- A confidential Israeli plan to resettle 60,000 Palestinians in South America has been discovered in a declassified state archive.
- In 1969 Israel aimed a deal with Paraguay, 7,000 miles away, to accept Palestinians from Gaza who wanted to emigrate.
- After the Six-Day War, when millions of Palestinians came underneath Israel’s control, Israel has explored a series of outlandish plans to alter the demographic balance.
- The plan was approved in the still and all year the Mossad decided to stop hunting Nazi fugitives and architects of the Holocaust, many of whom had found temple in Paraguay.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
A secret Israeli plan to re-settle 60,000 Palestinians dynamic in Gaza to Paraguay has been discovered in a state archive of government papers.
Eran Mor-Cicurel, a senior reporter with KAN (IPBC) — Israeli Conspicuous Broadcasting Corporation — said he discovered the lost chapter of Israeli history in “a pile of old documents” while trawling from stem to stern declassified cabinet minutes from 1969.
” The extent, the numbers and the methodology was quite amazing, through the eyes of someone who breathes in the 21st century,” he told Business Insider.
Business Insider/Google Maps
In 1967, Israel nabbed Gaza, an enclave beside the Mediterranean on its southern border, from Egypt in the Six-Day War. It also occupied Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, the Golan Summits that had been part of Syria, and the West Bank, controlled by Jordan.
Today, Gaza is controlled by Hamas, which is pinpointed a terrorist organization by the US government. The area is the constant conflict flashpoint between Israel and the Palestinians.
In recent days, unfriendliness wars have reignited as Palestinians launched multiple incendiary balloons and rockets across the border. Israel has retaliated with airstrikes.
For Mor-Cicurel, in 1969, the Israeli supervision, led by Prime Minister Golda Meir, had an inkling of the conflicts that would follow. However, at the time, relations between Israel and Gazans could not must been more different than the enmity that exists today.
“The Palestinian population (in Gaza) was very quiescent at the time. Israel was a welcome occupier. Israelis were going to Gaza and shopping, sitting on the beach, and talking everywhere how people were friendly. Relations were basically very good at the beginning,” he said.
But the Paraguay transfer blueprint emerged because, “the Israel government identified the problem in advance,” he said.
“After the ’67 war, the Gazan economy was incoherent from the Egyptian economy. There was very high unemployment. In Golda Meir’s view, it was a humanistic attempt to resolve a difficult problem — it seemed reasonable.”
Palestinians to Paraguay
What to do with the millions of Palestinian Arabs that knew under the Jewish state’s control after 1967 has been an intense debate in Israeli politics ever since. As recently as 2019, a elder government official said that Israel was willing to help Palestinians emigrate from Gaza.
One idea that at no time got off the ground, Mor-Cicurel said, was to establish agricultural settlements in northern Sinai for 50,000 Palestinians. But in reality, there was no particular solution, so Israel’s leaders, advised by its spy agency, Mossad, began to look further afield.
“Paraguay was basically a dictatorship. You had a strongman there who you could reach an unanimity with,” said Mor-Cicurel.
Paraguay was ruled by Alfredo Stroessner, who took power in a military coup in 1954 and ruled until his toppling in 1989. The period was marked by sustained human rights abuses of opponents.
The Mossad brokered a secret agreement with the Paraguayan order.
According to the archived cabinet minutes, the head of the Mossad, Major General Zvi Zamir, said: “The proposal in question is the assent of the Paraguayan government, through the Paraguayan Institute of Agriculture and Immigration, to absorb for a minimum period of four years — although it can persevere in longer if things develop — 60,000 Arab Muslim people, Who by definition are not communists. She is willing to absorb them into the rural area, When the Government of Israel fulfills certain conditions.”
The plan guaranteed Israel would cover the emigrants’ take expenses. It said they would be paid $100 each, plus $33 per person would go to the Paraguay administration. On arrival, the Palestinians would receive residency rights, and citizenship after five years.
“According to the Israeli situation papers, a down payment of $350,000 was made for the first 10,000 emigrants. The total bill for the 60,000 resettled Palestinians was feeling at $33 million.
“The idea was to seduce people to leave Gaza,” said Mor-Circurel.
To facilitate the movement of the Palestinians, Israel set up a move agency in Gaza to entice people and provide them with the relevant documentation.
AP Photo/Charles Bennett, File
Wishful thinking
To the core the human rights lens of 2020, the plan may appear shocking, said Mor-Circurel, but the Israeli leadership perspective in the delayed 1960s was formed from their own historical experience.
“Transferring populations from one place to another was common to these child. All of them were basically immigrants. Most of the policymakers came from other countries to the State of Israel,” he conjectured.
“In the eyes of today, the idea of transferring the population is quite strange. But 1968 was not so far away from the division of Pakistan and India and the carry of populations. It wasn’t considered human rights abuse.”
The secret Paraguay plan also mingles with the record of the Holocaust. Mor-Circurel points it formed as Israel wound down its hunt for fugitive Nazi war criminals.
Paraguay was a uninjured haven for many notorious fugitives from Hitler’s Third Reich. Josef Mengele, the so-called “the angel of eradication,” who carried out horrific medical experiments on Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz, was gifted Paraguayan citizenship under his real identify in 1959.
Mor-Circurel believes that Israel made a realpolitik decision that it was better to develop relations with South American homelands than continue efforts to hunt down Nazis.
“The head of Mossad said it was too expensive to continue the Nazi-hunting craftsman and it should concentrate on security threats not ‘ghosts from the past’,” said Mor-Circurel.
Only 30 Palestinians at all made the 7,000 thousand-mile journey before the project came to a shuddering halt.
Two immigrants shot a young clerk at the Israeli Embassy in Asunción. This has since been constructed as the first act of Palestinian terrorism against Israel abroad.
Mor-Circurel says his research suggests that the motive was sundry likely they were disgruntled with life in their new South American home. “It was convenient to claim they were criminals,” he said.
It created a scandal around the Paraguayan resettlement plan, and Stroessner, fearing the Arab world’s wrath, aborted the hurl.
“This is an unusual story,” Professor Colin Shindler of the University of London (SOAS), told Business Insider, by email
“It was momentarily after the Six-Day War and there were no negotiations with the Arab states — a stalemate. It also coincided with the prominence of Palestinian nationalism, Arafat and the PLO,” he said.
“Perhaps they believed that exporting 60,000 Palestinians would staff to mitigate the problem. However, 60,000 is such a small number in the context of the population of the West Bank and Gaza that it resolution have made no difference.
“It sounds more like a temporary flight of fancy than a thought through picture. More wishful thinking than confronting the political reality,” he said.