Extract from ABC News
What sort of country will Israel be after this war? And will Gaza be liveable, or will its 2.3 million citizens be forced to move to the Sinai desert in Egypt?
These are two major questions currently being discussed in Israel.
Since October 7, fear abounds among both Israelis and Palestinians.
The fear among Israelis is that if Hamas can do it once they can do it again. That as many as 2,000 Hamas militants were able to carry out all sorts of atrocities against women, children, babies and the elderly, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 240.
The October 7 massacre has touched people across the country. In a relatively small population, in my two recent trips I met countless Israelis who knew someone directly or indirectly affected by the massacre or the call-up for war.
Israelis' sense of security has been undermined. Videos of October 7 atrocities are being played repeatedly on Israeli media, to the point where some Israelis are concerned that it may be harmful to people's mental health.
Inside Israel, there is concern that the demolition of much of Gaza will make it difficult for Israel as a society to function in good health after the war.
Prominent Israeli lawyer Michael Sfard wrote this week: "Is there a way back from the hardness we have decreed on our hearts in the face of hundreds of thousands of people who because of our war are fighting like animals for pieces of food, a safe place where their children can lay down their heads, medicine, clean water and dignity?"
Shadow of the Nakba
The fear among Palestinians is that Israel wants a "second Nakba". Palestinians use the word Nakba — Arabic for "catastrophe" — to refer to the estimated 750,000 Palestinians who were forced to leave — or fled in fear – upon the formation of Israel in 1948.
Many Palestinians believe the reason Israel is bombing Gaza so heavily is to make it unliveable so that eventually the majority, if not all, of the citizens, facing starvation, will force their way into Egypt.
This fear is heightened by the fact that many prominent Israelis are stating straight out that they want another Nakba. Among those advocating a "Nakba 2023" is Avi Dichter, a former chief of Israel's Shin Bet intelligence service and a minister in the Netanyahu government. These are not anonymous trolls advocating a new Nakba.
And now a leading newspaper — The Jerusalem Post — has carried a prominent opinion piece advocating the emptying of Gaza. That in itself is extraordinary — the most read English-language newspaper for Jewish communities around the world running the argument that the new home for Palestinians in Gaza should be Egypt.
Even more provocatively, only a week before, the paper ran a headline: "Israel should make Gaza look like Auschwitz museum — council head." It quoted the head of a major council proposing "sending" all Gazans to refugee camps in Lebanon and "flattening the whole strip so it becomes an empty museum like Auschwitz".
That a major newspaper for diaspora Jews and a major mayor are evoking the horrors of Auschwitz when referring to Palestinians shows what is now seen as acceptable for publication in Israel.
Human toll beyond the rhetoric
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects any suggestion of ethnic cleansing, insisting that the primary aim of Israel's military action is to "destroy Hamas". It's debatable whether this can actually be done — Hamas is in part an ideology and idea, it's also one of many groups whose aims are "resistance" to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and, along with Egypt, its blockade of Gaza.
Hamas, in turn, makes no secret of its ultimate aim – its charter commits it to the eradication of the state of Israel.
But what is not debatable – I found this sentiment from every Israeli to whom I spoke – is that Israelis want Hamas as a fighting machine destroyed. Never again.
The human toll in Gaza is staggering. According to the Euro Med monitoring group, as of December 26, 29,124 people have been killed. This is higher than figures from Gaza's Ministry of Health as Euro Med counts people who are missing, many of whom have disappeared under rubble. The Ministry of Health counts only actual bodies. According to Euro Med, 11,422 of the dead are children and 5,822 women.
Euro Med says 1,920,000 people have been displaced, 1,541 industrial facilities destroyed, 101 media workers killed, 183 mosques and three churches destroyed, 305 schools damaged and 23 hospitals, 56 clinics and 55 ambulances targeted.
Israel repeatedly insists that its bombing is not indiscriminate – that "collateral damage" is inevitable as while Israel is using precision targeting, Hamas is embedding itself in civilian targets. It insists Hamas uses "human shields."
But one of Israel's staunchest supporters – US President Joe Biden – is no longer believing its claim that it is using precision targeting, saying Israel is losing international support because of its "indiscriminate bombing".
Gaza's future
On the current trajectory of Israel's attacks from the air, sea and the ground, Gaza looks set to be an enclave with 2.3 million people essentially living in rubble.
Its health, water and sewerage systems are effectively destroyed and it has 1.9 million people who have no homes, no food and no drinkable water. With no sanitation, Gazans face the prospect of widespread disease.
The longer term issue for Israel is that an entire new generation of young Palestinians could be radicalised by seeing their homes and sometimes their families destroyed.
After a recent meeting with Netanyahu, Biden warned Israelis not to be "consumed" by rage.
But his counsel appears not to have worked — the Israeli Centre for Public Affairs has collected 286 statements from key public figures calling in effect for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza with some saying it should be resettled with Israelis as collective punishment of Palestinians. The centre found "incitement, racism and extremist politics" had spread among Israeli soldiers.
The centre discovered campaigns selling T-shirts with the image of an army bulldozer with the words: "It is pleasant for you to flatten."
The centre noted that the head of the organisation that has military rule over Palestinians in the West Bank, the army's Co-ordination of Government Activities in the Palestinian Territories, Major General Ghassan Alian, had said: "There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell."
Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, said: "Burn Gaza now, no less!"
The former head of Israel's National Security Council Giora Eiland said: "Severe epidemics in the southern Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers."
Israeli singer Lior Narkis made a plea to the army: "Walk into Gaza and slaughter them alive."
Moshe Feiglin, the founder of Israel's Zehut Party, said: "There is one and only [one] solution, which is to completely destroy Gaza before invading it. I mean, destruction like what happened in Dresden and Hiroshima, without nuclear weapons."
Amit Halevi, a member of the ruling Likud party, said: "There should be two goals for this victory: One, there is no more Muslim land in the land of Israel … after we make it the land of Israel, Gaza should be left as a monument, like Sodom."
Israeli soldiers in Gaza has been photographing themselves with "Gush Katif" posters – calling for Israel to re-occupy the strip.
This is, of course, contrary to what Biden and other world leaders have been saying – that Israel must, instead, finally agree to a two-state solution under which Palestinians have their own state.
Palestinian fear
The rhetoric from prominent Israelis of ethnic cleansing and revenge has added to suggestions that Israel has an agenda not fully declared.
In early November, The Washington Post reported that many Palestinians feared a repeat of the Nakba. It reported that when Israeli archives were opened in the 1980s records showed that Israeli operations, including psychological-warfare broadcasts, helped drive the exodus of Palestinians.
"The element of surprise, long stints of shelling with extremely loud blasts, and loudspeakers in Arabic proved very effective when properly used," it quoted an Israeli Defence Forces intelligence report from June 1948 as saying. The report recorded that Jewish combatants were "the main factor" in the exodus.
"The 1948 expulsion remains an animating force in Palestinian identity, and it changed the demographics of Israel," the paper reported.
The fear of many Palestinians that Israel's real agenda is to render Gaza unliveable would have been heightened by an opinion piece in The Jerusalem Post entitled Why moving to the Sinai Peninsula is the solution for Gaza's Palestinians.
The article carried a sub headline: "The Sinai Peninsula compromises one of the most suitable places on Earth to provide the people of Gaza with hope and a peaceful future."
Written by Joel Roskin, an academic from Israel's Bar Ilan University, it said major portions of Gaza were now considerably incapacitated and cannot be simply fixed.
"Rather, the damaged and destroyed structures must be completely torn down. The tunnelled – and consequently exploded and bulldozed — soil must undergo extensive environmental and engineering rehabilitation … the facts demonstrate that the northern Sinai Peninsula is an ideal location to develop a spacious resettlement for the people of Gaza. Its open areas, along with the existing infrastructure, can easily host large-scale development projects that, if led by the Chinese and supported by local labour, for example, can easily mature in just one to two years."
It was a remarkable piece. A leading academic in the most read news website in the Jewish world arguing that because Israel had wrought such destruction on Gaza the Chinese – in only one or two years — could develop an alternative home for the Palestinians, in a country to which they have no connection.
The greatest challenge
While there is an abundance of calls for ethnic cleansing by Israelis, there is no shortage of such calls on the Hamas side.
As prominent Israeli lawyer Michael Sfard observed: "We have been accustomed to genocidal rhetoric that comes from Hamas. The Hamas covenant has obvious severe antisemitic articles, and also some that could be interpreted as expressing desire to eliminate the Jews in Israel."
Sfard said his grandmother, who survived the Holocaust after escaping with her mother and sisters from the Warsaw Ghetto, would say the greatest challenge in the face of extreme inhumanity was to maintain humanity.
Writing in Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Sfard questioned who Israelis would be after the war, asking "how many tons of coldness and indifference have settled inside us in order for us to turn high-rise buildings into dust, promenades and plazas into ruins and a million and a half people into displaced people who have nothing?
"And what will become of a society whose media outlets, which provide it with information about its deeds, have refrained for over 10 weeks from bringing even a single interview – a single one! – with a resident of Gaza to tell what's happening to them; who censor the pictures of the dead children and the weeping mothers, the children that we killed and the mothers whose bereavement we caused? The Israeli TV channels are shaping our collective perceptions not only by means of what they show, but also, and perhaps mainly, by means of what they're hiding from us."
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