Even After Netanyahu Admits Goal Is Forcible Population Transfers, US Media Ignores Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Aims

American reporters and pundits continue liberal delusions, even as Israel—and reality—move on without them.

On December 25, Netanyahu publicly confirmed what the Washington Post’s John Hudson reported on December 21, and Likud media had been reporting for weeks: Israel’s so-called “post-war plans for Gaza” include mass forcible population transfers of Palestinians out of Gaza into either the Sinai desert in Egypt or other “Arab” or European countries. 

As Crisis Group Senior Israel Analyst Mairav Zonszein summarized on Twitter, citing Hebrew-language media, “Netanyahu said today he is actively working to ethnic transfer of Palestinians out of Gaza in a Likud meeting today.”

This follows reporting from Washington Post reporter John Hudson on December 21 that Netanyahu is openly shopping around plans and trying to pressure countries to systematically take Palestinian “migrants.” 

This reporting comes after such a plan was announced by the Israeli UN ambassador Danny Danon on December 10 (see point 4) and a month after pro-Netanyahu media leaked this plan on Nov 30. There’s much debate about whether or not such a plan is feasible, but there’s no longer any doubt about Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's intent, which is mass forcible population transfers out of Gaza. And, since it’s Netanyahu running the war, and Netanyahu the US continues to arm, fund, and support, if he has genocidal motives, this would seem, objectively, to be of tremendous import.  

So what has the US media done with this well-documented plan to pressure countries into taking “hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza”? For the most part, they’ve refused to report it, mention it, or acknowledge it, even when reporting on specifically related topics. 

Take, for example, recent reports of key Netanyahu advisor and point man in the US, Ron Dermer’s visit to the US to discuss “post-war” plans for Gaza. According to pro-Netanyahu Israeli media, Dermer is the man who was originally shopping the idea of population transfers on Capitol Hill back in late November. And here he is discussing Netanyahu's “post-war” plans in Washington, the day after Netenyahu explicitly told Likud party members he is seeking to expel Palestinians from Gaza as a war aim. Yet, the fairly important fact that mass population transfers are on the top of their wish list is entirely missing in all reports on his visit. It wasn’t mentioned by The New York Times, The Associated Press, Axios, The Messenger, or USA Today.

Isn’t it relevant that the leader of the country the US continues to arm, fund, and provide military and intelligence support for, casually admits a war aim is resettlement of a native population? 

The plan is, of course, put in liberal terms of “voluntary resettlement,” but everyone knows this is code for involuntary resettlement. Bombing, sieging, and making Gaza unfit for human life, as the current “war” plan is, necessarily makes migration out of Gaza decidedly involuntary. According to The Economist, North Gaza will be “uninhabitable for years,” and since the IDF plans to do to South Gaza what it did to the north, where exactly are Palestinians supposed to live? As Israel continues to bomb, raid, capture, shoot, and displace over 2 million people to shove them into a tent city smaller than LAX airport, it’s clear that any “voluntary” resettlement program is a program of forced population transfers.

More conspicuously, reports explicitly about accusations of expelling Palestinians ignore the fact that Israel’s top leaders openly lobby for expelling Palestinians from Gaza. Yesterday, the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons said Israel is “working to expel” the civilian population of Gaza, yet the CNN report on these accusations completely omitted that this is, in fact, a war aim of the party and people in charge of the war. No mention of Netanyahu’s statements in support of “voluntary resettlement,” no mention of Dermer shopping around such a plan on Capitol Hill, no mention of the Washington Post reporting such a plan exists and is being lobbied for by the Israelis. It was treated as a mere allegation and CNN simply moved on.  

For months now, overtly genocidal rhetoric on the part of Israeli leaders has been repeatedly dismissed by American pundits and reporters as mere locker room talk, hot-headedness, blowing off steam, and pandering to the base—but never evidence of actual intent. Does anyone think that if Israel was an official enemy state like Russia or Iran, it would be afforded this degree of institutional and deliberate credulity? If Putin announced a “voluntary resettlement” program for Ukrainians to Poland or Belarus, this would correctly be called by all of American media a plan for ethnic cleansing. But when Israel does this repeatedly, while killing over 20,000 people in a matter of 11 weeks, it’s crickets from our media. 

One would think, now that there’s an actual plan, openly discussed by Israel’s most powerful person and his top aides, it would be clear this isn’t mere rhetoric but is an actual policy aim of the Israeli government. We know this because they say so all the time. Yet American media, deferential to bipartisan consensus in support of the bombing and siege, racism, selective dislike of the tabloid, and fear of flack from pro-Israel media bullies, refuse to mention the obvious. And in times of war and runaway chauvinism, simply mentioning obvious facts can be the most subversive act of all.