Amid widespread alarm over comments from US President Donald Trump about “buying” Gaza, “owning it” and displacing its people, an ongoing crackdown that began in January by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank is showing in real time how such a policy could play out.
On Monday, UNRWA – the UN relief agency for Palestinians – reported that Israel’s Operation Iron Wall has so far displaced about 40,000 Palestinians, almost emptying several refugee camps in the northern West Bank. For some context, this is more than the entire population of Bethlehem. As one displaced Jenin resident, surveying his waterlogged hillside shelter, told The National yesterday: “Look at this and tell me what's the difference between here and Gaza.”
Along with the accompanying destruction of Palestinian homes, economy and infrastructure – as well as movement restrictions and the continuing seizure of land for illegal Jewish settlements – Israel’s actions are a template for how the future annexation and depopulation of the Gaza Strip might look. It is a template that only the most radical would consider realistic or desirable.
The 15-month war on Gaza that followed the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel undoubtedly energised several ultra-right members of the Israeli government. These were figures whose previous calls for the expulsion of Gaza’s people and their replacement with Israeli settlers were once considered fringe positions. Nonetheless, such extremists have been further emboldened because it is now the US – the world’s most powerful country – that is presenting a vision of Gaza shorn of its Palestinian identity and transformed into an ersatz real-estate opportunity.
In the case of both Gaza and the West Bank, little consideration is being given to the fact that such policies are almost guaranteed to lock in conflict and volatility for future generations, not only between Israelis and armed Palestinian groups, but between Israel and an entire people who know from experience that to acquiesce to land grabs and forced displacement now would eventually spell the end of their country.
This fact is not lost on the Palestinian people. The office of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has accused Israel of "ethnic cleansing" in the West Bank and last week the Health Ministry in Ramallah said Israeli forces have killed at least 70 people in the territory since the start of the year, including 10 children, one woman and two elderly people. Similarly, Gazans have responded with understandable defiance to suggestions that they be forcibly moved to other Arab countries, with one resident telling The National: “When you have a rightful claim to something, no one – neither America nor Israel – can take it away”.
It is a sign of Israel’s divide-and-conquer approach to Palestine that Gaza and the West Bank are often discussed as if they were separate places. In reality, despite their unique situations and different political leaderships, they remain two parts of the same country. If 40,000 people are allowed to be displaced in the West Bank in one operation, it not only bodes ill for the future of Gaza’s more than two million people, it offers the threat of unending conflict that no redrawing of the map could contain.
