One of the main jobs of any historian worth his salt is to identify trends and patterns stretching from the past to the present. These patterns can then be used to develop projections and predictions about the future as well. The patterns can be very subtle, making the job of a historian very difficult, or they can be very easy to identify especially if the enactor of the patterns is crude and unrefined. When studying the conflict in Palestine, fortunately for the historians, the patterns are easy to discern as the Israeli Zionists are very predictable in their crude and cruel methods to achieve their goal of a Palestine completely “cleansed” of Palestinians.
As Israel tries to bury Gaza beneath its bombs, historians are confronted with some important questions: What is the ultimate aim of the Israeli onslaught? What strategy is Israel pursuing to achieve that aim? And can Israeli history provide us with an insight into the present situation so that we can answer the first two questions correctly? I will begin by answering the third question first as it will enable me to answer the other two questions quite easily.
On 17 October 2023, Israel attacked the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza with devastating effect. The brazen attack left more than 500 dead. There were no combatants in the hospital. To understand why Israel murdered hundreds of patients and hapless refugees we must travel back to a time when Israel hadn’t surfaced on the World map. Let’s rewind to March 1948 when the Zionists were in the process of creating Israel. The UN (thanks to the tireless efforts of the USA) had pushed a “splendid” partition plan for Palestine that gave more than half of Palestine to the Jews who were only about 30% of the total population. For the Zionists, this brought forth two problems. One, they wanted all of Palestine and not just the territory handed over to them by the UN. Two, they only wanted the land for their exclusively Jewish State. Even the land Zionists bought over the past 3 decades from the Arab elites was bought on the condition that the Arab landlords would empty the land of Arab peasants before handing it over to the Zionist buyers. So, the Zionists had to remove close to a million Palestinians from the land in order to forge their exclusively Jewish State. The UN defines such ethnic cleansing as genocide but this didn’t bother the Zionists one bit as they were backed by both the USA and the Soviet Union at that time.
But how to remove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their ancestral land? The Zionists didn’t have the robust anti-human apparatus of the Nazis (concentration camps and gas chambers) at their disposal then. They couldn’t kill them all even if they wanted to. So, they conceived a plan which they named “Plan Dalet”. The man destined to become the first Prime Minister of Israel a few weeks later, David Ben Gurion, himself took part in its planning and implementation. Plan Dalet was finalized in March 1948 and operationalized in April 1948. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has discussed Plan Dalet in detail while citing impeccable sources in his book, “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”. According to Pappe, Plan Dalet’s aim was to forcibly expel the Palestinian Arab population through the destruction of Arab villages. The Plan was very thorough and all Zionist brigade commanders were given lists of the localities they had to “clear” along with the exact dates.
On the 1st of April, 1948, Plan Dalet was put into action. Hundreds of Arab villages and dozens of towns and urban neighborhoods were emptied of their Arab inhabitants. Not only did this help achieve the goal of a largely Arab-less Israel, but it also generated economic pressure on the neighboring Arab states. The latter effect of Plan Dalet was not lost on the Zionist planners. McGowan and Hogan have mentioned the orders issued to the Zionist forces on the 1st of April 1948 in their book “The Saga of the Deir Yassin Massacre, Revisionism and Reality”: “The principal objective of the operation is the destruction of Arab villages … [and] the eviction of the villagers so that they would become an economic liability for the general Arab forces.”
Here we must ask how the Zionists managed to expel the Palestinians from the land they had inhabited for millennia. The answer is simple: By creating a devilish synergy between terrorism and psychological warfare. To understand the Zionist method, one must study the incident at Deir Yassin. Deir Yassin was a small Arab village near Jerusalem that had reached a non-aggression pact with Haganah (the Zionist militia that became the Israeli Armed Forces with the birth of Israel in May 1948). This pacifism didn’t save Deir Yassin when Haganah’s allied militia named the Irgun (commanded by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin) attacked and captured Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948. What followed was a horrific orgy of murder and rape. According to Ilan Pappe, “The Jewish soldiers sprayed the houses with machine-gun fire, killing many of the inhabitants. The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold blood, their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped and then killed.” The body count is estimated between 100 and 250. Ilan Pappe further mentions that the Zionists had no qualms about killing unarmed civilian men, women, and children because “as the Jewish forces regarded any Palestinian village as an enemy military base, the distinction between massacring people and killing them ‘in battle’ was slight”.
This wanton terrorism was just the first part of the two-pronged Zionist strategy. Following any act of horrific terrorism like the massacres at Deir Yassin and Tantura, the Zionists employed psychological warfare to scare the Arabs into fleeing their homes. Some years after the war, Menachem Begin proudly mentioned this aspect of Zionist strategy in his book “The Revolt”: “Arabs throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of “Irgun butchery” were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened, uncontrolled stampede. Of the almost 800,000 who lived on the present territory of the State of Israel, only some 165,000 are still there. The political and economic significance of this development can hardly be overestimated. According to another Israeli historian Benny Morris: “Deir Yassin had a profound demographic and political effect: It was followed by mass flight of Arabs from their locales.” All told, the Zionists killed 13000 Palestinians in 1948 and expelled around 750,000 to create a favorable demographic base for the exclusively Jewish State of Israel. The Arabs named this genocide the Nakba (translated as the Catastrophe).
The saga of Plan Dalet and Deir Yassin enables us to understand the Israeli goals, methods, and strategy. The ultimate Israeli goal is an Arab-less Palestine. They have been doing this in stages. First, they pushed the Palestinians into two small enclaves of Gaza and the West Bank. Now, they want to squeeze them out of there as well. Every year many new illegal Israeli settlements spring up in the West Bank. The Palestinian areas in the West Bank are nothing more than two dozen ghettos. The Gaza Strip has been under a strict Israeli blockade for the last 16 years and 2 million Palestinians there face malnutrition and water shortage as Israel slowly but relentlessly makes the land uninhabitable.
The savage Israeli onslaught that began in the wake of Hamas’s attacks of 7 October 2023 is aimed at achieving a second Nakba. Nakba 2.0 aims to repeat 1948 and “clear” the Gaza Strip by pushing its residents into Egypt. This will also saddle Egypt with a massive refugee problem and cause economic and social unrest in that country which suits Israel well. The Zionist strategy for Naka 2.0 is also the same as in 1948. Step 1, terrorize the population through horrific atrocities. Step 2, employ psychological warfare to make them flee. The savage attack on Al-Ahli Hospital was delivered a few days after Israel warned 22 hospitals in Gaza to evacuate. Israel even lobbed two shells at the hospital to “warn” them that failure to evacuate will result in a firestorm from the Israeli Air Force. Then finally on the 17th of October, a brutal air strike killed twice the number of people massacred at Deir Yassin. Israel has been constantly urging the Palestinians to evacuate the Northern part of the Gaza Strip as its bombing campaign has left more than 4,000 dead in a matter of days. The attack at Al-Ahli Hospital signifies to the Palestinians that Israel makes no distinction between combatants and civilians like in 1948.
But, unfortunately for Israel, the Palestinians remember the lessons learned from the first Nakba. They know that once they leave, Israel will never permit them to return. So, unlike in 1948, they aren’t leaving. Despite all the bombings and the horrific atrocities like the Al-Ahli Hospital massacre, they seem determined to hold on to their land. This leaves Israel with only one option if it wants to complete the Nakba 2.0: Launch a ground invasion of Gaza and kill everyone in their path indiscriminately. But this option will result in a large number of Israeli casualties as well. Thousands might perish in order to just clear the Northern half of Gaza. Many more Israeli soldiers would have to be sacrificed by Netanyahu if he wants to “clear” all of Gaza right now. Will the Israeli population accept this unprecedented level of casualties? After all, the loss of 2800 soldiers in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 had resulted in a robust protest movement against the Golda Meir government and had resulted in her resignation. Lenin had said, “In the final analysis, victory in any war is determined by the willingness of the masses to shed blood on the battlefield.” With the failure of Plan Dalet and Deir Yassin tactics in Gaza, it appears that victory will elude the Zionists this time. But, rest assured, the Zionists will turn Gaza into rubble to vent their fury because they are immune to international law. They can never be tried and punished for war crimes. They have been given a license to commit genocide and still paint themselves as the victims! And all this has been made possible because the USA, the global hegemon, the mecca of liberalism, the foremost champion of human rights, and the prime guardian of international law and a “rules-based world order”, backs its ally fully as it embarks on a fresh genocide.
