Israel's genocide aims to revive the old Zionist dream of Gaza without Palestinians

Middle East Eye

08-04-2025

Amid intensifying genocide, forced displacement, and the normalisation of ethnic cleansing targeting two million Palestinians, groups of powerful men in Washington DC, Jeddah, and Doha met calmly last month to discuss their fanciful plans for Gaza's future.
The new colonial attitudes of Trump's Washington dominate, continuing those of Britain in the 20th century.
Two Palestinian faces from 40 years ago illustrate these continuities: a grandmother in the Beqa'a refugee camp in Jordan was walking through the mud with her small granddaughter to collect Unrwa medical supplies for her family. Her shoes sank in the mire, and she turned back empty-handed, cursing the British under her breath, to the child's surprise.
She explained to the girl that it was Britain - a small, faraway country - whose politicians gave away her home and land to foreigners, with a piece of paper called the Balfour Declaration, written in 1917 during the First World War.
That was the year the grandmother, Leigh, was born in the Palestinian village of Iraq al-Manshiyya, between Gaza and al-Khalil, more than 200km south of what would become her home for half a century - a refugee camp in Jordan - until her death in 1993.
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Her village was besieged and bombarded for 10 months in 1949 by a Jewish militia, the Haganah, and her family was expelled.
From decades of attempted violent dehumanisation, Palestine has produced communities of dignity and respect
For decades in that camp - which powerful colonial officials chose to forget - Leigh, who lost both her husband and her son as well as her home, embodied and transmitted the memory, the loss, and the resolute steadfastness of the Palestinian communities who endured the Nakba and resisted the British.
The women and children of Gaza who lived through the horrors of genocide from late 2023 through 2024 and into 2025, and who in the days of ceasefire chose to return north and rebuild what they could on unrecognisable rubble, are Leigh's heirs.
The first responders in Gaza - who day and night in the genocide race towards bomb sites, dig the injured out of the rubble by hand, carry the dead with respect, wrap them, and pray over them - are Leigh's heirs.
And the 15 paramedics and civil defence teams assassinated on 23 March by Israeli military as they drove marked ambulances with full headlights responding to emergency calls from colleagues are Leigh's heirs.
The Israeli military lies about what they had done are a repeat of military atrocities by the British, which Leigh lived through eight decades ago.
From decades of attempted violent dehumanisation, Palestine has produced communities of dignity and respect - honoured by their writers, poets, artists, filmmakers, musicians, scientists, doctors, and academics, who show the world a culture that stands tall.
Colonial echoes
Britain's government today echoes the shame of the colonial-era Balfour Declaration with its refusal to condemn genocide, even as the human cost of Israel's daily violation of international law - through massive US bombs raining down on civilians, mainly women and children in tents and hospitals - is witnessed by the entire world, except within Israel.
The official figure of 50,000 Palestinians killed is believed to be a 40 percent underestimate, according to a peer-reviewed statistical analysis published in The Lancet.
Yet international sanctions and arms embargoes - tools that helped end apartheid in South Africa 35 years ago and are in force against Russia today - are not applied to save Palestinian lives. Leaders in Washington, London, and much of Europe refuse even to discuss them.
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The British Mandate in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s was a litany of hubris and wilful ignorance towards the Palestinians it dehumanised. And today, their successors in power - in western capitals and their Middle Eastern allies - again choose neither to respect Palestinians nor to see and hear them.
Decades ago, colonial Britain led in dealing out the horror in Palestine, particularly in its brutal suppression of the Arab Revolt of 1937, a response to Britain's encouragement of rising Zionist immigration and economic control.
Israeli expulsion plans are not new: They were first proposed in the 1930s Read More »
Just before the revolt, five key leaders of the Palestinian nationalist movement were exiled to the British colony of the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean for 16 months. Others were exiled to the colonies of Kenya and South Africa.
Britain had long exploited the remote Seychelles to exile inconvenient national leaders - from Yemen, Zanzibar, Ethiopia, Somaliland, Malaya, the Gold Coast (Ghana), and Buganda (Uganda), to as late as 1956, the Greek Cypriot leader, Archbishop Makarios.
At the height of the revolt, Britain had 100,000 troops in Palestine - one for every four adult men. From 1937 to 1939, 10 percent of Palestine's adult male population were killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled, according to Rashid Khalidi's peerless history, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine.
Some British soldiers would later admit to war crimes: setting homes alight, destroying villages, rounding up men, blowing them up, or stripping them naked and locking them in barbed wire cages for days with barely any water.
Collective punishment, torture and executions ordered by British military courts were routine.
Structural violence
One of the leaders of the Arab Revolt executed by the British was Eid Alfdilat - the beloved cousin of Leigh, the refugee grandmother in Jordan whose children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren were raised on the living history of this past.
The granddaughter's book, Palestinian Refugee Women from Syria to Jordan: Decolonising the Geopolitics of Displacement (2024), is a deeply researched four-year field study of Palestinian women's lives, shaped by the interconnectedness of collective historical injustice - particularly the legacy of the Nakba.
Its author, academic Afaf Jabiri, documents how settler-colonial structures have normalised Palestinian displacement, erased their history, silenced their voices, and exposed them to structural violence.
Jordan's population is 60 percent Palestinian. But in 2013, the government introduced a no-entry policy for Palestinians - even as it welcomed half a million Syrians fleeing the war sparked by the 2011 Arab uprisings.
Syria's largest camp, Yarmouk - a vast unofficial Palestinian camp - was virtually destroyed in sectarian fighting that displaced 160,000 people.
The 2013 Jordanian policy was a watershed moment of "anti-Palestinianism" in state policies and international humanitarian practice. It produced a unique inhumanity in Jordan. Palestinians in the country are largely ignored by the international community - including humanitarian organisations, which Jabiri describes as "unforgivable".
Displaced and erased
Jabiri's research documents families permanently split, with some refused entry at the border; children denied the right to sit the vital tawjihi exams required for university entrance; pregnant women borrowing neighbours' ID cards to access hospitals; forced marriages; bribery; smuggling; illegal residence; and detention in Cyber City Camp in northern Jordan.
The UN and other agencies routinely deny them aid, deeming them "Unrwa refugees" and therefore ineligible. Only a woman who had herself lived through such conditions - enduring gender-based violence and patriarchal control - could have written a study both intimate and academically rigorous.
International aid workers knew the hellish conditions of these families can only be explained as happening 'because they are Palestinians'
Her book's revelations of how Palestinian refugee women and girls from Syria, now in Jordan, have been systematically failed by the UN, other aid organisations, and the Jordanian state, amount to a sweeping indictment.
International aid workers knew the hellish conditions of these families - which, Jabiri shows, can only be explained as happening "because they are Palestinians".
Yet the courage, ingenuity, and perseverance of these women, as revealed in this book, affirms the enduring power of what Edward Said, in the 1980s, called "Palestinianism" - just as the daily writing, filming, and commentary from the people of Gaza does today.
Now, a reckless, powerful clique of white men in Washington - nostalgic for apartheid South Africa's days of racial privilege and global impunity - speak matter-of-factly of forcing Jordan to absorb a million Palestinians from Gaza, while Egypt takes another million.
They see the genocide as an opportunity to revive the old Zionist dream of Gaza without Palestinians - a fantasy real estate project, a "Middle East Riviera".
The dream will fail, as all colonial fantasies have failed.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.