Israelis no longer blush at calls for Palestinian extermination

This is a translation of an article published in Hebrew on Sikha Mekomit (Local Call).

At the end of October 2023, Local Call published the full text of a plan formulated by Gila Gamliel, then Israel’s minister of intelligence, for the “evacuation of the civilian population from Gaza to Sinai”. 

The plan received extensive coverage around the world and was viewed as proof that Israel’s real goal in its war in Gaza – at that time still in the aerial bombing phase before the ground invasion – was not to “eliminate Hamas” but to expel the Palestinians from Gaza. 

Coverage in Israel, however, was limited – perhaps because the Ministry of Intelligence had no authority (it has since been closed), perhaps because Gamliel had no real political weight and perhaps because the Israeli media prefers not to deal with the war crimes that Israel is planning.

Sixteen months later, Gamliel’s plan has effectively become the official plan of the Israeli government. 

The credit must first and foremost, of course, go to US President Donald Trump. But it is also undeniable that this process reflects the evolution of an idea long cherished by the Israeli public. 

Indeed, even after Trump and his people began watering down his transfer plan in recent days, terming it not a “forced evacuation” but rather “only a recommendation”, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has continued to extol “President Trump’s groundbreaking plan to allow freedom of exit for Gazans” and Defence Minister Israel Katz is setting up an administration for “voluntary exit” from Gaza. 

These formulations are present almost word for word in Gamliel’s plan.

The discourse of extermination is, first and foremost, the result of rage and frustration, not a plan of action 

Therefore, it would be inadvisable to casually dismiss a call by deputy parliament speaker Nissim Vaturi stating that “the children and women should be separated and the [male] adults in Gaza should be killed”. Vaturi may be a more marginal politician than Gamliel, but he signifies a development in the Jewish-Israeli discourse. 

There are no more threats of a second Nakba, which took over the right-wing discourse even before 7 October and subsequently entered the mainstream. There is not just a “Generals’ Plan” of siege and starvation, which was actually implemented by expelling the residents of northern Gaza and demolishing their homes and was only halted because of the ceasefire. Rather, there is a blueprint for annihilation: for a final solution to the problem of Gaza and to the problem of the Palestinians in general.

Vaturi’s words are noteworthy because they come against the backdrop of a normalisation of the discourse of extermination. 

If Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu was made to squirm after saying at the outset of the war that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was “one way” to deal with Hamas, now such statements are voiced openly – without any attempt to disguise or whitewash them. 

The examples are many and varied. Attorney Kinneret Barashi, a prominent right-wing “influencer” who always makes sure to mention that she used to vote for Meretz, posted on X that “every trace of the murderous mutations in Gaza should be erased, from the delivery rooms to the last elderly person in Gaza. 100% must die in Gaza”. 

Actor Yiftach Klein, who describes himself as being from the “Oslo generation”, said in a PR interview with Walla, marking his participation in a new play at the Habima Theatre: “I don’t believe them [the Palestinians]. I don’t believe in them and I don’t want to see them again as long as I live, ever. Let them be gone beyond the mountains of darkness and may they die there.”

Singer Ofer Levi said in an interview on Avi Shushan’s podcast on the Maariv website that if he were a soldier in the army, “there would be no more prisoners. I would kill them all and also burn them. Bring gasoline, give the order to go ahead and pour it out and then ignite it. Burn everything down to the last one of them, including everyone.” 

And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. Roaming briefly through social media yields many more examples – men and women, disillusioned, racist, all united in a chorus of annihilation.

The trauma of 7 October regenerated

Even without quantitative research, this discourse of extermination seems to have gained momentum after the 19 January ceasefire. 

Two explanations come to mind here. The first relates to the ceremonies that Hamas holds around the release of the abductees. 

The scenes of Hamas parading captives in front of crowds have been seen as proof the movement abused the Israelis it seized and that it has enduring support from Palestinians in Gaza.

Israelis have pointed to the crowd that surrounded the first three captives released in Gaza, the chaos that spiralled out of control during the first release of captives in Khan Younis, and the statements of thanks that they were forced to deliver onstage in front of a cheering audience.

Attempts to show that at most a few hundred Palestinians participated in each of these ceremonies did not help, nor did the fact that most of the captives appeared to be in slightly better condition than anticipated. The feeling of humiliation and threat only increased with each handover.  

The climax came with the ceremony surrounding the release of the bodies of Shiri Bibas, her two toddlers and Oded Lifshitz. 

The fact that Hamas held a ceremony for the handing over the bodies of two small children, whose abduction alongside their mother became a symbol of the cruelty of 7 October, deeply distressed the Jewish public. 

These feelings only intensified when it became clear that the body ostensibly of Shiri Bibas that was transferred to Israel was not, in fact, Shiri Bibas and after the spokesperson for the Israeli army announced that the two toddlers had been “manually suffocated” by Hamas members. 

Even the Bibas family’s own attempts to dampen the outrage and their pleas not to use their tragedy for propaganda purposes and not to publish details of Shiri Bibas and her children’s deaths before the autopsy report reached them were of no help.

In these ceremonies, Hamas was clearly seeking to prove to itself, to the Palestinian public and, of course, to Israel that it was still standing after Israel’s most destructive and deadly attack against the Palestinian people (at least since 1948), to show that Israel and Netanyahu had failed in their declared mission to eliminate Hamas. 

But even if Hamas intended otherwise – and at least in their statements, Hamas described these ceremonies as honouring the captives – the result was an intensification of the discourse of annihilation among the Jewish public, a renewal of the trauma of 7 October.

Outrage and frustration

But there is another explanation for the emergence of the discourse of extermination. 

Beyond the “elimination of Hamas”, depopulating the Gaza Strip or at least Gaza City and the towns to its north became a declared goal of many Israeli leaders on the right – Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir – and the commanders in the army. 

This was what was at the centre of the “Generals’ Plan” that the army actually adopted. The goal of the Southern Command, published by Ynet in mid-December, “is to prevent the return of Gazans to their homes in Jabalia, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia”.

After the ceasefire came into effect, however, the Israelis realised that not only had Hamas not been eliminated and was, in fact, showing self-confidence, but also that the ethnic cleansing had failed. 

True, Jabalia was completely destroyed, as were large parts of Gaza City and its environs. 

If all that destruction and bombing did not convince the Palestinians to leave, the conclusion drawn by more than a few Israelis is that there is no choice but to kill everyone

But the images of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians returning to the northern strip were tangible proof that the Palestinians remained in Gaza and that they had no intention of going anywhere, certainly not voluntarily. 

It is difficult to speak in terms of “victory” when Gaza has been completely destroyed and after 50,000-plus deaths and perhaps substantially more, but one can understand why most Palestinians – in Gaza itself and beyond – saw the return to the north as an Israeli failure.

The discourse of extermination, according to this explanation, stems from Israeli frustration at the inability to bring about the complete depopulation of Gaza. 

If all that destruction and bombing did not convince the Palestinians to leave, the conclusion drawn by more than a few Israelis is that there is no choice but to kill everyone – from “the delivery rooms to the last elderly person”. 

This is one of the reasons why the majority of the Israeli public has embraced Trump’s plan to uproot the Palestinians in Gaza. 

But perhaps because the Israelis are better acquainted with the local reality than the real estate mogul sitting in the White House, they know that there is no real chance that the Palestinians will leave of their own free will. 

In order to get rid of the Palestinians, you have to kill them. 

Chaim Levinson wrote in Haaretz that the plan presented by Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer to US envoy Steve Witkoff on Netanyahu’s behalf states that if negotiations with Hamas fail, the army will occupy the entire strip and “destroy the buildings that are still standing in most parts of the strip – except for defined shelter areas in the south of the strip – and only in those areas will food be distributed”.

Yoaz Hendel, a reserve battalion commander in the current war and a former minister, also talked in an article in Israel Hayom about “secured compounds” that will be established in the strip with food and drink distributed only at those sites. 

“Everything outside these compounds,” Hendel wrote, “is a killing zone.” In other words, anyone who does not enter these concentration camps – it’s hard to call them anything else – will be sentenced to death. 

Although ethnic cleansing has become a mode of action – the expulsion of 40,000 Palestinians from refugee camps in the northern West Bank and Katz’s declaration that he will not allow them to return are further proof of this – it has been a failure thus far. Israel has destroyed Gaza, but the Palestinians have not left it, and the Palestinians who have lately been forced to leave their homes in Jenin, Nur Shams and Tulkarm are not abandoning the West Bank either. 

The discourse of extermination is, first and foremost, the result of rage and frustration, not a plan of action. 

But the statements of Vaturi, Barashi, Klein and many others are preparing the psychological ground for moves that no one dared to mention out loud until 7 October – and that is dangerous, very dangerous.