REALLY? TRYING TO SHIP FOLKS OFF TO AFRICA AGAIN?

Edward Stanford Ltd. (1910) The Nile Valley: including Egypt, Nubia, Uganda, Abyssinia, British East Africa, and Somali Land. [London: E. Stanford] [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2009580104/.

I got no takers on this commentary, but I believe it to be important in helping to understand what is going on in Gaza today.

In 1902, the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain met with Theodor Herzl, a prominent Jewish leader, when Herzl was invited to speak to the British Royal Commission on Alien Immigration. As a result of this meeting, Chamberlain proposed the “Uganda Scheme,” designed to create a Jewish refuge in British Colonial East Africa and save Jews from the pogroms and anti-Semitic violence in Europe. Although Herzl preferred other locations for a Jewish refuge, he ultimately presented Britain’s proposal to the Sixth Zionist Congress that convened in Basel, Switzerland in 1903.

One hundred and twenty years later, senior government officials in Israel are pushing for a scheme to ship Palestinians from Gaza to Africa.

According to a news story published on January 3, by The Times of Israel newspaper, its Hebrew sister site Zman Israel reported that “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition is conducting secret contacts for accepting thousands of immigrants from Gaza with Congo, in addition to other nations.” And that “The ‘voluntary’ resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza is slowly becoming a key official policy of the government, with a senior official saying that Israel has held talks with several countries for their potential absorption.”

On that same day, The Daily Beast online newspaper reported, “Last Monday, Netanyahu told a Likud faction meeting that he is working to facilitate the voluntary migration of Gazans to other countries… ‘Our problem is [finding] countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it,’ he said.”

Despite Netanyahu’s assertion to the contrary, the scheme has progressed to a point where an Israeli government source stated that “Congo will be willing to take in migrants, and we’re in talks with others.”

It is unclear whether these references to “Congo” are to the Democratic Republic of Congo or the Republic of Congo, but a link in The Times of Israel’s online article takes the reader to the World Food Programme’s website which states that in the Republic of Congo, “52.5 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.”

The international community has been quick to denounce the scheme as a human rights violation and contrary to international law, but Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit two far-right parties in Israel have openly backed the scheme.

On Tuesday, January 2, 2024, the US State Department criticized Israel’s Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, who head the Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit parties respectively, for supporting the scheme. But this criticism has been very low-key. And unsurprisingly Israel dismissed the criticism from the U.S. out of hand.

Netanyahu’s office has issued public assurances that Smotrich and Ben Gvir do not represent government policy on the matter of removing Palestinians from Gaza, but his remarks at a recent meeting of a faction of the Likud party, which he leads, speak to his true sentiments on the matter. This scheme also finds support among ministers and lawmakers from the Likud party. Israel’s Intelligence Minister, Gila Gamliel speaking to the Israeli Knesset on January 2nd said, “The Gaza problem is not just our problem,” Gamliel said. “The world should support humanitarian emigration, because that’s the only solution I know.”

The Israeli call for the depopulation of Palestinians from Gaza did not just surface this week. In November, Danny Danon and Ram Ben Barak co-wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal that set out a plan for Palestinian “migration.” This plan called for “countries around the world to accept limited numbers of Gazan families who have expressed a desire to relocate.” Danny Danon is a Likud Party member who sits in the Knesset and was appointed by Netanyahu to serve as Israel’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in 2015. Ram Ben Barak is a former deputy director of Mossad, (which is equivalent to the United States CIA) and sits in the Knesset as a member of the centrist, liberal Yesh Atid political party. Ben Barak later claimed that his position as stated in the opinion piece had been misunderstood after he received resounding praise from right and far-right Israeli party members and criticism from his centrist, liberal party.

Danon, on the other hand, presented a five-step plan at a January 2nd Knesset conference on issues dealing with Gaza. The fourth step in this plan proposed enabling those Gazans who want to leave their homes and find refuge in other countries.

When his plan was widely criticized around the world, Danon claimed that his plan did not force any Gazans to leave, but merely made it “possible” for them to leave and work in other countries. He also pushed back with the argument that this plan would allow Gazans to go abroad, find jobs and send money back home to help Gaza’s economy. He did not mention that with the prospect of Gazans relocating to the Democratic Republic of Congo, they would be going to a country where 52.5% of the population lives below the poverty line.

One of the other five steps calls for creating a 3-kilometer-wide buffer zone inside Gaza along its border with Israel, further reducing the size of land available for use by Gazans. This would make the most densely populated region in the world even more densely populated, and further erode living conditions.

Another of the five steps is that the financial rehabilitation of Gaza should be contingent upon efforts to distance the population from terror and incitement. This rehabilitation would be dependent upon an international framework of unidentified financiers and there is no plan for who would take control of Gaza or how.

The two remaining steps are that there would be a full demilitarization of the Gaza Strip and the border crossings into Gaza would be upgraded but administered by an international force with Israeli representatives present.

These five steps would make Gazans’ intolerable situation even worse and would in effect force them to leave their homeland to try to survive.

Article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide states that deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part is a form of genocide.

The creation of intolerable living conditions in Gaza is de facto displacement and Customary International Humanitarian Law Rule 129 (A) states that Parties to an international armed conflict may not deport or forcibly transfer the civilian population of an occupied territory, in whole or in part, unless the security of the civilians involved or imperative military reasons so demand.

Forced migration resulting from armed conflict is also governed by international humanitarian law. Deliberate displacement of civilians as a tactic of war, particularly if it leads to the violation of their fundamental rights, is considered illegal under these circumstances.

The current government of Israel is intent on displacing Gazans by making their lives in their homeland so miserable that they must leave to survive.

This is a scheme that will serve neither Palestinians nor any African nations. The global community should not and must not sit idly by and allow this to happen. How the nations of the world respond to this impending crisis will be a measure of our humanity.