Palestinians wait for aid trucks to cross in the central Gaza Strip on May 19, 2024. Photo: Bloomberg.
A new poll conducted by Penn State University found that 82 percent of Israelis support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, coinciding with an ongoing effort by Tel Aviv to forcibly displace and relocate the strip’s population.
The poll was conducted in March and published by Haaretz on 22 May, surveying 1,005 Jewish Israelis.
In response to a question on whether the Israeli army should act in accordance with the biblical story of the Israelites and their eradication of all of Jericho’s inhabitants during the conquest of the city, 47 percent of Israelis responded “Yes.”
Sixty-five percent of the respondents also believe that there is a “contemporary incarnation of Amalek.” Ninety-three percent of the 65 percent that “the commandment to wipe out the memory of Amalek is also relevant to that modern-day Amalek.”
At the start of the war in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Tel Aviv’s campaign a holy war reminiscent of the biblical war against the Amalekites – a people the ancient Israelites were ordered to wipe out in the Hebrew Bible.
“Eighty-two percent of those surveyed expressed support for the forced expulsion of residents of the Gaza Strip, and 56 percent supported the forced expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel,” Haaretz cites the poll as saying, marking a sharp rise from a poll asking the same questions 20 years ago.
The publishing of the poll coincides with a brutal new Israeli military operation in Gaza – dubbed Gideon’s Chariots. The operation aims to bring the entirety of Gaza under Israeli control and will see the army displace the whole population and confine it to a small area in the southern region of the strip.
Netanyahu said in a speech on 21 May that his condition for ending the war in Gaza is the implementation of an initiative proposed by US President Donald Trump earlier this year, which calls for the expulsion of the strip’s population to other countries and a US takeover of Gaza.
Sources who spoke with NBC News one week ago said Trump is working on a plan to “permanently relocate” as many as one million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya.
US security contractors are already in the strip to oversee a new Israeli aid distribution plan, which the UN and other international organizations have strongly condemned, given that it relies on a mechanism that will further displace Gaza’s population.
