Israeli settlers are planning to reoccupy Gaza - The Forward
By: Nora Berman (The Forward)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
By Eyal Lurie-PardesNovember 7, 2023
In the aftermath of the brutal Hamas terror attack Oct. 7, Israel has launched a ground invasion aimed at "eliminating Hamas." Many of Israel's Western allies have expressed concern about this operation given the lack of a clear plan for what will happen in Gaza after Hamas is eliminated. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday that "Israel will, for an indefinite period will have the overall security responsibility" of Gaza. President Joe Biden even said publicly on 60 Minutes that the reoccupation of Gaza would be a "big mistake."
In the absence of a day-after-Hamas plan from the Israeli government, one group in Israel — the settler movement — is offering one. As Israel moves forward with its military operation, the settler movement is increasing the pressure to reoccupy the Gaza Strip and establish Jewish settlements there.
Even before the current war in Gaza, several ministers representing the Religious Zionist party had already commented that the reoccupation of Gaza is inevitable. But now, right-wing commentators and Knesset members are trying to build on top of the public rage to advocate for the official operational objective to reoccupy Gaza and reestablish settlements there. Even Israeli pop star Hanan Ben Ari, while performing for reserve units on the Gaza border, led chants of "Going back to Gush Katif!" (the name of the former block of 17 Israeli settlements in Gaza) to raucous applause.
Member of Knesset Amit Halevi of the Likud Party has already published a detailed plan, where he suggests building border fences around five main cities in Gaza to fragmentize Palestinians further and increase Israel's military control. This plan reflects a similar strategy for creating settlements as the one then-Labor Minister Yigal Allon suggested for the Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the 1967 War (known as the Allon Plan). According to Halevi's plan, Israel would also establish five mega-settlements between Palestinian blocks, each with a population of 100,000 Jews, as an enhanced human buffer zone.
So far, Israel's main Western allies — including the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy — have unequivocally backed Israel in its response to "Black Shabbat," even as the Palestinian death toll surpasses 9,000 deaths, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health, and hundreds of thousands of people are displaced. Building on top of this international support, the Israeli government has defined the objective of the war as "crushing and eliminating" Hamas' military and ruling capabilities.
In a presentation to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Oct. 20, Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant laid out the expected three phases of the war in Gaza. The first is a military campaign to "defeat and destroy Hamas." The second is a lower intensity warfare to "eliminate pockets of resistance." The third phase is establishing a "new security regime" in the Gaza Strip, thus transferring day-to-day responsibilities to another, unnamed party.
The practical meaning of this plan would be that, at least initially, the Israeli military would take control of the Gaza Strip. Because Hamas rules the Gaza Strip, Israel would need to conquer the territory entirely to eliminate Hamas' governmental and military capabilities. "I do not know of any ability we have to eliminate Hamas, including its infrastructure and institutions, without invading and conquering the entire territory," Brigadier General Barak Hiram, the next commander of the Gaza division who helped defend the southern kibbutzim, told Israeli media. Senior ministers, such as Benny Gantz, have repeatedly said the war would take at least several months.
Yet even if Hamas infrastructure and institutions are destroyed, Israel cannot eliminate the ideas driving it, and the affiliation many people in Gaza have with Hamas or with the Islamic Jihad.
This occupation of Gaza, even if it is intended to be only temporary, would likely be quite prolonged because Israel does not have answers to the critical question of who would govern Gaza post-Hamas. The nature of who could be the partner of Israel in Gaza to allow this "new security regime" is deliberately left unclear: Are they members of the weakened and corrupt Palestinian Authority? An international alliance led by neighboring Arab states? A fresh set of leaders from Gaza who have survived Hamas' 16-year purge of democratically inclined civilians? Only mentioning a vague transfer of responsibility in Gaza without identifying who it will be transferred to — especially when all the alternatives appear to be diplomatically and politically unlikely — carries serious potential consequences of an indefinite Israeli reoccupation.
Gallant's strategy indicates Israel is likely preparing to occupy Gaza for the first time since its disengagement in 2005. Back then, 8,000 settlers were evacuated from the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank. Israel has retained de-facto military control over these territories through strict border policies, checkpoints and a blockade of Gaza, enacted after Hamas was elected and took control of the Strip in 2007. Since Hamas came to power, there have been no elections in Gaza.
The disengagement from "Gush Katif" became a historical political turning point for the political right-wing settler movement. They have subsequently invested heavily to impact public opinion, framing the disengagement as a political sin that led directly to the Hamas regime and the constant missiles threatening towns and villages, especially in southern Israel.
As the settler strategy struck deeper roots in the Israeli discourse, a consensus grew that began to advocate for concrete policy changes. The settler right-wing first step was to reestablish settlements in the northern West Bank, where the Disengagement Plan Implementation Law, passed in 2005, prohibited any civilian presence there. In March 2023, the Knesset canceled the prohibition.
Although Netanyahu assured the U.S. that Israel is still committed to its international obligations as part of the disengagement plan, other ministers and politicians like Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich and Kahanist minister Limor Son Har-Melech of the Jewish Power party, continue to advance establishing outposts in this restricted area in the northern West Bank.
These messianic plans of the Israeli right wing would be alarming on any day, but are even more so during this time of war when there is an actual discussion of reoccupying Gaza. In light of the profound vacuum of Israel's strategy for the day after Hamas is defeated, the risk of the settler movement making progress on this ground is even more dangerous. They have demonstrated through their actions in the West Bank that they would not wait for official approval of a grand plan, as suggested by Halevi, before building illegal Jewish outposts.
Several of the settlers' techniques used in the West Bank, such as Knesset Members using their parliamentary immunity to establish public offices in Palestinian territories, could potentially be employed in the Gaza Strip. This means that even if the Israeli government does not want to reestablish settlements in Gaza —as it publicly claims — it is uncertain how they could de-facto block the settler movement from doing so.
The international community must not let rage and pain from the terror attack be used as a blank check for a destructive, messianic, Jewish supremacist mission to settle in Gaza. A reestablishment of settlements would lead to tremendous Palestinian suffering, a humanitarian nightmare, and the loss of any international credibility that Israel has left.
To prevent such a scenario, the international community must require Israel to provide assurances that it will maintain its international obligations under the Disengagement Plan — including specifying how it would block any attempt to establish Jewish outposts or civil presence in the Gaza Strip.
Eyal Lurie-Pardes is a visiting fellow in the Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs at the Middle East Institute after being awarded with the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School LLM Post-Graduate Fellowship. Prior to joining MEI, Eyal worked with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Zulat Institute for Equality and Human Rights, and as a parliamentary adviser in the Knesset.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion.
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This sounds crazy. They want to ghettoize Gazan cities and separate them by large numbers of Israeli settlers, somewhat similar to the arrangement in the West Bank that is drawing criticism and condemnation from many quarters.
The proponents of this plan want the Gazans to be perpetually under Israel's thumb.
Exactly, a common thread here has been that it’s impossible for Israel to destroy Hamas. A crisis ahead of need.
Hard to blame them, considering. In any case, I have doubts that Netanyahu is going to survive what's already been a pretty poor showing of leadership on his part since this began, let alone how what seems to be most of Israel felt about him before this all started. I would be surprised if the majority of the country would support such a plan, assuming Netanyahu can survive, politically.
Is this the official Israeli plan?
Israel Must Take the Gaza Re-settlers Seriously
“HaBayit – Return to the Gaza Strip” is not a new page on Facebook. It was created July 12, 2014, five days after the onset of the 2014 Gaza War. The last post before the start of the current war was posted August 22. The next one is from October 12, six days after Hamas’ pogrom-style attack. It includes a photomontage of many happy Jews on the street of a generic settlement, above which someone named Adi Moyal writes: “I can already hear the singing, the voices, Gaza erased, the north expanded.”
A few minutes later, a “simple infantry reservist on the front” named Benjamin Carpels writes that he’s “throwing out an offer. Two years from now, ‘Netzach Israel’ (Eternal Israel) has been established as a city among the other cities in Israel, on the ruins of the city of murderers of Gaza ,” and, explaining the attached photo, adds: “Empty (shell) packaging. The presents that were inside have been gifted to the enemy.”
On October 23, Meir Dena-Picar, the page’s creator, proposed a solution that will “eliminate the problem of Gaza: Re-occupation of the Gaza Strip, destruction of the Upper and Lower (referring to the tunnels) Terror City and the refugee camps, expulsion of the population to the south.” In another post, he will propose to correct a mistake and establish high-density Jewish cities in the Gaza Strip.
Dena-Picar, of the settlement Beit Hagai, mocks anyone who treats his plan as delusional. And how right he is! As the last 50 years have shown, any single settler’s hallucination should be taken seriously, and treated as a plan of action by the next government, if not the current one. And when the hallucination is built on overt plans for total destruction and mass expulsion , wars are the most suitable ground for its realization.
For example: Prof. Eviatar Matania of Tel Aviv University calls for the destruction of Gaza City, but opposes the establishment of settlements in its place. In an article in the right-wing religious Makor Rishon on October 27, he proposes to minimize the current Gaza Strip, reducing it to its southern part, to which the Palestinian population will be deported; completely destroying Gaza City; and erecting a huge park in its place in memory of the Hamas attack’s victims.
About two weeks ago, Amitai Gazit of Yediot Aharonot’s Calcalist revealed a policy paper by the Intelligence Ministry, headed by Gila Gamliel, with a “proposal” for the expulsion of all Gaza Strip residents to Egypt . The internal document ended up in the hands of a group that is establishing the “ Settlement Headquarters for the Gaza Strip.” Likud MK Amir Weitmann demanded that the generous compensation package given to Egypt ensure that the expelled Palestinians be housed in Egypt proper, rather than in the Sinai Peninsula.
To illustrate how far from hallucinatory or marginal these ideas are, we need only look to Yossi Cohen, ex Mossad chief, who has recently been appointed a “special missions envoy” dealing with questions regarding the war’s aftermath. Such questions apparently include, as reported by Haaretz’s Yossi Verter: “Can a large part of the (Gaza) population be transferred to Sinai with the consent of Egypt ?” Verter further reported that the same political source is certain that “Israel cannot allow everyone who fled south to return north.”
This is what the IDF is openly implementing today: With heavy bombardment and destruction, it pushes the population of the northern half of the Gaza Strip south, destroying everything it can. At the end of the war, there may already be a compromise between those Israelis who demand full expulsion and settlements throughout the Gaza Strip, those who settle for settlements on 80 percent of its territory, and those who support a large park and partial expulsion.
Conditions would improve if Israel controlled Gaza
Arvo charger...conditions would also improve if the Palestinians controlled Hamas..and not the other way around..
Maybe. If they're allowed some sort of self-determination and Hamas, or something like it starts coming back right away, I'd say that's an indication of where the Palestinian heart lies.