Opinion: Israel has always wanted to expel Palestinians. Now it's saying the quiet part out loud

Israel's plans to remove Palestinians from Gaza, ominously called "voluntary transfer", may seem like a shocking new idea. But it is as old as the Jewish state itself.

Insecurity about the country's origins has been baked in since 1948. In recent years, Israel's Defence Ministry has literally dispatched teams into Israeli archives to remove vast numbers of documents that prove the reality of the Nakba. 

Was this embarrassment, shame, hubris - or all of the above?

These are the actions of a guilty nation that can't face its own past, though many Israelis today are increasingly proud of the ethnic cleansing that took place in the late 1940s - and are determined to repeat it on steroids.

From the late 1960s, Israeli political and military leaders spoke in strikingly similar terms to Israel's far right and mainstream in the 2020s; removing Palestinians from Palestine was the overriding goal. 

Read more: Israel has always wanted to expel Palestinians. Now it's saying the quiet part out loud by Antony Loewenstein