Israel’s ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon and Gaza has reached a scale unseen since the Nakba. The history of Israel’s offensives shows how depopulation is soon followed by annexation.
To fully grasp what has been going on since October 7, 2023, in the territories newly reoccupied by Israel in Gaza and Lebanon, it is necessary to examine the pattern of these occupations against previous ones conducted by the Zionist state. As is well known, the very birth of Israel was inseparable from occupation. The new state proclaimed on May 15, 1948, spanned over 56 percent of British Mandate Palestine between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — the territory attributed to the “Jewish State” by the partition resolution adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in November 1947. By the end of the first Arab Israeli war in 1948–49, Israel ended up controlling 78 percent of that area.