Opinion: Israel's genocide in Gaza is a war on demographics
The ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has killed nearly 54,000 Palestinians, along with various plans to expel the remaining survivors, has one primary goal: to safeguard the Jewish settler-colony of Israel by restoring the lost Jewish demographic majority, which had been achieved through mass killings and expulsions since 1948.
Zionists understood early on that the only chance their settler-colonial project had of survival was through the establishment of a Jewish majority by expelling the Palestinians.
Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, outlined early plans for this in the 1890s, which the Zionist Organisation pursued from the 1920s. Expulsion, however, only became possible after the Zionist military conquest of Palestine.
On the eve of the 1948 war, Palestine had a Jewish population of 608,000 (constituting 30 percent), most of whom had arrived in the country over the previous two decades, alongside 1,364,000 Palestinians.
During the 1948 conquest, Zionist forces killed upwards of 13,000 Palestinians - one percent of the Palestinian population - and expelled around 760,000 Palestinians, or more than 80 percent of those who lived in the area that Israel would later declare a Jewish state.