Thread by @Alonso_GD

This kinds of argument is why it is important to understand Israel as a colonial endeavour. There is a reason why the demographics of the area look like this and it is not because of any kind of “Palestinian apartheid” 🧵

https://twitter.com/hananyanaftali/status/1958152309394805071

Gaza’s current form is the direct result of the Zionist plan to “cleanse” the land of Palestinians. Hundreds of thousands of people were forcefully expelled to Gaza from other parts of Palestine. After Egypt’s intervention, an armistice line separated Gaza from Israel

But these hundreds of thousands of refugees were living sometimes a couple of kilometres away from their old homes and the area was sparsely populated and not under clear Zionist control, so often they could simply walk into Israel and tend their crops or recover lost property

Of course, as an armistice line, there was also military activity in the area. There were frequent clashes between Israeli and Egyptian forces and occasionally Palestinian guerrillas carried out sabotage operations

Israel however treated all of them - the guerrilla fighter and the farmer - as so called “infiltrators” and killed them. To disuade people from crossing into Israeli-controlled land it started to simply destroy Palestinian towns and replace them with Jewish settlements

These areas though were unattractive for ordinary settlement - with the frequent threat of “infiltrators” wanting to sow fields that used to belong to them and now “belonged” to an Israeli settler.

This is why it created the Nahal, acronym for the “Fighting Pioneer Youth”, a paramilitary wing of the IDF that allowed young Israelis to do their military service through the establishment of settlements in the recently conquered frontier-land next to Gaza

These military-base-type settlements are everywhere around Gaza because they were built as a wall to keep ethnically cleansed Palestinians from returning to their stolen lands. And they did this through force, similarly to how Israeli settlers act today in the West Bank

The area around Gaza therefore is usually treated as if it was always “rightfully” “Israel proper”, but the area had very little Jewish population at the time of the Nakba. It was literally settled, much like the Wild West: by people with guns chasing out the original inhabitants

R’oi Rothberg was one of the inhabitants of Nahal Oz, the first Nahal settlement outside Gaza. His job was to deal with “infiltrators”. In April 1956, he saw Palestinians reaping wheat in the settlement fields and rode on horseback to “chase them off”

Before he could get to them he was ambushed by Palestinians and Egyptians who shot him and beat him, killing him. Moshe Dayan, the Israeli chief of staff, attended his funeral and gave a famous eulogy that is sort of like Israel’s Gettysburg address

Dayan admitted from the get-go that the project of the frontier-lands outside Gaza were a colonial settlement project. Israel was “transforming” Palestinian land and villages “where their fathers dwelt”

Dayan went on to describe Israelis as “a generation that settles the land” who needed to be “armed, strong and determined” to deal with the Palestinians it had expelled to Gaza and it called “infiltrators”

It was very clear to Dayan that these Nahal settlements were “a wall” to protect Israel from the consequences of its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians

So why is it that there are no Jews in Gaza? Because Gaza is one of the areas Zionists were not able to ethnically cleanse and then colonially settle. Jews were not pushed out of Gaza, rather Egypt prevented more ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by keeping Zionists out of Gaza

The area around Gaza is the wall of human shields and armed pioneer-style vigilantes Israel set up to keep ethnically cleansed Palestinians from returning to their stolen homes and crops.

So, in sum: There are no Jews in Gaza *because Israel is an apartheid state* built on the basis of ethnic cleansing and the colonial settlement of stolen homes and forcefully taken land