American-Israeli Professor: US & Allies Will Help Israel Ethnically Cleanse Palestine

There has been a growing public rift between US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Israel’s plan to invade the southern Gaza city of Rafah, the last designated safe area in the region.

Despite the growing public rift, Israel has nothing to fear from Biden and the United States will ultimately assist Israel in ethnically cleansing Palestine in more ways than just supplying weapons, professor, activist and anthropologist Jeff Halper told Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Tuesday.

“[Israel] is a settler colonial movement. Therefore, in order to transform Palestine into Israel, an Arab country to a Jewish country, you have to displace the population and you have to take its land. This isn’t only happening in Gaza. This is certainly happening in the West Bank as well,” Halper explained. “By destroying Gaza… it makes it impossible for the Gazans to come back. Now, Israel would like Egypt to take them and put them in the Sanai [desert], [but] Egypt says no.”

Instead, the United States and other Western countries will take the Gazans into their country. “The United States will say ‘Alright, we’ll take 50,000,’ Canada will say – Canada already said this – ‘we’ll take 30,40,50,000.’ Each European country will take a few thousand or tens of thousands, Australia, New Zealand and so on. Israel could get rid of a million or more Palestinians, with the help – the complicity – of European and North American countries, under the guise of humanitarian aid for refugees… That’s what Israel is calling ‘voluntary transfer.’”

Earlier, Co-host Jamarl Thomas asked about Egypt’s intentions, noting that satellite imagery has shown that infrastructure is being built in the Sinai desert, presumably meant to house potential Palestinian refugees.

“They’re building a camp, but not as [part of] a plan,” Halper explained. “They built the camp because they’re afraid… that if in fact, Israel does invade Rafah in the south, there isn’t really a good plan of where those people go. The combination of military pressure plus starvation is simply going to drive a million Palestinians through the border… If there [is] a massive break out of Gaza in the direction of Egypt, then Egypt is prepared for that… It isn’t for any kind of voluntary plan, it’s for that possibility.”

Israel’s ultimate plan, Halper argues, is to greatly lower the number of Palestinians in the region and then create an apartheid for the remainder.

“[Israel will] lock them into small little islands with the help of Biden, we’ll call those Bantustans a state, and now we have a two-state solution. Israel is on 85% of the country, it controls everything [and] it’s a Jewish country, but there’s a Palestinian state on a few little islands that will be recognized by the international community and now we’re done with the Palestinians and we can move on,” Halper explained. “In other words, Israel thinks it can get away with apartheid in a way South Africa couldn’t, and there’s good reason to believe that might be true.”

Rather than push for a two-state solution that is looking increasingly less likely, Halper argued that Israel should be converted “into one democratic state of equal rights for all its citizens.”