It becomes clearer with every passing day that the Israeli government has a very long-term plan. They want a final solution to what they perceive as the Palestinian problem. To this end they will bomb, shoot and starve the population of Gaza. When Netanyahu has finished in Gaza, he and his far-right henchmen will turn their attention to the occupied West Bank. We can expect to see more acts of provocation by Zionist settlers, Palestinians will attempt to defend their land. The IDF will use the response as a pretext for reprisals employing hugely disproportionate firepower. Any survivors will be pushed out.
This is not hysteria – Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently said: “Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned.” Itamar Ben-Gvir (Minister of National Security) has said “When we form the government, I will promote the Deportation Law, which will deport anyone who acts against the State of Israel or IDF soldiers”. This is not a man who believes in the human rights of anyone who resists the Zionist state.
And that Zionist state recently passed a resolution to annex the West Bank. Members of the Knesset voted 71 to 13 to designate this land as falling under Israeli sovereignty. Around 2 million Palestinian people live there – as they have done for centuries.
The Israeli government knows that their campaign of ethnic cleansing will result in decades of hatred towards the state of Israel. But they also expect that, eventually, their pariah status will end. Consider the history of Germany: the Nazi government perpetrated the worst genocide the world has known. Those who were most closely implicated were caught and executed. Within a few decades after 1945 Germans had rehabilitated themselves and become good Europeans.
This is the calculation of the present Israeli government. They may well not be forgiven for genocide. That doesn’t matter. In fifty or a hundred years’ time the state of Israel will be rehabilitated, they will have all the land, and the people of Palestine will have ceased to exist.
