By Hani Al Masri

The shock of the Israelis caused by the “Al-Aqsa Flood” military operation on October 7, 2023, at the hands of the Palestinian resistance movements, is still reverberating in the diplomacy of the Israeli government.

This appeared in an attempt to impose a scenario of displacement and wage a demographic war by the occupying entity on the Palestinians, specifically in Gaza and the West Bank.

On October 8, the occupation army spokesman, Colonel Richard Hecht, called for the opening of safe corridors for civilians in Gaza towards the Egyptian Sinai.

But the most blatant call came on October 13 when the Israeli occupation army issued a statement asking all residents of Gaza to evacuate their homes and head south (towards the Egyptian border).

The Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded by completely rejecting the displacement of the people of Gaza, as a consistent position of Cairo, which considered the conquest of Sinai tantamount to the liquidation of the Palestinian cause.

The question that arises is why Israel wants to displace the people of Gaza to Sinai? As well as the displacement of the people of the West Bank to Jordan, as reported by Hebrew media.

Are the displacement plans a product of the moment after the Al-Aqsa flood operation? Or has it been present for a long time?

“The devil of demography”

Plans to displace Palestinians, specifically in Gaza, the West Bank, and even the Old City of Jerusalem, have been in place for a long time, and are repeated by Israeli politicians and media figures on more than one occasion.

Even on May 7, 1971, the Jordanian newspaper Al-Dustour published a headline, “The Gaza Strip has begun to be emptied of its population,” and talked about an Israeli plan to transfer 300,000 residents of the Strip to Sinai.

Especially since the Gaza Strip represents a Palestinian population bomb in the face of the occupying state, and over time it has become a security and political concern for Israel.

In a famous quote, former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (1992-1995) said: “I hope to wake up one day and find that the sea has swallowed Gaza.”

Palestinian Statistics stated that today Palestinians are estimated at about 14 million and 300 thousand, including about 6 million and 400 thousand refugees.

Regarding the locations of the Palestinians, the agency reported that about half of them (7 million and 100 thousand people) are in historical Palestine, including about 1 million and 700 thousand in the territories of 1948.

What is dangerous about these data is that the Palestinian people now constitute 50.1 percent of the population residing in historic Palestine, while the Jews constitute 49.9 percent of the Jews.

The loss of Israel

These data prompted the Hebrew Reichman University in Herzliya to describe this demographic change as a “Coup”

She indicated in a research paper that the Palestinians will achieve an overwhelming majority in the future, due to their high birth rates (27.7) per thousand people compared to (19.3) in Israel, according to the United Nations.

In addition to the high death rate among Israelis, 5.3 per thousand, compared to 3.4 per thousand among Palestinians, due to the large average age of the population in Israel.

It went further when it stated that “this equation indicates that the State of Israel is heading towards a reality that may undermine its project and the entire Zionist project.”

It described the current situation as a sweeping disregard for Palestinian demographic superiority, especially with other factors such as the migration of secular Israeli citizens out of the country.

It pointed out that if the matter continues at this pace, it will cause the loss of the Galilee (north), Jerusalem (center), and the Negev (south), and the result could be the complete loss of Israel. It ended up being that Muslim Arabs became the majority over time.

And stated, “With time, the Arabs will become the majority across the entire spectrum that follows the occupation, if we surrender and there are no developments that accelerate that process, which is what Israel has been well prepared for decades.”

It explained: “The current plan is to empty Gaza and the West Bank of Palestinians, part towards Jordan and part in Sinai. As for the Jerusalemites, they will be expelled from the Old City outside the walls, and they will dissolve with the rest of the other minorities, and sovereignty will remain for the Jewish majority.”

The researcher in Hebrew affairs states that the occupation laws allow the Israelis to demand the return of property in East Jerusalem that they claim was theirs before 1948.

The rise of demography

One of the main reasons for the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was the overwhelming “demographic” superiority of the Palestinians there.

On December 27, 2021, Israeli political analyst Yoni Ben Menachem said, “The decision of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to withdraw from the Gaza Strip was correct.”

He added to the Turkish Anatolia Agency: “There are now two million Palestinians, and after years the number could rise to 3 or 4 million. As for the situation in the West Bank, it is different. In the view of the right, it is the Land of Israel and cannot be dispensed with.”

He pointed out that the Israeli left and center consider that demographic concerns impose an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders so that Israel remains a purely Jewish state with other minorities.

Source: Aqlam Hora