Gaza/Israeli border

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Oh dear—shock horror, rather—the first man to think about displacing a whole populace was one Adolf Hitler, although he never went through with it. He decided to kill them instead. I am talking about plans to deracinate the Gaza population to faraway places, 2 million souls in all, give or take 100,000, depending on the death toll of innocent old men, women, and children following the Israeli bombardment of the place. Yes, it was the Führer who wanted to move all of Germany’s Jews to Madagascar, but the locals said nein. So he took harsher measures. The Israelis do not plan to follow the Führer in exterminating the Palestinians, but make no mistake about it: Israel’s hard-right government plans to annex all of the West Bank as well as Gaza. And although Trump has not put a foot wrong since coming to power, his taking over Gaza will make him a second Nero, and it’s not even his own plan, although he’s taking credit for it.

David Freedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel in his first term, called the plan “brilliant” and out-of-the-box creative. He added that it was the only solution to a terrible problem for Israel. Happily he did not call it a final solution, but one never knows what a rich New York Jew might say where Palestinians are concerned. Freedman added that it was intolerable that Palestinians who supported Hamas remain in Gaza.

Well, here’s something that very few of us know, and I’ll even spill the beans on how I happened to find out: Forcibly removing the Gaza Palestinians would violate international law, but fifty years ago Israel was already violating international law by annexing parts of the West Bank and the Golan Heights. More than one million refugees were packed into camps in Lebanon and Jordan. The prospective Gaza takeover had a funny name, the Vulva Plan. (You can imagine why, as Gaza’s geographic position is right up there on Israel’s front.) David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first president, had counseled caution and patience. Hotheads like Begin, Dayan, and Sharon wanted it implemented. Wiser heads like Henry Kissinger and General Rabin were adamantly against it. Kicking 2 million unwilling Palestinians out was never going to be easy, but hard-liners like Netanyahu and his ilk remained hopeful.

How did the poor little Greek boy find all this out? Easy. The man who helped me become a journalist, Arnaud de Borchgrave, chief foreign correspondent for Newsweek, whose first cousin, Alexander de Marenches, was head of the French secret service. Alexander, Arnaud, and I had a very long and liquid lunch at the Paris Ritz long ago, and the French aristocrat spilled the beans that the Frogs had been listening in on Israel’s most secret communications. The French government had given the nuclear formulas to the Israelis, and de Marenches as head spook had access to Israeli secrets. Both Alexander and Arnaud are dead, but as soon as I read about The Donald’s plan, they immediately came to mind. Trump’s son-in-law, the ghastly Jared Kushner, had already spoken out of turn about what great real estate opportunities lay in Gaza’s seafront while the bodies still littered the place some months ago. Now Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister whom BiBi has given broad authority over the West Bank, is openly saying that “With God’s help, this is the year of sovereignty over Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical name for the West Bank.

Two million out of Gaza and another 9 million out of the West Bank and there you have it, greater Israel. Although knowing hard-right Israelis and religious settler nuts, the crying will never stop. There have been strong rumors, especially among the security services of nations not allied with Israel, that Mossad was aware of the planned October Hamas attacks and did nothing in order for Israel to unleash the counterattack on Hamas. Since the war began, Hamas has been 90 percent destroyed, ditto Hezbollah; Assad has been overthrown; and the Iranians have been exposed as paper tigers. The theory that Israel knew and did nothing makes sense, but I don’t buy it. If proved true, Netanyahu would be a dead man, as would all those involved who knew. And they are not brave men, just plain criminals.

What I find amazing is that the Israeli land grab and the violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza have not raised more protest among ruling parties in Europe. And I keep reading in British newspapers about some of the freed male Israeli hostages having lost weight. In the meantime there are thousands and thousands of dead and thousands and thousands of badly wounded women and children among Palestinians, but somehow they’re no longer mentioned. Does a dead Jew count more than a dead Palestinian, or vice versa? Or does a Jewish hostage who has lost weight count more than a dead Palestinian child or mother? What has happened to our humanity? Are we all as crazy and fanatical as the Netanyahu band of criminals?

The place the humanitarians who thought this up are thinking of sending the Palestinians is Puntland, an arid region on the northern tip of the Horn of Africa. Al-Shabaab terrorists control large swaths of the south, while the capital of Somalia, Mogadishu, is wracked by suicide bombings regularly. Sending the Gaza populace to Puntland is a fate worse than being bombed daily or humiliated by Israeli hard-liners.