Ahdaf Soueif warns Gaza sets displacement precedent

An Israeli rightwing rally overlooking Gaza on 30 July 2025 called openly for the return of Israeli settlements, Ahdaf Soueif writes in The Guardian. She argues that what followed 7 October 2023—mass killing, maiming and displacement—has been accompanied not only by rhetoric but by officials describing forced removal as policy, while key Western governments keep supplying arms and intelligence.

Soueif’s column stacks concrete episodes to make a case about how norms erode: statements by ministers, social-media performances by soldiers and pundits, and a drumbeat of administrative measures that turn cruelty into routine. She highlights Israel’s national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir as a symbol of this shift, citing an AI-generated video he circulated about Palestinian prisoners and his public conduct during a prison visit, alongside claims about new detention infrastructure and proposals to expand capital punishment through military courts. In her telling, the point is not that extremist ideas exist—every country has them—but that they are being moved from the margins into the machinery of state.

The second-order effect she worries about is exportable precedent. If a government can make displacement talk explicit, and if the response from allied democracies is limited to investigations, process language and incremental diplomatic pressure, other governments learn what the real red lines are. Soueif describes a period around 2017 when she sensed changing public attitudes in Western countries—less reflexive hostility to pro-Palestinian advocacy, more scrutiny of claims about “western values” and a “most moral army”. That shift, she writes, did not translate into changed policy: settlement expansion and repeated assaults on Gaza continued, and after 2023 the scale of violence and displacement rose sharply.

Her account also points to the asymmetry between public debate and state capacity. Civil society can generate awareness, but only governments control arms transfers, intelligence sharing, trade privileges and the legal shielding that comes from alliances. When those levers remain in place, officials who face few domestic costs can treat condemnation as background noise and focus on operational tempo. Soueif notes the visibility of the work itself—such as hundreds of Israeli trucks clearing rubble from Gaza—suggesting a conflict that is not only fought but administered, with logistics and contracting turning devastation into a managed landscape.

Soueif’s warning is ultimately about what becomes normal when the world’s most powerful states decide that normality is negotiable. She portrays Gaza as a test case in which declared intentions and visible actions meet continued external support.

On her telling, Israeli ministers are no longer hinting at what they want; they are describing it, and the supply lines have not stopped.