Front Burner - Is Israel committing ethnic cleansing in Gaza?

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

The charge of ethnic cleansing is not, on its own, considered a crime under international law. Experts consider it to be part of the overall charge of genocide. In this episode we take listeners to northern Gaza and examine the words and actions of politicians, academics and settlements organizations in order to better understand whether Israel is perpetrating a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Our guest is Meron Rapoport, a 30-year veteran of the Israeli news industry who formerly worked as the head of news at Israel's Ha’aretz newspaper. Today he’s an editor at the Israeli publication Local Call. He joins the show to discuss whether Israel is guilty of committing a program of ethnic cleansing, and the prospect of a ‘Second Nakba’ in Gaza. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Happy Holidays! I'm Frank Cappadocia, Dean of Continuous Professional Learning at Humber Polytechnic, and I'd like you to set a goal for 2025 to sharpen your skills and get promoted. Register for a professional designation, micro-credential, or certificate with Humber's Continuous Professional Learning and ignite your career journey this new year. Our experts deliver accelerated learning from resilience-based leadership to electric vehicle fundamentals in learning options that work with your ambitious lifestyle. Adapt, evolve, and excel. Go to humber.ca slash cpl to get started. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. A month ago, we received a collection of on-camera interviews done with

people from northern Gaza, all of whom were forced from their homes by the Israeli siege. We worked with Hani Mahmoud to get this tape. Hani is a reporter for Al Jazeera who's appeared on our show before. In addition to his own reporting on the ground, he asked some freelance reporters in the north to gather interviews for us with people making the dangerous journey south. Kamal is a young boy on his own. He looks about 9, 10 years old.

There's a thin layer of dust on his eyelashes, his cheeks and hoodie. The lone items in his possession are the clothes on his back and the school bag strapped across his shoulders. An empty water bottle sticks out of his side pocket. Kamal says that Israeli tanks descended on his neighborhood. Soldiers entered then emptied his home, arresting the adult members of his family. Since leaving, he says he's been walking past tanks, kicking up dust onto him, and the bodies of the injured and dead, which line the roads.

He's looking for his sister. his sister. An older woman in a long black abaya is walking with a garbage bag resting on her head, full of her belongings, whatever she managed to take with her. She speaks to the camera in full stride, walking purposefully, just in front of an older man with a cane and a little girl. She says the man behind her is her husband, who is blind. She says that they were sheltering in a school when they were forced out by the bombing overhead. In another video, the freelance reporter gathering for us approaches a horse-drawn cart carrying at least 10 people, most of whom are children. He places a mic on Isra, a young woman nursing an injured hand

slung under her long, red kamar. She immediately begins recounting her story. Isra says that one evening her home was shelled and that she still has fragments of shrapnel in her hand. On her way to the hospital, she says that she and her children were stopped by soldiers who took her 15-year-old son. The people on this cart, she says, are good Samaritans

who picked her up following the death of another son who was killed 10 days prior. She says they've been unable to collect his remains, that his body continued to lie under the watchful eye of drones. Istra was still on her way to get her hand looked at at the time of the interview. These are three stories in a much larger mass of people that have been driven south, away from northern Gaza. In additional video, you see huddled masses of people, which stretches about as far as the eye can see. Smoke billows from buildings in the distance. Debris is everywhere. Lone children, men and women, families on horseback, all on the run.

It's a mass exodus out of an area that experts say has become uninhabitable. This is a population of people that a number of prominent human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Israeli news organizations like Haaretz, have said is suffering a campaign of ethnic cleansing. The question that we are going to parse today. Now, ethnic cleansing is a difficult and unwieldy legal concept. It's not on its own codified into law as illegal, but many of the acts which constitute ethnic cleansing are prosecutable under the categories of genocide, ethnic cleansing are prosecutable under the categories of genocide, crimes against humanity,

and war crimes. And we know as much from places like the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Darfur, and more recently in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region. Today I'm speaking with Mehran Rapoport. He's a 30-year veteran of the Israeli news industry and was formerly the head of news at Israel's Haaretz newspaper. Today, he works as an editor at Local Call, a Hebrew-language news organization operating in Israel. Mehran, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. So we started this episode with tape of Palestinians in Gaza currently on the Long March South. What can you tell me about them? We're talking about two stages here. We're talking about the first stage of the war. And the first, I would say, two months of the war, maybe even less,

when there were orders by the army to the people of Gaza City and its surrounding, it's a city of over a million people, to go south, south of what is called the Netsarim Corridor. It's just south of Gaza City itself, It goes south. And then there were these huge marches that we have seen. And then it went on as the military repression continued. People were pushed all over, practically, of the Gaza Strip. That's one stage of the war. That's one stage of the war. The second stage that we are seeing, we are witnessing now, since the beginning of October, is a push to drive away the people that live in the northern part of Gaza City. There's a huge refugee camp, used to be a huge refugee camp, north of Gaza City called Jebalia.

And Israel started an operation, the Israeli army started an operation in the beginning of October with a declared aim to push the population south of Netsarim corridor, south of Gaza City. What happened is that the people were, most of them, indeed left because there were bombings, heavy bombings because, and above all, because the food and medicine was completely cut. People were not shot or not in the mass scale in the marches themselves, but the push, the pushing them into going away was accompanied by bombing on civilian houses, dozens of bombing on civilian houses in which hundreds and even more of civilians were killed. In the days after October 7th, there were concerns around the kind of response that might be marshaled by the Israeli military, of course, that Palestinian civilians would likely become collateral damage. But

it also became clear early on that in Gaza, the question of the land itself could become an issue, right? And how soon was it for you that you felt as though the nation's military response could become a referendum on Gaza as a piece of land. From the very beginning, the military always claimed that was prepared in what is called the Intelligence Ministry, that prepared a plan to push all the population of Gaza, or at least a large part of it, the whole Gaza Strip, more than 2.2 million people into Egypt. We know that in the first weeks it was reported that Secretary of State Blinken even went

to Arab capitals in order to support this effort, asking the Egyptian and maybe even the Jordanian or Saudis to accept these people from Gaza. This was flatly rejected by Egypt and all Arab states. But I think for me, at least, from the moment I saw that the army ordered the people of Gaza City to leave their places, I felt that this is part of hesitant, even very right-wing settlers. There are many representatives of the settler movement in the government. The minister of finance is a settler, the minister of home security, Itamar Bengguer lives in Tevron in a settlement.

But I think at the beginning they were hesitant to say out loud that the aim of the war is also to rebuild the settlements that were dismantled in 2005 with a disengagement plan. There were about 14 settlements in Gaza, something like 7,000 Israelis lived there. At the beginning, they were hesitant. I think, first, because there was a lot of anger against the government in the beginning,

as it was held responsible for the failure of October 7. And secondly, they knew that this is extremely unpopular in the Israeli public, they asked to resettle Gaza. But as time went on, and as the government felt more at ease, and as they felt also began open planning to resettle Gaza. Most of it was unofficial. Daniela Weiss, she's a settler, a very known settler from the beginning of the settler movement in the 70s. So she has an organization called Nachala, and they started really drawing plans. I don't want to interrupt you. I want to get back to those plans by the settler organizations. But when we're talking

about the rhetoric, maybe I could go through a few specific examples with you, just also for people listening. When we talk about how members of the Israeli education, political and security establishment have openly discussed their plans for the Gaza Strip. Uzi Rabbi, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Tel Aviv University, said that the Israeli military should, quote,

remove the entire civilian population from the north and lawfully sentence whoever is left as a terrorist and subject them to a process of starvation and extermination. You mentioned Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, National Security Minister Edomar Ben-Gavir. They have said that northern Gaza should, quote, be thinned out or depopulated and reoccupied with settlers. And as you mentioned, the report from the Israeli

intelligence ministry, it outlined a plan to, quote, transfer, unquote, two million Gazans into the Sinai Peninsula. Others have argued, as I think you said, that they should be scattered throughout the Arab world. One retired major general in the Israeli military with close connections to the government, who we'll also talk about shortly, has said that the IDF should allow for the spread of disease and for Palestinians, quote, Northern Gaza will slowly turn into a distant dream, like they have forgotten Ashkelon. They will forget that area too, unquote. Look, history suggests that in the fog of war, men with power often say terrible things and advocate for all kinds of violence, which never actually materializes.

But how seriously should these words be taken? I think that as for depopulating Gaza, I think our transfer of Palestinians out of Gaza, I think the government and these ministers that you are quoting and some of the generals, I think they quite early in the war understood that a transfer of Palestinians from Gaza is impossible. I think from the beginning of the war, the Israeli army went to a very, very meticulous and premeditated operation of wiping out the urban area, especially of Gaza City and other parts of the Gaza Strip. What we've seen from the very beginning is a systematic destroying of residential buildings all over Gaza City after the fighting ended. Now, some of it may be as a result of some kind of revenge. Some of it was maybe for military purposes. But as we went on with the war, I think, and especially this is what we are seeing in the last two months since the start of this operation in northern Gaza, is really a premeditated,

systematic destroying of all the buildings, all the residential buildings in these northern parts of Gaza City. The whole area is completely destroyed. city, the whole area is completely destroyed. The people were driven away. Even if there's ceasefire tomorrow, they have no place to return to. Now, this is systematic. And this has to do with what is called the General's Plan. It's a plan that was first initiated by an ex-general named Giora Eilen, who said that the solution for northern Gaza is, of all the Gaza, the northern part of Gaza Strip, is to make a siege, put a siege on it and prevent food and water and medicine, make the population leave all of it, and then you will fight only the terrorists, so we call that

state. This was never officially adopted by the army, but in fact, this is what's going on now in Northern Gaza. I think, again, that for these politicians, they understand that they cannot drive away the Palestinians out of Gaza. But they can make their life impossible. their life impossible. They can make their life that they will die from hunger and disease and they will try to run away from Gaza

because there's no life there. I think this is the plan. Happy holidays. I'm Frank Cappadocia, Dean of Continuous Professional Learning at Humber Polytechnic. I'd like you to set a goal to drive key learning for your people in 2025. I want you to connect with Humber CPL to design a custom training solution that accelerates your team's performance and engagement.

Humber works with you to hone industry-specific upskilling, enhance your leadership, and drive results. Flexible learning delivery formats are tailored to your unique needs. Adapt, evolve, and excel. To learn more, go to humber.ca slash cpl. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples,

I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Last week, Moshe Ya'alon, former chief of staff of the Israeli army, who later served as defense minister, defined Israel's actions in Gaza's ethnic cleansing. He argued that if he were in power, he'd have produced arrest warrants against a handful of Israeli politicians, quote, long ago. This is someone that served in one of the most right-wing governments in Israel. Were you surprised to hear that? Yes, I was surprised, although we have to say that Yaron is one of, he's a right-wing, he continues to be a right-wing, he's against, for example, the two-state solution,

he's not for a Palestinian state, but he's an honest man, he speaks what he thinks, he did not retract what he said, despite huge pressure by the Israeli press that told him, but how can you defame the Israeli army so much? And so forth. He did not retract the word, but he did say that he came out because generals or commanders that serve in Gaza called him and asked him to speak out. I think it may be that some of the commanders in the field, not all of them, but some of them may feel unease about what they're doing. Again, the army is all the time saying, we are not doing ethnic cleansing, we are just asking the population for its own sake to leave. But the fact that they are destroying,

to leave. But the fact that they are systematically destroying whole cities, I think, makes it a little bit not credible. So Yarlon maybe spoke to some of the commanders who understood that the politicians are basically putting them in a situation in which they commit war crimes. Then I think they understand that this is ethnic cleansing and that they could be held responsible. A number of Israeli politicians, including a member of the Knesset, Ariel Kolnar, current agriculture minister Avi Dichter, have referred to their current campaign in the occupied Palestinian territories as a second Nakba, or Gaza Nakba. Now, Nakba translates into catastrophe in Arabic. It's how Palestinians and much of the Arab world refers to the forcible expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. What do you think these

people mean when they call for a second Nakba? I think part of it, and I wrote a piece with a colleague named Amir Fakhouri, when the government was formed in the late 2022, that this government could be the government of a new Nakba. Because a very senior member in the government, like we mentioned, Sotrich, the finance minister, head of the Jewish Zionist Party, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, head of Utsma Yehudit, Jewish Power, were talking about expulsion of the Palestinians from Judea, Samaria, and Gaza openly.

They wrote pieces, they published plans. It was very, it's part of the ideology. And what happened, I think, is October 7, the murderous criminal attack by Hamas on October 7, gave them the perfect excuse to execute the plans that they dreamed about and believed in beforehand. So I think there is here a combination of ideology and using a chance and what they called an historic chance. a chance, what they called an historic chance. The Nakba is referred to in Israel as the war of independence. This is almost like the opposite framing to what you just described. And can you walk me through that framing and just put it into the context of this conversation that we're having? At the beginning, I think there was a complete denial by Israel that such a thing happened or that Israel really expelled Palestinians in 1948.

The official story was that there was a war and the Palestinians fled because they were promised that if they flee, the Arab armies will conquer Tel Aviv or Haifa or whatever, and they will be given the homes of the Jews. This was a story, I think, for 30 years. It was completely denied that there was any forceful expulsion in 1948. In more or less, I would say, in the beginning of the 80s, and especially during the 90s, historians wrote about it, went into archives. They confirmed that this was not a voluntary thing,

that people were expelled. But still, I would say that the official story was, yes, there was an akba. Yes, people were expelled. But we Jews had no other choice. It was a war. And if we wanted to create a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, there was no other choice.

After 2000, after the beginning of the second Intifada, there was, from the right wing, especially, came a third story saying, yes, there was an Akbar, and yes, we want to do it again. This is the solution for the Palestinian issue. As long as there are Palestinians between the river and the sea, in the West Bank or in Gaza, we will always have problems. The only solution is that this will be a land only for the Jews.

The Palestinians, if they wish, will be second-class citizens without political rights. That is the plan written by Smotrich in 2016, that they will not have political rights if they want to stay. And if they don't accept to be second-class citizens, then they have to leave. So if in the beginning the Nakba was denied and later on the Nakba was confirmed, but was said that there was no choice but doing it. From 2000 onwards, there's a trend saying this is the way Israelis should act. This should be the official policy of Israel. Can we come back to the role of settlements now? And could you just tell me more about how settlement organizations have been mobilizing plans for Gaza? As the war began, there were calls from ex-settlers and other right-wing organizations to rebuild these settlements. There were videos by soldiers that were taken in Gaza saying on the walls,

it was written here, it will be built. The new Netsarim settlement will be built here, the new Nevet Kalim will be built, etc., etc. But I think as already in December, there was a conference in Jerusalem to organize for a practical, to do practical plans to resettle, to rebuild the settlements. And this is going on. It's gaining power. There is already a make-up provisional camp near the Gaza Strip, near the Gaza border, Gaza Strip, near the Gaza border, on the Israeli side of, they say, some thousands of people ready to settle once the permission will be given.

The permission was not given yet. I think Netanyahu is hesitant. He continues saying that he is not for rebuilding the settlements in Gaza. I think he knows, first of all, that this is not popular among the Israeli public. And second, maybe he's still afraid from the Americans. But the pressure is mounting. There is an initiative to abolish the disengagement law, the law according to which these settlements were dismantled. Listening to you today, it does seem very clear to me that you believe your country, Israel,

is currently carrying out a program of ethnic cleansing. Please do interject if you disagree with me. But recently, Amnesty International published a report which claimed Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza. The nearly 300-page report touches on much of the same criteria laid out by the ICJ and many others, the International Court of Justice. Ethnic cleansing is specifically named a number of times, and it is discussed more broadly as like a pathway to genocide.

Amnesty has made similar genocide determinations in places like Rwanda. But what do you make of the idea that your government is currently committing genocide in Gaza? I'm not a legal expert on international law, and I want to be very cautious here. expert on international law and I want to be very cautious here. I know that the Palestinians certainly are convinced, every Palestinian I'm talking to, whether he lives in Gaza or he used to live in Gaza or Palestinian elsewhere, are convinced that Israel is committing genocide. I will settle for what the ICJ itself said,

that it's plausible that Israel is committing genocide. But as time goes on, and as the ethnic cleansing is being implemented, I think we are closer and closer to real genocide, although maybe we are not there. But I know that ethnic cleansing is not defined as in the statue of Rome that was the basis of the ICC, of the International Criminal Court. But ethnic cleansing could be one of the features of genocide. This I can say with certainty. I think Israel is acting so that the Palestinian,

that Gaza will be uninhabitable, that the Palestinian national presence as a group, as a national group, as a collective group in Gaza will be impossible. Let me ask you this question directly. So the official position of both the Israeli political and military apparatus is that, yes, they have been carrying out a campaign of violence in Gaza, but one retaliatory in nature, and one that they say has distinguished

between civilians and combatants in a reasonable manner, and that all of this has been done in the service of the goal of liberating the hostages in the custody of Hamas, which Israel has always said embeds itself among civilians. So talking to you today, you obviously don't believe that this is true now. But did you ever believe that it was true over the course of this year? It was quite clear from the beginning that the amount of what is called collateral damage is huge. damage is huge. We published that the ratio for collateral damage was one Hamas militant Israel could kill 20 non-involved and if it's a high officer of Hamas it could be 100 and more. So this was quite clear from the beginning and it is quite clear from the beginning that the rage and willing and the wish

to revenge on the really atrocious attack by Hamas. And I thought this could be it, just an overreaction. But as time went by, I think that the goal has changed. The official goal was to release the hostages. The hostages are still there. Hundreds were released to a deal more than a year ago. After that, maybe six hostages or even less were released by military operation. Others were killed in military operation. And it's quite clear now that the military pressure does not bring back the hostilities.

So this aim has been put aside completely. The other aim, destroying Hamas, yes, Hamas is weakened, but it's still operating. As Israel is refusing to have any other government in Gaza, then it's practically strengthening, still keeping Hamas alive. So these two main goals are not achieved 14 months into the war. So I think, unfortunately, I have to understand from this that the goal has changed. Israel is not the only country home to a vocal minority that rallies around a national dream of restoring a country to its historical or ancient borders. Vladimir Putin has talked about reconstituting what he calls historical Russia.

In East Africa, there has long been discussion of a greater Ethiopia. There is also greater Persia or the idea of a unified greater India. The concept of a greater Israel is something that has been in the zeitgeist in some fashion since the formation of the country. And can you walk me through what it means exactly and how it relates to this question of ethnic cleansing that we're talking about today? Zionism was based on a return of the Jewish people to its homeland. And where exactly were the borders of the kingdoms of Judea and the kingdom of Samaria in the 6th and 7th and 8th century BC is not very clear. So the borders of this greater Israel are not very clear. There is this promise in the Bible

that is interpreted as greater Israel is from the Nile to the Euphrates, to Baghdad, from Cairo to Baghdad. It exists in some of the maps of the right wing. It exists in the maps of the British mandate, as you may know. The British mandate at the beginning in 1920 included also Jordan, both sides of the Jordan River. And still the Likud party, the party of Netanyahu, in its anthem is still talking about there are two shores to the Jordan River and both of them belong to us. This is very in the Israeli-Jewish mind, although for many years it was very marginal.

As the settlers became stronger, and as Netanyahu himself moved to the right, I think these ideas are really part of the policy. Now I think as again, October 7 for them, for these settlers who knew that the dream of greater Israel is still marginal in the Israeli society. I would say not more than 20% of Israelis really wish for this greater Israel. But as the events of October 7, as the attack of Hamas was for them as kind of a proof that only through achieving greater Israel, greater border, going to Lebanon, going now into Syria, going close to Gaza, strengthening our hand in the West Bank,

in Judea and Samaria. This is the only way to exist. And this, I think, because of October 7th, became more, less opposed, I would say, by the large majority of Israel. Still, resettling Gaza, according to all the polls, no more

than 20-25% of Israelis wish that. But the raids after October 7 made this idea that we need to have a greater Israel in order to defend ourselves

became more mainstream. We've talked today about the Nakba and how you believe 1948 to be linked to our present moment. Just can I ask you, do you believe that today is worse than 1948 in some way? In some way it was. First, the numbers, I think, are higher. I think in 1948, the numbers, many were fled and people died on the roads. And the numbers were not really extremely reliable. But they're talking about 10,000 Palestinians that were killed, maybe 20,000 Palestinians that were killed in 1948.

Now we're talking about at least twice, maybe much more. And I think also it's much more systematic in these days. It's done by a state, and it goes for very long. And the scale of destruction, I think, is bigger. And I think to a certain extent, yes, it is worse than 1948. But at the same time, I have to say, the Palestinians have changed, I think. In 1948, they fled and they regretted they fled. fled and they regretted, they fled and they let, so to speak,

Israel take over their lands and homes and villages and towns. Now they don't. As I said in the beginning, even under the huge and terrible pressure in the northern part of Gaza City, people don't go south into the central Gaza Strip. They insist to stay, even in terrible condition in Gaza City, in cities, in tent cities, in really catastrophic situations, they still stay. The Palestinians learned from 48 that they're not going to give up. The Israelis maybe would have liked that the Palestinians would just run away, but they don't. I wonder if we could end here. You are a journalist who has been working

in the region for more than three decades. This case on ethnic cleansing that you've been making isn't exactly a majority opinion in the country that you're from. And I wonder, if you don't mind me asking you, how have people, your peers, your family even, reacted to this case that you've been making in your work? even reacted to this case that you've been making in your work? I don't know. You know, I live in Tel Aviv. It's quite a liberal city. And my friends are, you know, more or less like-minded. We are not that alone. Of course we are.

We are a minority. There's no doubt about it. We are not that alone. There's no doubt about it. We are not that alone. And Israel is still, for Israeli Jews, is still a democratic state. Yes, it is unpleasant sometimes, but we are not arrested. We are not beaten. We are not deported, of course.

So, yes, I feel very bad for the society in which I live because I'm part of this society. I feel responsible for what is done in my name. And I feel ashamed many times when I see the videos coming out of Gaza. And even when I walk in the streets of Tel Aviv and hear conversation, overhear conversation, people, what they're saying about Palestine. It's not pleasant, but this is the society I live in and I'm still hopeful. I'm hopeful that still Israelis will come to understanding,

maybe after this war will end, that there are 7.5 million Palestinians living in this land between the river and the sea. There are 7.5 million Jews. No one is going away. We have to live with each other. There's no other way than to live in equality, in equal rights and without violence.

And this is possible. It is done in places in Rwanda. It is done in Northern Ireland. It is done in Europe after World War II. It is possible. And I'm still writing because I believe that this could happen. Mehran, I want to thank you so much for your time today and for this conversation. I'm incredibly appreciative.

Thank you. All right. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.