The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

Ilan Pappé

The conventional Israeli policy of ethnic cleansing, employed successfully in 1948 against half of Palestine's population and against hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank in 1967, was of no use here. You could slowly transfer Palestinians out of the West Bank, and in particular, out of the Greater Jerusalem area, but you could not do it in the Gaza Strip once you had sealed it as a maximum-security prison camp. The result, as I have argued elsewhere, was the onset of a policy of incremental genocide by Israel against the Gaza Strip.