Twenty years ago, Israel unilaterally disengaged from Gaza after the post-1967 years of occupation and settlement. An overriding factor governing the decision to withdraw was the issue of demography. With a population of over two million Palestinians, Gaza has always represented a significant part of a broad demographic problem facing the self-declared ‘only democracy in the Middle East.’ Within Israel and the occupied territories (the area that has been under direct or indirect Israeli control for 58 years) there are over 14 million people. Approximately half are Israeli Jews, the other half, Palestinians. This underreported reality stands sharply at odds with the notion of a Jewish and democratic state, especially one which aspires to the land borders of a Greater Israel.
Twenty-one months after Israel re-entered, Gaza stands in ruins — obliterated, to use the current Trumpian term. The State of Israel has unleashed terror upon the Strip on an unprecedented scale. The different elements of the collective punishment of Gaza have become familiar but still make for shocking reading: the indiscriminate bombing; the sniper and drone attacks; the withholding of aid; the domicide; the ongoing forced displacement; the restriction of access to water, food, healthcare; the targeting of civilians and razing of infrastructure.
That these things add up to genocide is hardly a matter for debate anymore. Instead, we need to ask where all this is headed. We can’t simply accept the hasbara narrative that Israel only wants the return of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas. The current state of the Strip cannot support this. There is no access to Gaza, but we can look at satellite photographs. We can look at the footage provided by Palestinians. We can also listen to Israelis in public, political and media spaces. More is going on here. This is a war that is going way beyond the oft-repeated objectives.
It seems perverse on the part of many Western commentators not to link the devastation of Gaza to current public discourse in Israel and to Zionist concerns about demography and Palestinian fertility. There are two aspects of this genocidal tragedy that suggest a renewed drive on Israel’s part to tackle a perceived ‘demographic timebomb.’ Firstly, Israel is manifestly engaged with the idea of the ethnic cleansing of the population and secondly, it is waging a war on the Palestinian future through the daily targeting of women and children.
The forced transfer of the Gazan population is now openly discussed, an entirely possible endgame legitimized by Trump’s plan. A new infrastructure of resettlement (with a nomenclature betraying a nostalgia for Gush Katif) is being prepared by the IDF’s D9 Caterpillar bulldozers. Palestinians have been uprooted and are continually being displaced within the Strip. The GHF aid ‘system’ is exacerbating this. Their homes have been destroyed and the areas that Palestinians can move in are now extremely limited, the conditions intolerable. It is in this context that we are presented with the current idea of a ‘humanitarian city.’ As Trump himself has put it, Gaza is a ‘hellhole.’ It might seem to some that the world will not stand by and let the ethnic cleansing of Gaza happen but, of course, it’s already happening. The uncomfortable optics of forced transfer won’t be an issue when conditions have become so bad that people beg to leave and their ejection from their own land can be spun as an act of mercy.
Bad enough, you may think. But what should be equally as outrageous to the outside world is Israel’s sustained assault on Palestinian children and women. At the point of writing, a figure of over 57,000 fatalities in Gaza includes 17,000 children and 9,000 women.
South Africa’s ongoing case at the ICJ includes the accusation that Israel, in contravention of the Genocide Convention, is imposing measures intended to prevent births within the Gazan population. A recent U.N. report by the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory criticizes Israel for deliberately targeting health facilities in Gaza, destroying ‘in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group.’ The WHO has warned of a health system at breaking point. Cesarean sections are being performed without anesthetic in those few hospitals still operating and newborn children are dying due to a scarcity of incubators and medical staff. The weaponization of aid means that, according to UNICEF, 17,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women currently require treatment for acute malnutrition in Gaza. Doctors have described a critical shortage of baby formula as being a direct result of Israeli aid restrictions.
This onslaught on children and mothers is a key component of this genocide which can be linked to a long-held Zionist obsession with Palestinian birthrates. Mandate Palestine was not, of course, a land without a people, as pioneers of the state such as Israel’s first Prime Minister, Ben Gurion, knew. The country has always worried about the need to manufacture and maintain a Jewish majority. A chief architect of the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, Arnon ‘the Arab Counter’ Soffer, long warned of the danger for the Jewish state of the Palestinian womb, Arafat’s ‘biological weapon.’
Evidence of the intent to target women and children can be seen in statements by Israeli public figures, collated in South Africa’s petition to the ICJ and freely available elsewhere. These senior figures include not just the usual suspects like Ben Gvir and Smotrich but also the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog who responded to Oct 7 with the declaration that there are no uninvolved civilians in Gaza, ‘an entire nation’ is responsible.’ This normalization of genocidal discourse, particularly in relation to women and children, is enabled by a national political consensus and an indifferent Israeli public. It seems that there is not one righteous man in Gaza, or indeed, woman or child. ‘The children… have brought this upon themselves’, as one opposition member of the Knesset put it.
Barring international intervention, it seems certain that at the end of this latest phase in Gaza there will be fewer Palestinians. The demographic facts will have changed; they have already changed. The numbers are appalling enough, with 57,000 fatalities likely being an underestimate. But there are also names. For those who care to seek them out.
Indiscriminate blanket bombing has killed thousands of civilians and rendered Gaza unlivable. This is a war of homicidal excess, not one that is being waged to recover hostages and eliminate a terrorist organization. It is difficult not to conclude that it is part of a longer-term project to change the ethnic balance between the river and the sea.
Such are the ongoing demands of Zionism and its insatiable hunger for land, that it is not enough to erase the Palestinian past and present. Ethnic cleansing can only be part of a wider strategy. The demographic threat of tomorrow must also be addressed.
The facts are available, as is the evidence of intention. If the hostage situation is resolved, if Hamas is somehow ‘defeated’, who seriously believes that the expansionist, frontier state of Israel will leave Gaza alone? Or the West Bank? If Zionism is to avoid a death spiral, the demographic timebomb must be defused. The project demands land, and it demands a Jewish majority on that land.