How Pat Robertson’s Christian TV empire created a ‘shadow government’ — and led to Donald Trump

Written by Chauncey DeVega 
/ Salon 





August 29, 2019

Last week Donald Trump shared a message on Twitter from a racist conspiracy theorist proclaiming that he, the president, was viewed by Jewish people as the “Second Coming of God” and the “King of Israel.”

The mytho-religious aspects of this “endorsement” likely have no meaning for Donald Trump. Such claims matter to Trump primarily because they stroke his megalomania. Trump the malignant narcissist authoritarian and fascist seeks out praise from wherever it may come. As such, Donald Trump frequently praises himself in the grandest and most absurd terms possible: for example, Trump’s looking to the sky last week as if looking for a sign from God and then telling journalists and the world that he is in fact the “chosen one.”

Beyond personal grandiosity, Trump’s endorsement of his status as the “Second Coming” and the “King of Israel” were important signals to his two most loyal groups of supporters.

Christian nationalists, evangelicals, “reconstructionists” and “dominionists” support Donald Trump because they see him as a means of overturning the U.S. Constitution and its rules separating church and state, with the ultimate goal of creating a Christian theocracy. Trump’s racist supporters are buoyed and encouraged by his sharing (another) message from a member of their movement. Collectively, these Trump supporters are eager to put an end to America’s multiracial democracy.

Terry Heaton was a television news executive for the Christian Broadcasting Network during the 1980s, where he worked primarily on “The 700 Club,” its signature news and talk show. Heaton also served as one of Pat Robertson’s advisers during his 1988 presidential campaign.

Terry Heaton is also the author of several books including his most recent, “The Gospel of Self: How Pat Robertson Stole the Soul of the GOP.”

I spoke to Heaton recently about how and why right-wing evangelical Christians have come to worship and love Donald Trump, a man who is an unapologetic sinner. Heaton also offers insights on the direct connection between evangelical-oriented media such as his former employer at CBN, Christian nationalism,  Fox News and Donald Trump’s conquest of the Republican Party and its voters. Heaton also warns about the power and influence of Robertson and his “shadow government” of right-wing  evangelicals, who have waged a decades-long campaign to overthrow secular democracy in America.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. You can also listen to my full conversation with Terry Heaton through the player embedded below.

How do you make sense of Donald Trump’s rise to power and why so many Christians support him, given his evident values and behavior?

One of the things that has always puzzled me about the Trump phenomenon is that he would never have been elected had he not been able to recruit people for whom his policies would be harmful. But many of these voters consider their faith first. As I wrote in my book “The Gospel of Self,” they see affluence around them and in their minds there is no reason they too can’t be rich one day.

There is also this belief from a certain Biblical perspective that Donald Trump is a type of King Cyrus. Cyrus was the Persian king who released the Israelites from captivity and then let them go back to Jerusalem and build the temple. Connecting Trump to King Cyrus has been written about a great deal in certain Christian publications.

Cyrus wasn’t a righteous man. He was a reprobate and a pagan. But the point is that God used him for good. Many of these Christians look at Trump and they say the same thing could be going on with him. The ends then justify the means, and to them supporting Trump means getting their Supreme Court justices, “religious freedom,” prayer in schools and all their related concerns about “morality.” This of course includes abortion and same-sex marriage.

What should be viewed as major mistakes by Donald Trump, in terms of his behavior and policy-making, are just dismissed by many conservatives because of their religious beliefs. He also promised to “drain the swamp,” which these voters find to be very appealing and compelling language.

But Trump has not in fact “drained the swamp.” He is the head swamp-monster. He is violating the emoluments clauses of the United States Constitution. He has put crony capitalists in charge of his administration. Trumpism is a version of what is known as “state capture” by private interests — the kind of thing that happens in Third World countries and so-called banana republics.

Trump supporters do not see it that way — and that is the problem. In order to reach Trump’s Christian evangelical supporters it has to be a Christian message. You will not convince those people with a rational or secular argument. It has to be from a Biblical perspective, because that’s the only thing they listen to.

For example, in talking with these voters, how about we agree that God put Donald Trump in office? Now if we agree on that, then we also have to also come to an agreement that throughout the history in the Bible where God has done such things, it was not always for the good of the believers. God has put certain people in power in order to punish others, to disappoint them.

I think that could well be going on with Donald Trump. Trump’s Christian supporters believe that God is upset with America’s culture. But the Bible says that judgment begins at the house of God. So if God is angry with the culture, guess who he holds responsible? Not the culture, but the church. And I think that’s an argument that you can win with Trump’s Christian supporters.

Do these right-wing Christian leaders actually believe that Donald Trump is a tool of God? It isn’t simply transactional, where they and others are getting what they want, but they know in their hearts and minds that Trump — by their own criteria — is a wicked sinner?

Yes, they do believe it. They believe the King Cyrus argument. It is being used in many places all over the Christian world now. Yes, Trump’s behavior is terrible. Yes, Donald Trump is the opposite of what we would hold up as good Christian. But it doesn’t matter, because God used King Cyrus and God can use Donald Trump in the same way. This is why it Is so hard to speak in rational terms with Donald Trump’s Christian evangelical supporters. King Cyrus is their ultimate explanation.

If you know the Bible, then you also know the places in the Bible to which these people turn for everything. Then you can make opposing arguments within the scope of the Bible itself. And that’s what I’m trying to do. It is not easy.

In terms of biblical hermeneutics, how can one group of Christians actually believe that Jesus Christ — assuming he even existed — is some type of gun-toting, nationalist plutocrat who wants to punish the poor and bless the rich, while other Christians believe exactly the opposite? 

The doctrines of the church are man-made.  A person can argue for the inerrancy of the Bible, but they cannot make a compelling claim that man-made doctrines are perfect. Either people are infallible or the Fall of Man never took place.

White evangelicals and other white Christians also need to confront the racism and white supremacy in their churches and religious communities.

The Southern Baptist denomination was formed for one purpose and one purpose only, and that was to keep whites from interacting with African-Americans. It’s tragic. If one believes that the rise of Trump means the death of all that is good and holy, then we may be missing out on some real good that can come out of how Trump and his movement are really exposing the deep problems in this country with racism and other social issues. Trump is putting all of America’s problems on the metaphorical table for the whole world to see.

How did you initially get involved with “The 700 Club”?

I was working for a TV station in Louisville, Kentucky, called WHAS. I was a host and producer of a magazine show that was popular back in the late ’70s called “PM Magazine”. I got this packet in the mail one day from a young woman who was going to CBN University, and she was doing a study on magazine show burnout — what happens to people who produce these kinds of daily high-pressure programs.

I filled out the questionnaire and sent it back to her. She called me the next week and said, “You must be a Christian because the way you answered the questions is not like the other people.”

The first story on my audition reel was a story about a thoroughbred horse photographer in Lexington, Kentucky. I did not know that Pat Robertson was obsessed with thoroughbred horses. And the fact that I did that story with just a photographer and myself was impressive to Pat Robertson and the network, as they were struggling with how to do that kind of work. I really could have written my own ticket. The fact that they offered me a job wasn’t really a surprise. I was out of work when I accepted the job. But it wasn’t just the money. I was really up for the challenge.

Many people believe that Ted Turner’s gift to television is 24-hour news. But Turner’s real gift was that he took graphics production technology out of the hands of engineers and put it in the hands of artists. That revolutionized television production on a scale that most people do not realize. It was remarkable. I knew that, so I hired a gentleman from New York who was the godfather of television graphics and he came in and built a graphics production facility that was second to none.

Many of the techniques perfected by Fox News were actually borrowed from CBN, such as the style, tone and obvious bias that is used to frame the narrative.

Ten years before Fox News, there was CBN News. There was “The 700 Club.” CBN had a slogan, “TV Journalism with a Different Spirit.” We pioneered point-of-view journalism for television. In so doing, because Pat Robertson was very conservative politically, he was able to blend Republican Party politics and conservative politics with the Bible, and in so doing he presented a consistent message that if you were for Jesus, then you were for the Republican Party. From a journalistic standpoint, we were presenting a right-wing version of the news.

Where did that slogan come from? It is so seductive.

The marketing genius of CBN cannot be underestimated. The people who worked there were brilliant. George Gallup was our researcher. We had very smart people who saw marketing as a way to move people to make social and political change — and the change that CBN wanted was to move people from wherever they were to the right. Not only did Pat Robertson and CBN move people to the right, we moved the Republican Party to the right. This was all built upon a fallacy that it was OK for us to present right-wing news programming because everything else was supposedly left-wing. To say there is left-wing news is just not true.

We at CBN had no business presenting political propaganda as news, and other people picked up on what we were doing. For example, Fox News says that they’re “fair and balanced.” What are they balancing? Well, they claim they’re balancing the liberal media. It is based on a false assumption.

CBN is a business. How did faith mate with profit-seeking? How did the “faithful” reconcile making all that money with the network and “The 700 Club” in particular? Were there ever any conversations about how poor people were being exploited by the pledge drives, for example?

That’s a very cynical way of looking at it. I appreciate your question, but that is not the way it really was. We were trying to change the world for Jesus. These were really wonderful, well-intentioned people. That’s what we were doing. We never did anything that messed with people’s faith. We wanted to present this all as “You, the viewer, are being a faithful Christian.” Now if you go back and look at Pat Robertson’s book “The Secret Kingdom,” which he wrote in the early to mid 1980s — which is a handbook, a self-help book based on the Bible — that is where I started to really have problems with what we were doing at CBN. Because it is so easy to get caught up in that aspect of the message that you forget the other parts of the Bible, such as helping the poor.

I had a meeting with Pat when I became senior producer and responsible for fundraising on TV. I said, “Pat, if I’m going to do this, you’re going to have to teach me about fundraising.” So we had lunch one day, and we ate and had our pleasantries, and then got a pot of coffee and cleared the table away. And he said, “Write this down. People give to this ministry for these reasons, and in this order. How does it help me? How does it help my family? How does it help my neighborhood? How does it help my community? How does it help my state? How does it help my country? And how does it help somebody else?”

So if you can craft a message that appeals to the self, then you can raise money. And the last reason people give is so they can help somebody else. If you really want to raise money, you’ve got to appeal to the person’s sense of self-interest. You’ve got to talk to them in a way that they understand that you are talking to them. Craft the fundraising message in a way that appeals to their sense of self-worth, their sense of self-growth, their sense of place in the world. Speak to their ego.

How do we connect the dots from Pat Robertson’s decision to run for president with where America is today with Donald Trump and his takeover of the Republican Party?

Pat Robertson was very effective at creating a shadow government of religious conservatives. That was his message. Pat wrote a book about this shadow government after he dropped out of the presidential race. Robertson said that his greatest contribution was raising up people like Sarah Palin. She is a classic example of the shadow government of “The 700 Club.” But this shadow government and people like Palin are all over the United States now. This was a grassroots effort to build the reserves, if you will, for the legislature, at school boards, city councils, then state legislatures and on up.

You would be amazed at the number of people who are in key positions right now. It is why the religious right and Robertson’s shadow government have been so much more effective than many people know. If this was a top-down approach it would be easy to stop because all you have to do is identify the top leadership and then you can cut it off. But now you can’t. This Christian right-wing shadow government is very much a grassroots movement that starts with the message of conservatism. Now I would go so far as to say it is nationalism. It is not just rural, red-state Christians. This movement is in the suburban churches too, the big megachurches where the congregation then takes the message back to their neighborhoods and their friends and so on.

You need to understand that white Christian nationalists, Christian fundamentalists, are not in any one denomination or any one particular church. They are everywhere. Many of them were raised on what we created at “The 700 Club.” They are in charge of a large voting bloc. They are not going to be swayed by logical arguments. It will take people from within their own version of Christianity, that world, to help right the wrongs they are doing to the country.

Can we draw a more or less straight line from Pat Robertson and “The 700 Club” in 1988 to Donald Trump’s presidency today?

Absolutely. I don’t see how it’s possible for it not to be. The role of evangelicals in the election of Donald Trump is still underestimated because he is such a reprobate. Many people have difficulty believing that the church could possibly be involved in Donald Trump’s election. But again, those who do not want to accept how Christians can support Donald Trump are not properly thinking about how this all came to pass in America.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/how-pat-robertsons-christian-tv-empire-created-a-shadow-government-and-led-to-donald-trump/

U.S. Jews Have Only Themselves to Blame for Trump's anti-Semitic Tropes. Listen to Gideon Levy

By blindly and automatically supporting Israel, the Jewish establishment in the U.S. proves that American-Jewish liberalism ends where the occupation starts. 

LISTEN FREE

Aug 25, 2019 4:19 PM

A composite image of (from left) Rashida Tlaib, Muftia Tlaib and Gideon Levy.Reuters, Gil Cohen Magen and AP

On today's show:

Haaretz Weekly Ep. 36Haaretz

Host Simon Spungin is joined by senior Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy, who has harsh words for the American-Jewish establishment, which he accuses of supporting the occupation policies of the Israeli government.

Gideon also tells us about his visit to the ancestral home of U.S. Congresswoman Rashida Talib, who, along with Ilhan Omar, was banned from entering Israel last week over their support of the boycott movement.

Follow Haaretz Weekly on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Haaretz Weekly

Analysis 

Israel Has Created Ten Methods for Deportation

One it reserves for labor migrants and African refugees – and all the rest are for the native Palestinians

Amira Hass 

Jul 30, 2019 8:15 AM

Protests against the deportation of Filipino children in front of the prime minister's residence, Jerusalem, June 11, 2019.Olivier Fitoussi

Happy are the Filipinas whose risk of deportation from Israel has awakened Israelis with consciences, who understand that dry regulations and laws are not the only guide to a worthy life. Happy are the small Filipinos born in Israel, whose Israeli friends are immune from the brainwashing of a “state for Jews only,” and are demonstrating and interviewed against the deportation.

Israel has created ten methods of deportation. One of them it has reserved for labor migrants and African refugees fleeing war and famine, while the rest have been assigned to the native Palestinians – children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of people who were born here. Most of the Israeli public views these methods as justified and supports – even if only by remaining silent – their continued implementation. We, the minority, scream against it inside a bell jar.

There is the expulsion of people and chasing them out of the country, there is the forced displacement from homes and villages to enclaves of Area A, there is expulsion to the Gaza Strip and turning it into a penal colony, expulsion from Jerusalem to the West Bank and from agricultural land that provided a living for the family for hundreds of years.

Official Israel is careful not to declare that its intention is to empty the land of its Palestinian natives. It has always relied on laws, regulations and military orders – seemingly respectable and proper – with a stamp of approval from the High Court of Justice. It has revealed great talent to ignore the principle of equality and the political, social and geographic contexts of its forced rule over another people. (For example: Why do they not grant building permits to Palestinians in the places they have lived for decades and centuries? Because the law states that only a detailed master plan allows the granting of building permits. So why don’t they prepare a master plan for the Palestinian community?

Israel prepares to demolish homes in East Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi Hummus, July 22, 2019. AFP

The clerks of the IDF’s Civil Administration in the West Bank, or those of Jerusalem city hall or the Galilee and Triangle areas shrug and remain silent, and the honorable justices of the High Court of Justice do not ask difficult questions. They only know that the house does not have a permit – so its fate is to be demolished.

There is expulsion by virtue of the Israeli control over the Palestinian Population Registry, which turns Palestinians into permanent residents by the grace of Israel’s bad intentions. Until 1994, Israel revoked the residency status of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and in the Gaza Strip if they resided overseas for a long period, or were not here during the 1967 census.

The Oslo Accords, in one of its rare positive sections, annulled this liberty of the occupier to revoke Palestinian residency, but not that of the Jerusalemites. But the liberty of Israel to determine who and how many of the 1967 and 1948 deportees could return to the West Bank enclaves was not annulled. The mechanism of “family reunification” – which has been recognized as one the ways of restoring residency status – was always too slow, and since 2000 it has in practice been frozen in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In Jerusalem it is subject to the whims, foot-dragging and cold-heartedness of the Interior Ministry. And at any moment the Shin Bet and the Interior Ministry can revoke the residency status of a Jerusalem resident for “security reasons” and deport them to the moon.

There is expulsion by drying people out. Israel controls the water sources. It sets low water quotas for the natives. Agriculture for Jews is expanding in the West Bank, while the water for the Palestinians – for drinking and agriculture – is shrinking.

In the summer months hundreds of thousands are dependent on water supplied in water tankers (because there is no water in the taps) and pay 10 times as much for it. The Gaza Strip is cut off from the water in the rest of the country, as if it were an isolated island. Ninety-five percent of its water is unfit for drinking. Not everyone can bear this for a long time.

A tanker at a filling station in Jericho. Some Palestinians have as little as 15 liters of water per day.Courtesy of EWASH

There is expulsion by the banning of construction and connecting to infrastructure and by constant demolitions, blocking access to springs and grazing land, in what is called Area C, which covers most of the West Bank. Not everyone can bear it for a long time. People move to live in the Palestinian enclaves.

Israel’s control in Area C (while embedding and perpetuating the situation that was supposed to be temporary, according to the Oslo Accords) is one of the main reasons for the deterioration of the Palestinian economy (de-development is the excellent term coined by economist Sara Roy): The absence of an economic horizon is a means for causing masses of young people to leave the country.

Evil is also the work of vicious people: Wherever the state and the Civil Administration do not succeed, the settlers intervene. The army punishes the Palestinians for the settlers’ violence, and prevents the former from accessing their land to “prevent friction.” This is how our observant, frum youth take over more and more Palestinian land.

The ban on movement of the residents of the Gaza Strip is not just the imprisonment of two million people. It is their expulsion from our minds and the slaughter of creativity, ability to make a living, to study and heal the sick. In contravention of the Oslo Accords, Israel defines Gaza-born residents who managed to reach the West Bank and stay there as illegal. To avoid deportation, they imprison themselves in their hometown in the West Bank. It’s no surprise that young Palestinians are trying to leave the country: expulsion in the guise of leaving of one’s own free will.

And there is mass expulsion during wartime, whose peak was brought on by the 1948 war. Therefore, our messianic right – mildly religious, Orthodox nationalist and secular – dissatisfied with the creeping expulsion of Palestinians that the government is carrying out all the time – loves wars, looks forward to them and instigates them.

https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/ten-methods-for-deportation-israel-has-created-1.7582516

Israeli Right Resurrects ‘Voluntary Transfer’ of Palestinians, Despite 50 Years of Failure The proposal by a ‘senior government official’ to assist emigration from Gaza joins the efforts of esteemed Israeli leaders and professors, but they haven’t been able to suppress Palestinian aspirations

Israeli Right Resurrects ‘Voluntary Transfer’ of Palestinians, Despite 50 Years of Failure

The proposal by a ‘senior government official’ to assist emigration from Gaza joins the efforts of esteemed Israeli leaders and professors, but they haven’t been able to suppress Palestinian aspirations

Amira Hass 

Aug 25, 2019 11:56 AM

On Monday, when a “senior government official” said Israel was willing to help Palestinians emigrate from the Gaza Strip, it sounded to many people like empty talk. But this statement follows a series of Israeli attempts at demographic manipulations, so what the official said shouldn’t be played down. Still, Israel has a history of utter failure in getting Palestinians to respond to material enticements to emigrate.

The remarks and the speed with which the leader of the right-wing Yamina alliance, Ayelet Shaked, came out in support of the government official’s philosophy shows the strength of the Israeli delusion that Palestinian demands and national aspirations will disappear, diminish or be defeated through emigration.

Immediately following the start of the occupation in 1967, the Israeli government’s inclination was to annex Gaza to Israel while emptying it of most of its refugees. The assumption was that it would be easy to uproot the refugees once again. The proposed destinations for them thrown around by the cabinet were Sinai, the West Bank, Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Iraq and South America.

In the book “1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East,” published in Hebrew in 2005 and in English in 2007, Tom Segev provides details on proposals such as these to uproot the refugees once again. Above all, the details and the way the initiatives were considered says something about their proponents, who maintained an arrogant colonial way of thinking, treating the Palestinians as subjects devoid of a connection to their homeland, like chess pieces that could be moved around the board.

One of the plans that sounds nearly utopian today, when Israel has been barring Gazans by any means possible from going to the West Bank, was to relocate Palestinian refugees from Gaza to the West Bank. That was proposed in September 1967 by Yosef Weitz, a head of the Jewish National Fund and an advocate of population transfer even before Israel was established.

Interior Minister Haim-Moshe Shapira of the religious Zionist movement actually proposed absorbing 200,000 refugees from Gaza in Israel proper and to balance their demographic presence by increasing Jewish immigration. Yigal Allon, who was labor minister in 1967, supported settling them in Sinai at El-Arish and the West Bank, excluding the Jordan Valley.

Segev writes about the proposals by three professors: Roberto Bachi, the director of the Central Bureau of Statistics, mathematician Aryeh Dvoretzky and economist Michael Bruno, who proposed transferring 40,000 families, about 250,000 people (and more than half of Gaza’s population at the time) to the West Bank over 10 years.

Palestinian demonstrators take cover at the border fence in the southern Gaza Strip, June 21, 2019. Ibraheem Abu Mustafa / Reuters

The professors assumed that the project would spawn major economic growth. Housing Minister Mordechai Bentov of the left-wing Mapam party supported it. In fact, some families did agree to move to the West Bank and live to this day in some of its refugee camps, but their numbers are much smaller than the 40,000 that was proposed.

In June, the website +972 Magazine wrote about a new study on the work of these three professors, framing it as the work of a committee that also included sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt. Although it was said that the research was based on the newly revealed documents, Segev, who relied on documents he found in the Israel State Archives, quoted from conversations that the professors had with Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.

Compassionate Israel

Segev wrote in his typical sarcastic style: “Bachi gave Eshkol alarming information: a survey had shown that infant mortality in Gaza might decrease. ‘If we continue to be as compassionate as we are now,’ he said, infant mortality in the territories might even come to rival that of Israeli Arabs. ‘This is a shocking situation,’ he observed.”

Dvoretzky proposed transferring Gaza refugees to the homes of Palestinians who were uprooted in 1967, particularly in the Jordan Valley. Segev writes that the mathematician explained to Eshkol why this was “worthwhile.”

“The more Gaza refugees occupied the houses of people who had recently left the West Bank, the less chance there was that those people would return. ‘In addition, you are provoking internal strife among the Palestinians themselves.’”

The unconcealed assumption behind efforts to encourage migration to the West Bank was that many of the migrants would continue on to Jordan. But Segev wrote that Defense Minister Moshe Dayan “was opposed to resettling the refugees on the West Bank, insisting that they belonged with [King] Hussein – i.e.,with Jordan, not the West Bank. Then Dayan added, ‘I don’t mind if they all emigrate.’”

From the beginning of 1968, Segev wrote, a group of five Israelis worked in Gaza via collaborators who went around the refugee camps and promised people money if they agreed to leave. The military government, the Shin Bet security service and the prime minister’s adviser on Arab affairs stood behind the group’s activities. Eshkol appointed Ada Sereni coordinator among these groups. She was born in Italy, a kibbutznik with hawkish political views and the widow of Enzo Sereni, a parachutist from the pre-state Jewish community who died at Dachau.

Palestinians flee into Jordan via the damaged Allenby Bridge, 1967.AP

Segev writes that Ada Sereni was selected for the job because Eshkol hoped that her connections in Italy would permit the transfer of a large number of refugees from Gaza to Libya, a former Italian colony. In Israel, the efforts promoting the population transfer were kept a secret, but the activities in Gaza were in the open, as was the money offered to those leaving and the form they had to fill out, stating that they were leaving of their own free will.

At the same time, the Israeli Foreign Ministry – apparently in coordination with the Mossad, according to Segev – was encouraging the emigration of Palestinian refugees to Brazil and other parts of Latin America. The director of the Jewish aid organization the Joint Distribution Committee also helped in attempts to organize the emigration of Palestinian refugees.

According to Segev, in May 1968, Ada Sereni reported that in the first three months of her work, about 15,000 people had left Gaza. The Central Bureau of Statistics found that in the first six months of 1968, about 20,000 Palestinians had emigrated.

What the Israeli politicians and professors didn’t understand in 1968 was that the refugees’ hope to return to the towns and villages they had originally come from in what became Israel proper hadn’t waned. Still, a sense of solidarity and of a community with a common identity had developed in Gaza. Leaving voluntarily – permanently – was not considered an option, in contrast to leaving to study or work elsewhere and return during vacation periods (as the Egyptians had permitted when they administered Gaza before the 1967 Six-Day War).

Here and there, the documents reveal Israeli intentions to create pressure to encourage emigration. In a note from a Foreign Ministry official, Segev learned that the Israeli commander in Gaza, Mordechai Gur, was inclined to lower living standards in the Strip to spur residents to leave.

Even before Ada Sereni’s appointment, Eshkol had hoped that “precisely because of the suffocation and imprisonment there, maybe the Arabs will move from the Gaza Strip .... Perhaps if we don’t give them enough water they won’t have a choice, because the orchards will yellow and wither.” My Haaretz colleague Ofer Aderet included this quote in an article published in English on November 17, 2017, based on classified minutes of a debate by Eshkol’s cabinet.

Just one method worked

Even before the publication of these and similar statements, some Palestinians had concluded that the worsening living conditions were part of a Zionist plot and that the line between gestures encouraging emigration and worsening living conditions for that purpose was a very fine one.

The lack of water in Gaza is much worse than mere yellowing orchards. Also, the poverty and suffocating enclosure of the Strip are dozens of times worse than in 1967 and 1968. The Israeli blockade, which has tightened gradually since 1991, is the number-one factor in the economic, occupational and environmental decline in Gaza, with all the social, health and psychological ramifications. The result is a sharp rise in the number of people who want to leave.

The last known attempt by Israel interpreted as soliciting people to leave came in 2016. In February of that year Israel declared that Gazans could travel abroad via the Allenby Bridge crossing the Jordan River, but on condition that they pledge not to return for a year, not to stop on the way and not to remain in the Palestinian Authority enclaves in the West Bank.

In May of this year, the absence period was lowered to six months. Israel’s willingness to let people leave via the Allenby crossing was considered a relief measure, because since 1997 Israel had prohibited Gazans from entering or exiting via Jordan except with prior permission, which was granted very rarely. This prohibition went against the Oslo Accords, which stated that the parties would treat Gaza and the West Bank as a single entity. Egypt – aware of Israel’s hallucinations about a mass departure of Palestinians – has since 2005 tightened restrictions on passage via the Rafah crossing, to the point of closing it entirely for months on end.

Despite the many Palestinians who would like to emigrate, only a few hundred people took advantage of the new Israeli regulation and left via the Allenby Bridge. The opening of the Rafah crossing for longer periods over the past year has let them return to Gaza without reference to pledges they signed.

In 1967 Israel took upon itself the authority to revoke residency from Palestinians who were not present in the occupied territory during the war or during the census conducted there, or who went abroad and remained outside the territories for an extended period. This was the only method of “encouraging emigration” that worked.

This authority was taken away from Israel with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1994 (although not in East Jerusalem). Even those who since that time left Gaza and the West Bank because of deteriorating conditions and disappointments continue to hold a Palestinian passport and Palestinian ID number, not to mention a deep connection and emotional involvement. Some discover that other countries don’t welcome everyone. Many try any way they can to register their children in the Palestinian population registry.

But despite all the failures, Israel’s expanding right wing continues to hallucinate about “voluntary transfer.” The Palestinians long ago proved that there is no such thing.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-right-wing-resurrects-voluntary-transfer-of-palestinians-despite-50-years-of-fail-1.7735140?utm_source=smartfocus&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-brief&utm_content=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.haaretz.com%2Fisrael-news%2F.premium-right-wing-resurrects-voluntary-transfer-of-palestinians-despite-50-years-of-fail-1.7735140&fbclid=IwAR1Gr8pZ6UZ7f3TQ5D5gXDRLqv6lud0_U57CAkfCQLR-XSjJJ105xQolO2o