Hebrew University Professor Calls for Committee to Investigate Israel's Ethnic Cleansing

Israel has perpetrated ethnic cleansing in the northern Gaza Strip. Through starvation, denial of health care, bombings and the destruction of both homes and the schools where the displaced sought shelter, Israel has forced the vast majority of residents of the Jabalya refugee camp, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia to leave their place of residence. And the state has no intention of allowing them to return.

Though most Israelis have ignored the other war crimes the country has committed since the war began, the response to the ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza has been different. Over the last month, prominent figures from the Jewish center-left – including a former deputy head of the National Security Council, Eran Etzion; Tomer Persico, a scholar of Judaism; and many others – have openly called for soldiers to refuse orders for ethnic cleansing. Top legal experts, including some who advised Israel's defense team on how to fight accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice, have signed a letter opposing the ethnic cleansing, expulsions and harm to civilians in northern Gaza.

Why is the response to the ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza different from the (nonexistent) response to the other war crimes Israel has committed, which, in the eyes of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, create a plausible fear of genocide? Is it the cold-blooded bureaucracy of it? The fact that the ethnic cleansing is clearly a step planned in advance in line with the so-called "Generals' Plan"?

Maybe it's the timing – the recognition that the army has seemingly achieved its goals in Gaza, so the operation in Jabalya and its environs has no military purpose. Or maybe it's the fact that most of the hostages' families oppose continuing the war, having concluded that military pressure won't lead to their loved ones' freedom.

Perhaps it's that the pictures of thousands of people walking through the ruins, escorted by tanks, reminded them of the Holocaust. And it's also possible that the photographed ethnic cleansing reminds them of the "original sin" of the Nakba, which won't leave Israeli Jews alone. After all, there's a difference between denying the Nakba, justifying it or claiming that the Jews had no choice and seeing it happen before your very eyes and on camera.

But maybe there's a simpler explanation: Israel isn't even bothering to deny that it is deliberately starving the residents of those areas. Brig. Gen. Elad Goren, who is billed as the "head of the humanitarian/civilian effort in the Gaza Strip" in the office of Israel's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, was asked by AP whether the army is preventing aid from entering northern Gaza. In Jabalya, he replied, most residents have left, and there's "enough assistance" left from before for those who remain. And in Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun, he said, there are no people.

So there are no people, and the officer in charge of the army's "humanitarian effort" is effectively presiding over starvation and expulsion. And as Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen, commander of the 162nd Division, which is operating in northern Gaza, told journalists, "Nobody is returning to the northern section ... We got very clear orders. My goal is to cleanse the area."

The army has repeatedly denied that it has adopted the Generals' Plan, which calls for evacuating hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza City and its environment by threatening starvation and war if they stay. But what is happening in practice appears to be even worse. It's reasonable to assume the ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza is just the first stage, to be followed by cleansing Gaza City of the 400,000 Palestinians who still there. The worst is yet to come.

This moral critique of ethnic cleansing and the calls for soldiers to refuse to take part in it could be an important turning point in the attitude of parts of the center-left to what is happening in Gaza. But for the protests against ethnic cleansing not to remain in a vacuum, it's important to create a larger framework that would give this opposition a name, context and political power.

Now is the time to form "the Israeli committee against ethnic cleansing and war crimes." It's important for us, as Israelis, to speak out loudly and clearly against the crimes being committed in our name and with our help. And it's important to give all the different people who will come out against the crimes in Gaza the feeling that they aren't alone.

A committee like this would be similar to an anti-fascist front. But what Israel is doing in Gaza today is much worse than fascism. It more closely resembles a war of extermination.

The firing of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant – even though it wasn't directly connected to the ethnic cleansing, of which he was one of the perpetrators, but rather to his support for a hostage deal and some kind of cease-fire – could bolster this front of people who refuse to participate in these crimes.

Refusing to serve was and remains the strongest card we have to play against the current government's plans for perpetual war. And that's especially true now, since Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. presidential election may well remove the brakes that have until now prevented Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his partners from completing the ethnic cleansing of Gaza City.

Following Gallant's dismissal, the resistance to ethnic cleansing may well join forces with other groups that seek to bring this cursed war to an end. Nevertheless, it's important to refine our moral opposition to a crime that first and foremost threatens the Palestinian presence in this land, but in the long run, will also threaten the Jewish presence here.

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Prof. Yael Barda, an expert in law and sociology, is on the faculty of Hebrew University and is the author of the book "The Bureaucracy of the Occupation." Meron Rapoport is a journalist, political activist and editor of the online news site Sikha Mekomit, the Hebrew version of +972 Magazine.