Will Gazans Ever Be Allowed to Return Home?

An Israeli think tank has launched a ‘brilliant’ proposal: let’s permanently send the residents of Gaza to Egypt. Why not? The cost is merely a ‘drop in the bucket’: a maximum of 8 billion dollars. And there are, after all, 10 million vacant homes in Egypt. This is not some delusion of grandeur by an obscure group; no, this is serious work, supported by individuals like Israel’s former National Security Advisor and two former Defense Ministers.

Here’s another one: Israeli intelligence services are fantasizing about creating a ‘sterile zone’ along the Egyptian border to prevent the return of Palestinians. If you’re skeptical about the authenticity, these details were leaked from a document circulating within an Israeli ministry. The document originates from a lobby aiming to re-colonize Gaza.

This is nothing new. Israel already has a rich tradition of ethnic engineering. In 1967, the idea was to give Jewish families more child benefits, while Arabs would receive information about birth control. Palestinians who left during the wars of 1948 and 1967 were not allowed to return. Ben-Gurion visited Gaza after the 1956 war and was shocked that Gazans had not fled en masse. After the 1967 war, the Israeli government had drafted a plan to reduce the number of Palestinians in the occupied territories. They even encouraged 60,000 Palestinians from Gaza to migrate to Paraguay. In 1962, a proposal known as Operation Worker was launched. The goal was to encourage Palestinian refugees to emigrate to West Germany, where there was a new demand for foreign labor. About eighteen months before the Six-Day War, Israel tried to orchestrate an agreement between Germany and Jordan to promote the emigration of Palestinian refugees from Jordan to Germany through German trade unions. Ruth Wolf, an official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs involved in the project, stated: “Perhaps it’s necessary to hint to the Germans that they bear a special ‘responsibility’ for the creation of Israel due to the Holocaust. Here they have an opportunity to help resettle refugees whose problem originated from the creation of the state of Israel.”