The Endless Nakba: Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Countless books and articles have been written about Israel’s model of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from the land where their ancestors settled and lived peacefully for thousands of years. Palestinian scholars, human rights defenders, victims, and survivors of Israeli aggression have clearly and comprehensively described the suffering inflicted upon them, their families, and their communities for more than 77 years as Israel has sought to kill or displace Palestinian people from their land. UN agencies and Special Rapporteurs, most recently Francesca Albanese, have documented and described Israel’s multiple methodologies aimed at shifting the demographic composition of Jerusalem and the West Bank to result in a majority of Jewish Israeli settlers. I cannot add anything more credible than what has already been said on this topic, but I would like to highlight some of Israel’s key interventions (also known as war crimes, genocide, and apartheid) to underscore some of the ways in which the Israeli government operationalises its plan of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people. 

Israel has been militarily occupying the West Bank since 1967, and has been actively expanding a web of illegal settlements in order to transform the demographics by displacing Palestinian people to make space for Israelis. In 2024 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) to be unlawful. The ICJ held that Israel must end its unlawful presence as rapidly as possible, cease immediately all new settlement activities, and evacuate all settlers from the OPT. Despite the unequivocal language in the opinion from the ICJ, Israel remains unmoved - physically and metaphorically - because its illegal settlements represent the foundation of its plan to ethnically cleanse the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza and eventually outnumber the Palestinians.

Not only do the settlers take up space that previously belonged to generations of Palestinian families, thereby shifting the demographic composition of the land, but they also constitute an unchecked force of violent brutality against the Palestinian people. Countless well documented instances of Israeli settlers beating and even killing Palestinians, destroying cars and homes, uprooting agriculture, and generally treating Palestinians as subhumans exist, but convictions for this violence are unheard of. Since October 7, 2023, over 6,700 Palestinians have been wounded in attacks by the Israeli army and settlers across the West Bank, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Israeli settlers often justify their property stealing by citing the fact that it was empty and was not in use when they moved in. This disingenuous defense of land grabbing ignores the fact that Israel has set up a legal system explicitly designed to keep Palestinians from using their land: 95% of building permits applied for by Palestinians are denied by the Israeli authority, and furthermore, Israel has enacted a law that dispossesses Palestinians of land not used in very specific agricultural ways set by Israel. Furthermore, those who have been violently evicted or dispossessed from their homes face a deadline to return and reclaim it - one that is often impossible to comply with as they struggle to consolidate the resources and documents necessary to assert their claim. The extent to which Israel has codified a legal system that enables Israeli settlers to steal land from Palestinians who have virtually no legal protections is mind-boggling.

The Israeli military forces themselves are also inherently brutal and act in violent disproportion to any threats they may perceive, infamously shooting children for throwing stones and sending snipers after journalists. They regularly arrest, detain, harass, and humiliate people at checkpoints, security stations, house raids, and other venues where they exploit their power as an occupying military. The Israeli military regularly subjects people in its custody to a range of sexual assaults including forced nudity, body cavity searches, unwanted touching, and rape. This way of treating the Palestinian population - in ways that degrade and devastate - takes an immeasurable toll on people individually and collectively. It has intergenerational traumatic impacts and has driven more than 7 million Palestinians to leave Palestine to rebuild their lives elsewhere. This is exactly what Israel wants: to dramatically decrease the number of Palestinians so that Israelis will eventually be a majority throughout the Palestinian territories. The US government’s suggestion to relocate Gazans to other countries was wholly aligned with the Israeli strategy of eradicating Palestinians from their homeland.

Not finally, but most obviously: since October 2023, we have witnessed in real time the Israeli strategy to kill as many Palestinians in Gaza as possible through bombing, destruction of medical and reproductive health facilities, executions, and now forced starvation through a complete aid blockade. South Africa has taken Israel to the ICJ for violating the Genocide Convention, the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes, and the ICJ in a separate advisory case, has heard arguments in regards to Israel’s obligations regarding humanitarian aid in Gaza. It is hard to imagine a more dystopian situation than one in which the state that has waged a genocide against a trapped people, now blocks humanitarian aid to those people while citing its own self defense concerns. And yet this is what Israel has always done and will continue to do, as the years pass by and it continues to expand and justify its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Israel feels that time - and critically, the US - is on its side. It commits war crimes, runs an apartheid system, and violates international law in countless ways. Yet it has managed its disinformation and propaganda machine so effectively that it has masked its true intentions from too many of the most powerful political figures in the world for far too many years. And finally, when one of the many documentaries about Israeli violence against Palestinians in the West Bank shocked the collective conscience of those who had been ignorant to date  and won an Oscar, one of its directors, Hamdan Ballal, was severely beaten by settlers and detained by Israeli forces. This is the perpetual cycle of violence, injustice, and impunity that the unlawful Israeli occupation embodies.

I strongly encourage readers to visit the websites of the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling, Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Centre, Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Addameer, and Al-Haq, as well as the website of the Special Rapporteur for Palestine, to find in-depth information about all the instances described above.