Ramzy Baroud
Thousands of miles separate Uganda and the Congo from the Gaza Strip, but these places are connected to Palestine in ways that traditional geopolitical analyses fail to explain. It was last week revealed that the far-right Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is actively discussing proposals to expel millions of Palestinians to African countries in exchange for a fixed price.
The discussion on expelling millions of Gazans has supposedly entered mainstream thinking in Israel since Oct. 7. But the fact that this discussion remains active more than three months after the start of the Israeli war on Gaza indicates that the proposals are not an outcome of a specific historical moment, such as the Al-Aqsa Flood operation. Even a quick glance at historical Israeli records point to the fact that the mass expulsion of Palestinians – known in Israel as “transfer” – was, and remains, a major strategy that aims at fixing the country’s so-called demographic problem.
Long before fighters from the Al-Qassam Brigades and other Palestinian movements stormed the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel on Oct. 7, Israeli politicians discussed on many occasions how to reduce the overall Palestinian population to maintain the demographic Jewish majority in historic Palestine. This idea is not confined to Israel’s extremists, as it has also been discussed by the likes of former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who in 2014 suggested a population exchange plan. Even supposedly liberal intellectuals and historians have supported this idea, both in principle and practice.
Top Israeli historian Benny Morris regretted, during an interview with the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2004, that Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, failed to expel all Palestinians during the Nakba – the catastrophic event of murder and ethnic cleansing that led to the creation of the state of Israel on top of Palestinian towns and villages. Further proof that the idea of transfer was not concocted on the spur of the moment is the fact that comprehensive plans were immediately produced after Oct. 7. They included a position paper published on Oct. 17 by Israeli think tank the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy that described the war on Gaza as “a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip.” A document uncovered a few days later by the Israeli news outlet Calcalist proposed the same strategy.
The fact that Egypt, Jordan and other Arab countries openly and immediately declared their total rejection of the expulsion of Palestinians indicates the degree of seriousness of those official Israeli proposals. “Our problem is (finding) countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it,” Netanyahu said last week. These comments were followed by others, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich saying: “What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration.”
It was then that the official Israeli discourse adopted the term “voluntary migration.” But there is nothing voluntary about the starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians, who continue to face an ongoing genocide and are being pushed systematically toward the border region between Gaza and Egypt. In its legal case at the International Court of Justice, the government of South Africa included Israel’s planned ethnic cleansing of Gaza as one of its main points, accusing Israel of genocide.
Due to a lack of enthusiasm on the part of pro-Israel countries in the West, Israeli diplomats are traveling the globe looking for governments that are willing to accept ethnically cleansed Palestinians. Imagine if this behavior stemmed from any other country in the world; a country that murders people en masse, yet shops around looking for other states to accept the expelled survivors in exchange for cash. Not only has Israel made a mockery of international law, but it has also set new standards of despicable behavior by any state, anywhere in the world and at any time in history, ancient or modern.
And yet, the world continues to watch and support – as in the case of the US – or gently or vehemently protest, but without taking a single meaningful action to stop the bloodbath in Gaza or to block the terrifying scenarios that could follow if the war does not end. But there is one thing that many people might not know: The Zionist movement, the ideological institution that established Israel, had attempted to move the world’s Jewry to Africa to establish a state prior to historic Palestine becoming the “Jewish homeland.” This was the “Uganda Program” of 1903. It was raised by Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, at the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. The Uganda Program eventually fell through and the Zionists refocused their attention on Palestine – much to the misfortune of the Palestinians.
If one were to compare the genocidal language of the Israeli leaders of today and study their racist references to Palestinians, there would be a major overlap between their collective perception and the way that Jewish communities were perceived by Europeans for hundreds of years. The sudden Zionist interest in the Congo as a potential “homeland” for Palestinians further illustrates the point that the movement continues to live in the shadow of its own history, projecting the discrimination practiced against Jews in Israel’s own racism against innocent Palestinians. Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu on Friday proposed that Israelis “must find ways for Gazans that are more painful than death.” One does not need to struggle to find historical references that used similar language, such as Germany’s Nazis in their depiction of Jews.
If history does repeat itself, then it has an odd and unkind way of doing so. We have been told that the world has learned from the mass killings of previous wars, including the Holocaust and other Second World War atrocities. Yet, it seems that the lessons have largely gone unlearned. Not only is Israel now assuming the role of the mass killer, but the rest of the Western world continues to play the role assigned to them in this historical tragedy. They are either cheering, politely protesting or doing nothing at all.
