Earlier this week, a plane carrying 153 Palestinians from Gaza landed in South Africa without documents. The passengers were stranded on the plane for 12 hours, and South African authorities allowed them to disembark on humanitarian grounds, claiming they had not been informed of the expulsion flight by the Israelis.
The Palestinians on board had paid a company called Al Majid Europe between $1,500 and $5,000 to leave Gaza. The operation is run by a small number of Palestinians on the ground in cooperation with the Israeli occupation authorities. There have been at least two other similar flights since June this year.
This is the latest plan being rolled out by Israel to reduce the Gaza Strip’s population, a long-standing goal of the apartheid regime dating back to the early 20th century.
Since the beginning of the Zionist movement, Palestinians have been perceived as a demographic obstacle to the establishment of a Jewish state. In the late 19th century, Theodor Herzl, one of the founders of Zionism, wrote that the forced removal of Arabs from Palestine must be part of the Zionist plan, suggesting that in a quiet and deliberate way poor people could be moved across borders and deprived of employment opportunities.
In 1938, David Ben-Gurion, a major Zionist leader and later Israel’s first prime minister, supported forced “relocation” and made it clear that there was nothing “immoral” about it. Part of this vision was carried out ten years later in the 1948 Nakba. At the time, more than 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes in what Israeli historian Benny Morris called “necessary” ethnic cleansing.
After 1948, Israel continued its efforts to evict Palestinians. In the 1950s, tens of thousands of Palestinians and Palestinian Bedouins were forcibly deported from the Naqab (Negev) Desert to the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza, then under Egyptian rule.
After the June 1967 war, Israel occupied Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, adopting a strategy called “voluntary migration.” The idea was to pressure residents to leave by creating harsh living conditions, such as demolishing homes and reducing employment opportunities.
In parallel, “migration offices” were established in refugee camps in Gaza, encouraging those who had lost hope of returning home to leave the country in exchange for money and travel arrangements. Israel also encouraged Palestinians to work abroad, especially in the Gulf. The price the Palestinians had to pay for leaving was that they were never allowed to return.
After October 7, 2023, Israel found a new opportunity to carry out its ethnic cleansing program in the Gaza Strip, this time through genocide and forced expulsion. Israel believed it had the necessary international sympathy and diplomatic capital to carry out such atrocities, as indicated by statements from various Israeli officials, including Ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. They even devised the so-called “General Plan” to completely reduce the population of northern Gaza.
The new plan to force Palestinians out of Gaza fits well into this historical pattern. However, what is unique about this case is that Palestinians are being made to pay for their own forced displacement, and their desperation is being exploited by Palestinian collaborators seeking easy profits. Of course, this is aimed at furthering the financial depletion of the Palestinian people and creating further internal rifts and tensions.
This plan, like its predecessors, has the central feature of denying the return of Palestinians. None of the passengers on the plane had Israeli exit stamps in their passports, which is why South African authorities had difficulty processing the entry. The lack of legal records of their departure from the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip means that these people are automatically classified as illegal immigrants and have no possibility of returning.
What is important here is to clarify why Israel is allowing these flights to take place while preventing the evacuation of sick and injured Palestinians and students admitted to foreign universities. These exits of patients and students are legal and represent a right of return, which Israel does not want to recognize.
It is no surprise that some Palestinians are willing to be fooled by this flight plan. Two years of genocide have pushed the people of Gaza into unimaginable despair. That’s how many Gazans are willing to board a plane. Still, Israel cannot fly us all to South Africa.
Palestinians have endured decades of Zionist occupation. The tenacity of the Palestinian people in the face of war, siege, raids, destruction, land theft and economic subjugation confirms that Palestinian land is not just a place to live, but a symbol of identity and history that people do not want to give up.
In the past two years, Israel has destroyed the lives and homes of 2 million Palestinians. And even that did not kill the Palestinian spirit and the urge to hold onto Palestinian land. Palestinians are not jumping out. we will stay here.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
