The Israeli state’s determination to ethnically cleanse at least the northern half of the Gaza Strip have now become well-known. The plan, already part implemented, is to terrorise Gazans into fleeing south, creating an unparalleled humanitarian emergency. Aid in any significant amount will remain blocked by Israel from entering Gaza through the Rafah crossing.
This in turn will force Egypt to allow Gazans to enter the North Sinai desert where they will be put into refugee camps from which they will never be allowed to return. Hamas will not only have been militarily defeated but politically humiliated, since it will have been seen not to be able to protect the Palestinians from what will in effect be a second Nakba.
Needless to say, this plan is fraught with the most dangerous consequences, hence the belated efforts by the major powers to delay the Israeli ground invasion and attenuate its coming brutality by attempting to get Israel to agree to a time limit for the occupation of Gaza, and to agree that it will abide by the rule of law as it invades. Since the major powers combine this with public flag waving and political rhetoric which is relentlessly pro-Zionist, there can be little expectation of stopping the Israelis.
And, as with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the invasion of Gaza is a project that has given little attention to the likely consequences. One such consequence is that the defeat of Hamas will radicalise Palestinians in the long run, and that this will take forms even less welcome than Hamas to the US and its allies. This process is not new, it is indeed what produced Hamas in the first place. The defanging of the PLO by the Oslo accords did not eradicate Palestinian militancy, it merely allowed Hamas to become more widely supported than ever before.
And if angry and disposed Palestinians arrive in the Sinai desert, they will not find it empty. For years past, Islamic State (ISIS) fighters, estimated to be 1,000 strong, have been waging their own war against the Egyptian state. The Egyptian government tried to create a sterile zone in the Sinai by demolishing over 3,000 houses. As one study records: ‘In Sinai, the brutality of the Egyptian military and police turned young Bedouins into a pool of insurgent recruits, and generated some communal support for the militants, to avenge the injustices the locals were facing at the hands of the central government soldiers’. There were mass arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearance of locals. From July 2013 to December 2018, more than 12,000 residents were detained.
In the end, the regime came to a secret arrangement with Hamas, which it publicly and really detests, to fight ISIS together. If the Israeli plan to force any significant number of Gazans into the Sinai succeeds, then they are likely to both hate the Egyptian state for allowing their displacement and no longer to have faith in Hamas, leaving some at least open to ISIS propaganda.
Egypt and other Arab states can see the danger to their own interests here, and so last weekend’s Cairo Peace Conference issued plenty of warnings to the Israelis that the displacement plan was unacceptable. Israel already has a veto over large-scale Egyptian military deployments in a Sinai buffer zone as a result of the Camp David Accords.
But relying on the steadfastness of the Arab kings, princes, and tyrants has never served the Palestinians well. They have learned through bitter experience that imperialism rules the Middle East by supporting Israel against the Palestinians and the Arabs more generally, and also by suborning and bribing the Arab rulers not to attack the Israelis or defend the Palestinians in anything more than the most inadequate ways.
ISIS grew originally in the British sector of post-occupation Iraq, and they must be awaiting the arrival of furious Palestinians into the Sinai with considerable anticipation. As ever, the imperial powers never see the consequences of their own actions. This time those could be even more serious than they were in Iraq.
The hope of avoiding this disaster lies in the massive Palestinian solidarity movement in Egypt and throughout the Arab world. That pressure is already causing cracks to appear in the imperial powers’ support for Israel. Now is the time to force those cracks into a breach that can immobilise the Zionist project for Gaza.