The discrepancy between Israel’s declared goals for its war on Gaza and its actual actions is staggering. While Tel Aviv continues to repeat hollow slogans—returning hostages, dismantling Hamas, disarming Gaza — these narratives function more as propaganda tools aimed at securing international legitimacy than genuine military objectives.
For global media consumption and western political cover, these slogans serve to justify an onslaught now surpassing 612 days — one that has claimed the lives of over 54,000 civilians in direct bombardments, caused more than triple that number in injuries, unleashed mass destruction, led to near-total displacement, criminalised UN humanitarian agencies, and waged a war of starvation—just to name a few.
This propaganda machine has successfully framed the ongoing, televised slaughter campaign as a just response. Alarmingly, much of the western world has accepted and echoed this narrative — rationalising the live-streamed brutality unfolding in Gaza, where civilians are enduring what experts have identified as genocide.
The sinister reality, from seven decades ago
Initially, public discourse focused on Israel’s stated objectives. More recently, attention shifted to the claim that the war exists primarily to save Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career, preserving his coalition and shielding him from corruption charges. While these factors play a role, reducing this genocide to Mr. Netanyahu’s survival obscures a far more sinister and enduring reality.
This war is a continuation of a long-term strategy to complete what David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father, initiated in 1948 — the mass expulsion of the Palestinian people. Many Israelis chillingly refer to this as “finishing the job”.
Among the vast majority of Israelis, there is a deeply rooted belief that Ben-Gurion missed a historic opportunity in 1948 by not expelling all Palestinians beyond the Jordan River. Today’s military operations, along with mounting calls for mass expulsion represent efforts to finally “complete the job”.
The expulsion of Palestinians is neither a new policy nor a hidden agenda. It is a foundational and repeatedly tested strategy of the Zionist project. The Nakba of 1948, when Zionist militias ethnically cleansed over 9,50,000 Palestinians, was not a tragic byproduct of war but a deliberate, meticulously planned act aimed at establishing a Jewish-majority state.
This strategy resurfaced in 1956 during the Sinai Campaign, when Israel briefly occupied Gaza. One key objective was the forced removal of Palestinian refugees from Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Although only partially executed due to Gazan resistance and international pressure, the intention was clear and well-documented. Israeli historian Avi Raz and others have demonstrated that the concept of “voluntary transfer” or engineered displacement was actively discussed by Israeli officials during and after the war. Ben-Gurion and other leaders viewed the 1956 war as a second opportunity to “finish the job”.
This policy’s continuity was exposed in a Haaretz investigative report dated December 5, 2024, titled “We Give Them 48 Hours to Leave: Israel’s Plans to Transfer Gazans Go Back 60 Years”. The article reveals that from the 1960s onward, Israeli officials quietly formulated policies aimed at reducing Gaza’s Palestinian population — a central policy rather than a fringe idea.
A demographic engineering
On May 15, 2025, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported that 7.4 million Palestinians — Muslims and Christians — now live in historic Palestine, equalling the Jewish population. Despite decades of Israeli policies aimed at boosting Jewish birth rates and displacing Palestinians, the demographic balance now favours the indigenous Palestinian population. From the Israeli perspective, this “demographic threat” is under constant scrutiny. The prospect of a Jewish minority ruling over a Palestinian majority is politically and morally untenable. To preserve its identity as a “Jewish state”, Israel has increasingly relied on apartheid, violent expulsions, and demographic engineering.
On October 9, 2023, just two days after the war began, the Israeli government announced a special inter-ministerial committee tasked with facilitating the forced transfer of Palestinians from Gaza. It is no secret that Israeli officials have discussed relocating Palestinians to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula or even to African countries such as Rwanda and Uganda under the pretence of “voluntary resettlement” — a thin veil for forced population transfer, which constitutes a war crime under international law.
The concept of transforming Gaza’s coast into a luxury zone devoid of Palestinians — the so-called “Middle East Riviera” — was openly proposed by United States President Donald Trump, whose real estate background shaped his vision of the region as prime beachfront property rather than a homeland for a dispossessed people. Under the guise of regional development, Mr. Trump’s real estate proposal repackaged ethnic cleansing as economic opportunity. Mr. Netanyahu embraced this vision wholeheartedly, describing it as “the only viable plan to enable a different future for the region”.
Deliberate erasure
The widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure and life in Gaza cannot be explained by military necessity or any declared war aims. Entire neighbourhoods, homes, towers, roads, and sewage systems have been obliterated. Schools, universities, hospitals, and water infrastructure have been systematically targeted. Agricultural lands have been scorched. Starvation has been weaponised. Over 1,50,000 people have been killed or wounded, many of them civilians. Thousands more have died indirectly due to hunger, thirst, disease and the collapse of Gaza’s besieged health system. And all of this is just the tip of the iceberg.
This is not collateral damage or incidental. It is a deliberate, methodical erasure of Palestinian life and society. It is the continuation of a long-standing project to “finish the job” begun in 1948 and enact a final solution to the “Palestinian demographic threat”.
The real final goal of this war transcends military objectives or Mr. Netanyahu’s political survival. It is a war over geography and demography — a campaign that began 77 years ago and still rages today. It aims to erase the indigenous Palestinian people from their homeland, uproot their presence from the map, and entrench Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea.
Abdullah M. Abu Shawesh is the Ambassador of the State of Palestine to the Republic of India
Published – June 17, 2025 12:16 am IST