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Cake day: October 18th, 2024

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  • The mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt has been an aim of Israeli governments since December 1948, when the army first tried and failed to cleanse this last remaining enclave along Palestine’s Mediterranean coast. It tried again during the 1950s and intensified its effort after the 1967 War, when Israel occupied both the Gaza Strip and the Sinai desert. Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023 gave Israel another opportunity. Expulsion plans were trumpeted by Israeli politicians and media spokespeople. Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that he was actively seeking to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza. Israeli and some US officials started lobbying Egypt to accept large numbers of refugees. For eight months the Israeli army refrained from occupying the border area near Rafah, leaving the exit to Egypt open.

    This exemplifies the circular logic of Zionist settler-colonialism: settlements are built to mark and protect the state’s border, but that makes them vulnerable to attack and so a buffer zone is established to protect them. Afterwards, this buffer zone is itself settled to mark and protect the newly expanded borders, at which point another buffer zone becomes necessary. In this manner vulnerability is produced and then mobilised in a feedback loop that the genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses has called ‘permanent security’.