From the moment the so-called State of Israel was declared in 1948, Zionist strategists have known that the dream of a secure Jewish homeland could never survive if the land remained full of its original people. For more than seventy years, the world has watched wave after wave of expulsions, demolitions, massacres, and settlements — each one justified as “self-defence,” each one slowly carving away the map of historic Palestine.
Yet Gaza has always been the anomaly. Trapped behind its barbed wire and watchtowers, this tiny coastal strip holds two million Palestinians in what is widely described — even by Western human rights organisations — as the world’s largest open-air prison. Why not just leave Gaza alone? The answer, for any honest historian, is devastatingly simple: they cannot build the next Jerusalem without emptying Gaza first.
The religious justification is as old as Zionism itself. In Genesis 15:18, the Torah declares, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates.” This so-called “Promised Land” stretches from the Nile to the Euphrates, placing Gaza well within its imagined borders. Far-right religious Zionists — including influential rabbis and settler leaders — openly cite this verse to frame the complete de-Palestinianisation of Gaza as a sacred duty. In the Zohar, the Arabs are described as mere “donkeys of the Messiah,” destined to serve the chosen nation — or to vanish before it.
The political blueprint has been no less explicit. In the 1980s, the Israeli strategist Oded Yinon published what became known as the Yinon Plan, a chilling document that proposed permanently fragmenting the Arab world into powerless sectarian enclaves. One of its key recommendations was to neutralise Palestinian resistance by either forcing Palestinians to flee or locking them into unliveable enclaves. Gaza, with its dense population, resilient spirit, and stubborn memory of return, has always been a problem for such planners. As one former Israeli defence official put it in a leaked conversation, “We can bomb Gaza to the Stone Age, but we can’t make it disappear — yet.”
But the dream remains. In recent years, that vision has become more brazen. Far-right ministers like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have repeatedly spoken of “voluntary migration” — code for ethnic cleansing. In the early days of the 2023–2024 siege, leaked cables revealed discussions inside the Israeli security cabinet about forcibly pushing Gaza’s population into Egypt’s Sinai desert. The idea was simple: turn Gaza into scorched earth, then rebrand it as a security buffer zone to “protect” the new Jerusalem.
None of this is whispered in hidden basements. It is written into policy papers, broadcast on settler social media accounts, and repeated in Knesset debates. Even Israeli mainstream outlets have published opinion pieces openly arguing that Gaza’s “human problem” should be solved by permanent deportation — or by making life so unbearable that Palestinians leave by any means possible. One senior Israeli figure, Avi Dichter, infamously declared, “Gaza must be shrunk. The land must remain; the people must go.”
But why Gaza? Why now?
Because Gaza is not just a slum. It is a living symbol that stands between Zionist settlers and the dream of a unified Jewish Jerusalem. For decades, Israeli expansionists have claimed that a “Greater Jerusalem” must extend deep into the West Bank — swallowing Bethlehem, surrounding Al-Aqsa, and linking settlements into an unbroken belt of Jewish sovereignty. Gaza, sitting stubbornly on the map, refuses to be assimilated into this fantasy.
The link is more than geographic. It is spiritual. In the religious Zionist worldview, the complete redemption of the land requires the final removal of its indigenous people. The same ideological current that fuels settler violence in the hills of Hebron drives the flattening of neighbourhoods in Rafah. It is the same bulldozer, the same biblical commandment, the same indifference to the world’s outrage.
Of course, the language used in Western capitals is softer. “Security,” they say. “Counter-terrorism.” But behind the press releases and diplomatic doublespeak, the fact remains: every bomb dropped on Gaza is a step towards creating a new Jerusalem unburdened by its rightful inhabitants. Every border fence tightened, every hospital starved of fuel, every family forced to flee Rafah or Khan Yunis or Jabaliya pushes the map closer to the fantasy drawn in old Torah scrolls and updated in think tank boardrooms.
And the West? The same Western leaders who claim to defend “human rights” and “international law” line up to sign billion-dollar arms deals, to veto ceasefire resolutions, to protect the occupation from any real consequences. They will light up their parliaments in the colours of Ukraine or Pride, but the black-and-white keffiyeh remains suspect, even criminalised.
In the end, the plan is neither secret nor new. It is the same script: divide, destroy, dehumanise, and displace — until the map fits the myth.
But Gaza’s people have a different page in their book. Their resistance — under the rubble, in the tunnels, with the keys to homes their grandparents once locked behind them — is not just stubbornness. It is a message: the land may be scorched, but its people will not vanish.
In a world obsessed with erasing Palestine from its charts and its conscience, Gaza remains the reminder: Jerusalem will never be complete until justice is.
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