Ethnic Cleansing 3.0: How Israel Became the Transfer State
Thursday, June 25, 2026 at 12:22AM by Gideon Levy 25 June 2026 
Palestinians flock to the area where the humanitarian aid packages land over western Gaza City, in August 2025. Credit: Mahmoud Abu Hamda/Reuters
Jerusalem's Silwan neighborhood is being emptied of its inhabitants. Under bizarre and outrageous pretexts, families are being evicted from the homes they have lived in for decades. In the Gaza Strip, hundreds of thousands of displaced people are being crowded into uninhabitable refugee camp. Some will never return to their homes, of which nothing remains. The head of Israel's National Security Council called an emergency meeting on "encouraging the voluntary emigration" of Gazans.
Himnuta, Elad, the Jewish National Fund, the National Security Council, the Israel Defense Forces, the Sephardi hevra kadisha burial society and the Israeli Civil Administration are all government bodies or nonprofit organizations working toward one goal: Ethnic Cleansing 3.0. After the successful cleansings of 1948 and 1967, the next stage of the Zionist enterprise that serves as the bedrock of the Jewish state has arrived. Everything is going according to the phased plan.
There has been a recent string of seemingly spontaneous events over the past few days. What looks, on the face of it, to be the anarchy of rioting settlers – extremists bent on avenging October 7 – has a greater purpose. The right has an orderly plan and a clear strategy, and it is hard at work to implement it. While the left has lost its way, enmeshing itself in hollow clichés and all but comatose since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the right continues to shape an irreversible reality.
Israel has become a transfer state, one for whom ethnic cleansing is a central policy plank. This ethnic cleansing has a variety of different names and faces; it is sometimes overt and sometimes covert and repressed, but it is growing into a historical phenomenon in full swing, far from everyone's sight. After the creation of apartheid, which was never the goal of Zionism or of the state, the transfer has arrived, the one goal for which the apartheid was created in the first place.
Hence, Israel is not an apartheid state. It is something worse than that; it is a transfer state. Apartheid in South Africa never intended to clear the country of its indigenous inhabitants. Israeli apartheid does.
Over the past few months, I have written almost exclusively on settler violence in the West Bank. Week after week, village after village, family after family are doing everything they can to keep their homes and lands, until finally, they give up. From shepherding communities, who live like our ancestors in caves without disturbing a single soul, to wealthy bankers, who abandon villas in affluent villages; all are living in fear and being forced to leave their homes.
One village after another is being abandoned. One family after another raises arms in surrender. They proclaim "sumud forever," but a few months later the sumud ends, and all that is left of their house is ruins. Helpless and defenseless, they are left with no choice. And the land is gradually cleansed of its people.
The "government of change" won't be able to change much. The facts have already been established "on the ground." While it may be that in absolute numbers, not including Gaza and southern Lebanon, there have been only a handful of displaced families, and though it's true that there is still a lot of work to be done – the trend is clear, and its systematic character is frightening.
Palestinians walking along the separation barrier between the West Bank and Jerusalem in February. Credit: Ohad Zwigenberg/AP
They started with the most vulnerable populations, the shepherding communities and residents of East Jerusalem, who get no recourse from an Israeli justice system that is fundamentally apartheid in nature. The campaign is racing forward unhindered.
The expulsions in Gaza and those in Silwan have an obvious link – a worldview that asserts that in this land there is room for only one people, us or them. This view is apparently held by the majority of Israelis, even those who shift uncomfortably in their armchairs when witnessing what is happening, which at best is almost never reported in the Israeli media.
Know that while you were asleep, a people is being dispossessed of its land, step by step.
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