Gaza, Palestine – Last month, Sufian Abu Ghassan joined hundreds of thousands of Palestinians defiantly trekking back to their battered neighborhoods after a ceasefire paused Israel’s 15-month war on Gaza.
The 70-year-old was relieved that Israel’s mass killing of Palestinians had stopped, for now.
However, he knew the mass destruction brought on by Israel’s war would make life difficult. His taxi business was destroyed, his home damaged, and there are hardly any provisions in Gaza, even drinking water.
At least he and his family had survived Israel’s carpet bombing and siege and starvation tactics and had returned to northern Gaza, the only home they ever knew.
On the night of February 17, Abu Ghassan heard a broadcast from Israeli drones, threats designed to trigger the greatest generational trauma in Palestinian history.
Israel was threatening battered, exhausted Palestinians with a “second and third Nakba”.
The Nakba is the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages by Zionist militias to make way for the creation of Israel in 1948.
Finishing off the Nabka?
Seventy-seven years after the Nakba, which Israel has never recognised, the country is again threatening to expel millions of Palestinians from what’s left of their homeland.
Most of the people in Gaza – 70 percent of about 2.3 million – are descendants of those forced to flee militia violence during the first Nakba, their villages and towns subsumed by Israel today.
The vast majority yearn to return to their homelands – just like Palestinians similarly rendered refugees but having fled to the occupied West Bank or neighbouring countries due to the Nakba.
Many, like Abu Ghassan, are determined never to be uprooted from what’s left of Palestine.
“Israel wants to expel all of us … but that’s impossible. None of us will leave … dying here would be better,” he told Al Jazeera.
Abu Ghassan has already been uprooted five times since Israel’s war on Gaza began, following a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
The attack saw Palestinian fighters break out of the enclave, long described as an “open-air prison” due to Israel’s suffocating land, air and sea blockade that caused a protracted humanitarian crisis since 2007.
About 1,139 people died and 250 taken captive in the Hamas-led attack.
Israel quickly launched what United Nations experts and rights groups describe as a potential genocide against Palestinians, uprooting nearly the entire population, deliberately starving people and reducing most of the enclave to rubble.
Israel’s war on Gaza killed at least 62,614 Palestinians, mostly women and children.
Now, many Israeli politicians – and people – are rallying behind a “plan” suggested by United States President Donald Trump to forcefully relocate Palestinians in Gaza to Egypt and Jordan in order to “clear” it for developers.
Nakba apologism and denial
Israelis often deny the Nakba and claim Palestinians were “accidentally” or “inadvertently” uprooted as part of a war for Israel’s independence, according to Ori Goldberg, an Israeli commentator on political affairs.
“There is no recognition of the Nakba whatsoever in regards to preserving Palestinian memory or history. At best, people will say this was a war … that we won and you lost, so suck it up,” Goldberg told Al Jazeera.
However, most credible historical accounts of the Nakba indicate a deliberate policy to drive Palestinians off their land.
Renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappe wrote in his book, the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, that Zionist militias deliberately besieged cities and villages, blew up homes and looted belongings before exiling Palestinians in 1948.
In some regions, Pappe noted, Israelis even planted thousands of trees to cover up evidence of the mass destruction that accompanied the ethnic cleansing campaign.
Diana Buttu, a Palestinian analyst and former adviser to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), stressed that many Israelis have never been forced to confront their past due to the state’s effort to conceal evidence and the memory of the Nakba.
“Many Israelis don’t even know that many of the homes they live in used to belong to Palestinians,” she told Al Jazeera.
“In Israel, there’s a whole thing of how do I pretend that 1948 [Nakba] didn’t happen,” Buttu said.
A second Nakba?
Despite not publicly recognising the Nakba, many Israelis are now calling for a “second one” by supporting Trump’s Gaza plan.
A February poll by the Jewish People Policy Institute, an Israeli think tank, found that about 80 percent of Jewish Israelis support Trump’s “plan” and that 52 percent believe it is “practical”.
“This has always been a part of the Israeli fantasy,” said Goldberg.
“As a teenager, in political discussions … a question was often asked along the lines of: ‘Would you press a red button if it could make all Palestinians go away?’” he told Al Jazeera. “The answer [among most] was always: ‘Yes.’”
Trump’s “plan” would amount to ethnic cleansing and likely force Israel to commit many crimes under international law, legal experts previously told Al Jazeera.
Israeli officials were already thinking along the same lines soon after October 7 anyway.
Less than a week later, on October 13, 2023, a leaked memo from Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence suggested Israel try to uproot Gaza’s Palestinians and resettle them in Sinai, Egypt.
It added that Israel should seek the global community’s help to achieve this mission.
Throughout Israel’s war on Gaza, Israeli officials have referred to the Nakba to taunt Palestinians.
“We’re now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” Israeli Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter said in November 2023, defending the uprooting of more than 1.5 million people from northern Gaza.
In May 2024, Mondoweiss, an independent media outlet that advocates for Palestinian rights, shared a photo from Gaza of Israeli soldiers grinning and posing after spray-painting “Nakba 2023” on a building.
Israel now appears to be taking advantage of Trump’s comments, dropping leaflets over Gaza claiming Trump’s “plan” is compulsory and Palestinians should seek assistance to leave.
“Neither America nor Europe care about Gaza at all. Arab countries don’t even care. They’re now our allies and provide us with weapons, oil and money and send you shrouds,” the leaflets read.
No fear
Palestinians in Gaza told Al Jazeera they are neither frightened nor intimidated by Israel’s threats. Many believe they’ve already survived the worst of Israel’s violence.
Mohamed Abu Ibrahim, 55, said Israel’s threats of “another Nakba” are psychological warfare.
“Honestly, I wasn’t shocked or surprised [by these threats],” he said. “There’s nothing Israel can do that will surprise us anymore.”
Buttu added that Israel’s attempt to push ahead with Trump’s “plan” indicates that it has failed to achieve its war aims since October 7.
She said that, despite Israel’s genocide and devastating damage inflicted on Gaza, it has failed to destroy Hamas and maintain troops on the ground across the enclave.
Israel’s failure to achieve its war aims, argues Buttu, is why it is increasingly calling for the expulsion of Palestinians.
“Just this idea that ethnic cleansing is cool, it’s OK … It really shows you where we are at in this global system,” Buttu said, referring to what she perceives as global apathy to Israel and Trump’s plan.
“It’s all quite terrifying.”
