Afrasianet - Dr. Hisham Okal - In a world that has learned nothing from its history, the plane that took off from Israel's Ramon airport near Eilat, carrying more than 150 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, came as if it were a group tour trip to an untitled future. The flight that passed through Nairobi before landing in Johannesburg was not just a humanitarian evacuation but was, coldly, the first public rehearsal for a new demographic phase. The story is not in the plane itself, but in the questions that came with it: 

Where did you come from? How did you get out? And why did you go out now? And who will benefit from its release? 

When the picture becomes clear, it becomes clear that the plane did not take off from the devastated Gaza Strip, where there is no airport, runway, or control tower, but left Ramon, an entire Israeli airport, with a careful logistical arrangement through a party that usually deals with tourist flights rather than humanitarian evacuations. This alone is enough to understand that it was not a "charitable coincidence" or a "global solidarity initiative," but a small window that opened to test the world:  

Will anyone notice that the Palestinian who left has no right to asylum, residency or protection? Will the public pay attention to the fact that the plane is not a refuge but a silent experiment to engineer the future of Gaza? But the story becomes darker when we get into the subtleties that have leaked from inside the sector. According to almost certain local sources, some of the families who boarded the plane gave up their property and rights inside Gaza before leaving, not because they wanted to sell or change, but because some mediators had promoted a shiny promise: "South Africa will grant you political or humanitarian asylum." And what a paradox... The country that stood firmly against the genocide at the International Court of Justice received them only as tourists. No protection, no residency, no asylum, not even a promise to stay. 

In an instant, the Palestinian who had escaped from the ashes to the African continent was suspended in the air: 

He can't go back, he can't stay, and he doesn't know if he's been abandoned, deceived or used as an experimental number in an equation bigger than him.

Soft demographic engineering: When strangulation becomes an alternative to forced displacement, who thinks that the second phase of Trump's plan is a "reconstruction" or "political order" that lives in illusion. The second phase, as it now manifests, relies on crushing psychological pressure, long-term social adaptation, making daily life unbearable, and emptying people from within before emptying the land of the population. 

The project does not need bulldozers, it does not need official decisions. All it needs is a bi-weekly plane that takes some of the desperate and leaves the rest to train on the idea of "getting out." In this way, displacement becomes a "soft"  process that is not registered as a crime, is not considered a war, and no one is watching it. The duality of the world... 

The last chapter of moral failure The world that was crying out to stop the killing today is silent in the face of the reconfiguration of Gaza. Months ago, "recognition of the Palestinian state" was on the agenda of every state. Today?

It has suddenly disappeared as the only witness to the crime disappears. The world has shown that the genocide did not end when the bombs stopped, but their tools changed: from direct killing to population engineering, from bombing houses to bombing rights, from freezing reconstruction to opening Ramon Airport as an alternative to opening the future.

As long as South Africa is the only country that has agreed to accept Palestinians as tourists, it will soon discover, as Malaysia and other countries have discovered, that if it accepts to be a gateway, it will unwittingly become a partner in the soft displacement phase. South Africa is not a naïve country, it is the one who tried the occupation in The Hague, and it will soon close this door because it knows full well that what is happening is not "travel", but a human redistribution with soft gloves

sharp angle. asks ... The strange thing about the whole scene is that the party that knows exactly when the air enters Gaza and when it cuts off, when the can of sardines passes through the crossing and when it is blocked, did not pay attention—inadvertently or deliberately—that an entire tourist plane flew over people's heads carrying half a quarter of families to South Africa. It's as if tourism from Gaza is an idea that doesn't make it to the radar, while everything else arrives. At the same time, Netanyahu appears to repeat that he does not recognize a Palestinian state, as if he is sending A small message to those who run the sector: Stay the same... Your existence is more important than a state, and an entity is more important than an entity...

Dr. Hisham Okal – Professor of Crisis Management and International Relations