Moshe Feiglin, the deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament and a leading member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, posted an open letter on his official Facebook account calling for the conquest of the Gaza Strip and the complete removal of its current inhabitants.
“There are no two states, and there are no two peoples. There is only one state for one people,” Feiglin wrote in the letter.
In the letter Feiglin outlined a six-point plan, under which the entire civilian population of Gaza would be evacuated to encampments on Israel’s border with Egypt and the former territory of Gaza razed to the ground. At that point, the former residents of Gaza would be deported abroad or required to sign loyalty oaths to the Israeli government, and the former Gaza Strip would be incorporated into Israel proper and redeveloped as an Israeli city.
The letter reads, in part:
a) The IDF [Israeli army] shall designate certain open areas on the Sinai border, adjacent to the sea, in which the civilian population will be concentrated, far from the built-up areas that are used for launches and tunneling. In these areas, tent encampments will be established, until relevant emigration destinations are determined.
The supply of electricity and water to the formerly populated areas will be disconnected.
b) The formerly populated areas will be shelled with maximum fire power. The entire civilian and military infrastructure of Hamas, its means of communication and of logistics, will be destroyed entirely, down to their foundations.
[…]
f) When the fighting will end, Israeli law will be extended to cover the entire Gaza Strip […] and the city of Gaza and its suburbs will be rebuilt as true Israeli touristic and commercial cities.
The United Nations defines ethnic cleansing as “the planned deliberate removal from a specific territory, persons of a particular ethnic group, by force or intimidation, in order to render that area ethnically homogenous.”
As of August 5, the post had received over 8,000 likes on Facebook.
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Ethan Corey is a writer and researcher based in New York. His work has appeared in The Nation, Rolling Stone and MEL magazine.
