heads the Religious Zionism party, spoke to the gathered crowd bent on stealing Palestinian land in Gaza. He argued that Israeli settlers would “make Gaza flourish because it is our land.”

Prior to the conference, Smotrich tweeted that the conference was “designed to express the ambition and striving to establish a Jewish, Zionist and pioneer settlement in the Gaza Strip.”

He added, “To be honest, it is quite clear to me that eventually there will be a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip … it will be necessary to reoccupy Gaza, as our heroic fighters and commanders have been doing for the past year.”

He concluded by asserting that he and his allies would “continue the resettlement of the country in all its expanses because this is our country and we have no other.”

Smotrich has in mind a country that includes not just the occupied West Bank and Gaza, but extends into Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

My colleagues at The Electronic Intifada discussed this on Wednesday last week and concluded that Palestinian military resistance makes any return of settlers to Gaza unlikely.

Though, as Ali Abunimah noted, Israel has crossed all red lines laid out ever-so-tentatively by the Biden administration.

Empty rhetoric

Vedant Patel, deputy spokesperson at the State Department, responded to a journalist last week that “the rhetoric that you’re referring to about resettling Gaza or however it was phrased, we certainly – that’s the kind of rhetoric that we unequivocally reject.”

Patel added that Secretary of State Antony Blinken opposes “any territorial reduction in Gaza” and that the US doesn’t “want to see any reoccupation of Gaza after this crisis ends.” The US, instead, seeks a “sustained peace.”

After more than a year of genocide, however, it appears the US is conflating a “sustained peace” with a crushed people. Including “the Palestinian people’s voices, their aspirations” for “post-crisis governance in Gaza” is little more than empty rhetoric after the US has funded the destruction of the occupied territory.

Politically, a return to colonial settlements in Gaza would likely galvanize student demonstrators and perhaps generate mild condemnations from some US politicians unwilling to address other Israeli war crimes.

Yet Netanyahu may hesitate because renewed settlement activity would be a real-time reminder of Israel’s theft of Palestinian land during both the 1948 Nakba and the post-1967 occupation and settlement of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Recolonizing Gaza would lead any thoughtful analyst – vanishingly rare in much of mainstream western media where terms such as apartheid and dispossession generally don’t get raised – to comment on how Israel did much the same previously, rightly calling into question the legitimacy of those earlier dispossessions.

Netanyahu, however, is so keen to delay an investigation into 7 October that he may cede ground to the Israeli settlement movement and its Knesset representatives in order to hold his government together. He would likely determine that any western anger could be managed, especially with the Democratic Party’s leadership proving both inept and complicit with the Gaza genocide.

According to an anonymous senior US State Department official speaking recently to The Washington Post, “US officials told Netanyahu there is a ‘perception’ that Israel is pursuing a strategy of ‘isolating the north, telling people that if they don’t leave they’re effectively targets and denying food to go in.’”

Netanyahu and his strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer denied this was Israeli policy, despite enormous evidence to the contrary. When US officials then called on Netanyahu to make that clearer, “the Israelis declined to make such a commitment.”

Blinken, who is fully complicit in the war crimes and genocide, gave every indication to reporters that he accepts Netanyahu’s word on the matter.

This is not simply a matter of naivete. This is what complicity, a lack of a moral compass and zero courage during a political campaign look like.

Such complicity is rightly unraveling key parts of the Democratic coalition and creating a climate in which Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is happier basking in the war crimes glow of the Cheney family than changing course as anti-genocide voters have urged her to do for months.

As Gaza-based human rights organization Al Mezan recently noted: “Jabaliya, the largest refugee camp in Gaza, was founded in 1948 by Palestinians violently uprooted from their homes by Zionist militias (later the Israeli military). Now, Israel is forcibly expelling those refugees and their descendants again, under the threat of physical elimination through genocidal violence and starvation. End the ongoing Nakba. End the genocide.”
There is no evidence that a Harris or Trump administration would take any effective measures to counteract the ongoing Israeli brutality.

After a year of genocide, the Biden administration is hoping anti-genocide voters will accept the possibility that the administration may reconsider its military support a few days after the election if humanitarian conditions in Gaza don’t improve.

Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III claimed in a 13 October letter to Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant and Dermer that they were writing to “underscore the US government’s deep concern over the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza, and seek urgent and sustained actions by your government this month to reverse this trajectory.”

The letter merely states about the weapons supply: “Failure to demonstrate a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining these measures may have implications for US policy under NSM-20 [National Security Memorandum-20] and relevant US law.”

In other words, even if things don’t improve, there may or may not be consequences.

Blinken has disregarded US law on humanitarian aid previously so these weak and flexible words are no great surprise.

That Secretary of State Blinken, President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris will almost certainly not face consequences at the International Criminal Court for their arming of a genocide is one of the great injustices of the early 21st century. Their determination to reconfigure the Middle East via war crimes is reminiscent of the Republican Party of 2003.

Following their tenure, the Democratic Party will have to be degenocided if some voters are ever to return. Some may never return – to either of the major apartheid- and genocide-supporting parties.

Genocide is simply a red line.

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Michael F. Brown

Michael F. Brown is an independent journalist. His work and views have appeared in The International Herald Tribune, TheNation.com, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The News & Observer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Post and elsewhere.