JERUSALEM: A senior far-right member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government said on Tuesday Gaza could not survive as an independent entity and it would be better for Palestinians there to leave for other countries.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who heads one of the religious nationalist parties in Netanyahu’s coalition, said he supported a call by two members of the Israeli parliament who wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial that Western countries should accept Gazan families who expressed a desire to relocate.
The comments underscore fears in much of the Arab world that Israel wants to drive Palestinians out of land where they want to build a future state, repeating the mass dispossession of Palestinians when Israel was created in 1948.
“I welcome the initiative of the voluntary emigration of Gaza Arabs to countries around the world,” Smotrich said in a statement. “This is the right humanitarian solution for the residents of Gaza and the entire region after 75 years of refugees, poverty and danger.”
He said an area as small as the Gaza Strip without natural resources could not survive alone, and added: “The State of Israel will no longer be able to accept the existence of an independent entity in Gaza.”
Smotrich spoke during Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip, a blockaded coastal enclave ruled by Hamas that is home to some 2.3 million people, most of them refugees after earlier wars.
Palestinians and leaders of Arab countries have accused Israel of seeking a new “Nakba” (catastrophe), the name given to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes in the wake of the 1948 war that accompanied the founding of the state of Israel.
Most ended up in neighboring Arab states, and Arab leaders have said any latter-day move to displace Palestinians would be unacceptable.
Israel withdrew its military and settlers from Gaza in 2005 after a 38-year occupation, and Netanyahu has said it does not intend to maintain a permanent presence again, but that Israel would maintain security control for an indefinite period.
However there has been little clarity about Israel’s longer term intentions, and countries including the US have said that Gaza should be governed by Palestinians.
Meanwhile, when Hamas gunmen stormed southern Israel on Oct. 7 and rocket sirens pierced the early morning quiet across the country, Israel’s premier museums went into war mode, rushing to protect their most precious artwork and artefacts.
The Dead Sea Scrolls. Ancient dedication plaques on loan from the Louvre. A 1916 masterpiece by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt. These and other treasures were quickly taken off display and brought to special bunkers to ensure they are not damaged during the war.
“To take off an exhibition is something that usually is not done because we trust the building, we trust the safety of the showcases. But this is a different situation so we have to act accordingly,” said Hagit Maoz, curator of the Shrine of the Book at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum.
The iconic building, shaped like the lids of the jars in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, is usually packed with visitors eager to glimpse the collection of ancient religious texts. Today the eight display cases lining the walls have paper notes saying “temporarily removed.”
The last time the museum removed the display, Maoz said, was during the 1991 Gulf War when Iraq fired missiles at Israel.
Nurith Goshen, curator of Chalcolithic and Bronze Age archaeology, was cleaning up broken glass from a rocket strike near her home outside Jerusalem on Oct. 7 when the museum called announcing the war protocol and asking to confirm her list.
“You really have to choose the finest or the most fragile artefacts,” she said.
Her list included items on loan from the Louvre and the British Museum, and she said they got permission from those museums before taking them down.
“You really understand the meaning of what we are holding here, and what we have under our custodianship for Israel, but also for the world,” said Goshen.
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art took similar precautions.
Gustav Kimt’s Portrait of Friedericke Maria Beer, painted two years before his death, is now stored on a rack in a fortified underground bunker with other works. The paintings left behind blank spaces on the gallery’s wall.
“These works of art have experienced war, some of them survived World War Two,” said museum director Tania Coen-Uzzielli. “We are custodians for a short time, and we needed to protect them. To protect them for posterity and for history.”
