Is Israel Engaging in ‘Ethnic Cleansing’?

Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic Senator from Maryland, has an abiding anti-Israel animus, and has just now expressed the claim — in an interview with Mehdi Hasan — that Israel engages in “ethnic cleansing”: “US Sen. Chris Van Hollen Accuses Israel of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Northern Gaza,” by Corey Walker, Algemeiner, November 19, 2024:

Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon said last month that Israel has delivered over 1 million tons of aid, including 700,000 tons of food, to Gaza since it launched its military operation a year ago. He also noted that Hamas terrorists often hijack and steal aid shipments while fellow Palestinians suffer….

In the month since, Israel has expedited the shipment of another 140,000 tons of food aid into Gaza. The IDF, of course, cannot control what happens to the aid once it reaches Gaza. It is known that Hamas seizes most of the aid trucks, brings them to its own warehouses, where it unloads the aid. Then Hamas members and their extended families take what they want, and some of the aid is also set aside, to then be sold, at very high prices, to desperate Gazans who were supposed to receive the aid for free. That is where the real problem lies: not in a supposed failure to deliver aid to Gaza, but the failure to prevent Hamas from seizing so much of that aid, once it gets inside Gaza, both for its own members and for sale to civilians who, of course, should have been receiving the aid for free.

The increase in aid trucks sent into Gaza by Israel has been sufficient to meet the Biden administration’s demand.

Beyond humanitarian aid, Van Hollen lambasted the Biden administration for refusing to “hold the Netanyahu government accountable” after it passed legislation last month to ban the controversial United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) from operating in Israel and stopping Israeli authorities from cooperating with the organization.

Israel banned UNRWA from operating inside Israel — it continues to operate in Gaza itself — because dozens of UNRWA staff members took part in the atrocities on. October 7, 2023. In addition, Israel has proof, from documents seized in Gaza, that 450 UNRWA staff are members of Hamas, a terrorist organization. One of them is Suhail al-Hindi, who for many years headed the UNRWA teachers union in Gaza, and also sits on the Hamas political bureau, alongside the recently assassinated Yahya Sinwar. Furthermore, Hamas has made frequent use of UNRWA buildings, including schools and office buildings, to store weapons and hide fighters. The UN’s headquarters in Gaza is located in Gaza City’s upscale Rimai neighborhood, and directly under it, in an enormous tunnel, is Hamas’ main command-and-control center. Yet UNRWA pretends it had no idea there was anything going on beneath its headquarters. Nor was it aware of the weapons caches piled high in UNRWA buildings of every kind.

Hasan asked Van Hollen if he agreed with the characterization of the Israel-Hamas war as a “genocide,” to which the senator responded that he “doesn’t know the answer to that.” However, the lawmaker asserted that Israel’s evacuation of civilians from northern Gaza is tantamount to an “ethnic cleansing” campaign.

The evacuation of civilians from northern Gaza, and all the other evacuations carried out in other cities in the Strip, including Khan Yunis and Rafah, were undertaken, as Van Hollen must know, to make those civilians safe, not to “cleanse” Gaza of their presence. As soon as the fighting stops in a particular area, the civilians are allowed by the IDF to return home.

Van Hollen, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called on Democrats to “speak out more” on the ongoing humanitarian situation in Gaza. He cautioned that the incoming Trump administration could “greenlight” the Israeli government to expand settlement construction in the West Bank, a practice which he claims amounts to “pushing Palestinians off their land.”

To repeat: the “humanitarian” situation in Gaza is mainly the fault of Hamas, which seizes so much of the aid for its own members, and for resale to civilians. The Israelis have made possible for 39,000 trucks laden with humanitarian aid, including 840,000 tons of food, to enter Gaza.

Van Hollen keeps bemoaning the “humanitarian situation,” but without once pointing the finger at Hamas for seizing so much of the aid for itself. Why he is so determined to blame Israel for supposedly limiting deliveries of humanitarian aid — a charge Israel denies — while omitting to say a word about the role of Hamas in seizing so much of the humanitarian aid once it arrives in Gaza, is worth pondering.

Van Hollen is also worried about the Trump administration signaling that it has no objections to Israel expanding “settlements” in Judea and Samaria (a/k/a the West Bank). He seems to think it a self-evident truth that such settlements are a Bad Thing. But expanding existing settlements to accommodate a natural growth in population is perfectly understandable. And creating new settlements, too, on “state and waste lands,” or on land bought from Arab owners, is, according to the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, perfectly legal. Indeed, Article 6 of the Palestine Mandate tells the holder of the Mandate (the U.K.) to both “facilitate Jewish immigration” to the land and to “encourage close settlement by Jews on the land.” What land was that? According to the Mandate maps, it included all the land from the Jordan River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west, and from the border of the Mandate for Syria and Lebanon in the north to the Red Sea in the south. Does Van Hollen know about the Mandate for Palestine’s borders? Does he think he can simply ignore the Mandate’s provisions, and the land to which those provisions apply? The first Trump administration correctly concluded that Israeli settlements were not illegal. Would Van Hollen care to study in detail the reasons for that conclusion?

And so, on November 20, along with 18 other Democratic Senators, Chris Van Hollen voted for three resolutions calling for the American government to halt the delivery of tank grounds, mortars, and JDAMS. The effort was a resounding failure — less than one-fifth of the Senate voted for the resolutions. Even had they passed, they would amount to only one billion dollars worth of weapons; the Biden administration has readied a $20 billion dollar proposal of weapons for Israel.

“Recipients of security assistance must facilitate and not arbitrarily restrict the delivery of humanitarian assistance into war zones where US weapons are being used, and American-supplied weapons must be used in accordance with international humanitarian law. The Netanyahu government is violating both of these requirements in Gaza,” Van Hollen said in a statement.

Israel is not “arbitrarily” restricting humanitarian assistance to Gaza. It checks the trucks to make sure no weapons are being smuggled into the Strip. Then they are waved through. The amount of that aid so far: 39,000 trucks carrying 840,000 tons of food, and about 160,000 tons of non-food aid, such as medicine. Israel has done more to facilitate the delivery of aid into Gaza than any other country or organization.