Back in August, I posted a message here from a friend in the southern West Bank about an Israeli ultimatum to the inhabitants of his village to flee their village or be killed. Though the noose is slowly but surely tightening around their village, and around the West Bank itself, the threatened expulsion has yet to take place, at least within that particular village. Hundreds of people have been expelled from their homes in the West Bank in various discrete expulsions over the last few months, but so far, there’s been no mass expulsion.

That said, my friend’s news was not incorrect, just temporarily misplaced. A mass expulsion known as the “General’s Plan” is now reportedly being discussed or planned for the north of Gaza. The planned expulsion there is to take exactly the form threatened in my friend’s village: the residents are to be ordered to flee, presumably to some “safe location” in the south; those who remain will be regarded as legitimate targets for extermination, and killed en masse.

While the General’s Plan is now being reported everywhere as news, it’s really nothing new. Such plans have been circulating on the Israeli Right for decades. I first encountered the public advocacy of such a plan in February 1988–February 11th, to be precise–as a college freshman at Princeton. The speaker was the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, who explicitly advocated the expulsion of the Palestinian population from “Eretz Israel,” Greater Israel. When I asked Kahane in the Q&A what would be done with those who refused to leave, he told me forthrightly that they would be exterminated. I recently confirmed my memory of this event with the historian Sumaiya Hamdani of George Mason University who was there that night, and remembers things as I do. Unlike the hypothetical calls to genocide discussed in Congress last December, this call to genocide really happened. No administrator condemned it, or condemned those who invited Kahane to speak. No one was fired for failing to do so, either. 

Ideas of the genocidal sort have percolated for decades in Zionist circles, not just in Israel, but on American college campuses, and not just on the Zionist Right, but on what passes for the Zionist Left. Unfortunately, ideas of this sort don’t just percolate, like coffee. They demand expression in action. So here we are.

Israeli military patch depicting envisaged state of Israel, including much of the Arabian peninsula and a swatch of East Africa

A West Bank friend of mine has now passed on another rather bizarre tidbit of information. I haven’t been able to confirm it, and neither has anyone else, but it seems strange enough to be true, and is not the kind of thing a Palestinian would have any interest in making up. I’m told that the southeastern West Bank–the area between between Bethlehem and Hebron–is now being patrolled, not by regular Israeli soldiers, but by a combination of settler militias, corporatized security services, and (oddest of all) what my friend referred to as “Mexicans.” 

I doubt that the soldiers in question are actually Mexicans; I suspect that “Mexican” is a catch-all term for “people from somewhere near Mexico,” i.e., Spanish-speaking Central Americans. Mexico wouldn’t send troops to the West Bank. Paraguay might; El Salvador might. But if I had to guess, the mystery soldiers are most likely Guatemalans. Guatemala has had a long (and rather tortured) history of military and other cooperation with Israel, dating to the Cold War. It’s also the kind of dysfunctional, cash-starved regime that might descend to playing a mercenary role for a friend in need. So my money’s on Guatemala. But that’s just a guess. 

If I’m right, it’ll be a sick and sad irony. Guatemalans make up a sizable contingent of migrant refugees here in the US–indeed, in my home town–driven from their homes in part by US policy in Central America (particularly our “War on Drugs”). If my guess about these soldiers is right, we now have Guatemalans treating the West Bank as their shooting gallery and mini-police state, with Palestinians functioning as the Mayans of the East. If a mass expulsion is to take place, I’m sure Israeli soldiers will be the ones to do it, but however things pan out, these Guatemalans will have played their part. It reminds me, sardonically, of that old children’s song: it’s a small world, after all. 

“They don’t speak Hebrew, they don’t speak Arabic, they don’t speak English,” my friend complains. “What are they doing here?” What they’re doing, of course, pre-empts the need for speech. It needs no speech to be understood.