1969 assignment of nationality, pointing to an existing address for absorption, is how Israel used to frame Palestinians. Golda Meir, reflecting on regional identities as all recently designated states, denied anyone would be Palestinian. Her framework said West Bank arabs are Jordanian (a nationality extended to them by Jordan’s 1954 law).
2026 is a completely different story. Denial of humanity, denial of any address, is an escalation to genocide as a statement about the people. This is how officials of the Israeli state speak of Palestinians today.
Meir’s scheme gave the 1948 Arabs citizenship and the West Bankers Jordanian passports, which they held until 1988. Everyone had a legal somewhere, so the peoplehood question was lobbied as a filing decision about which state processes the claim. Notably absent from her theory is Gaza, which left a dangerous gap.
Egypt administered Gaza from 1949 to 1967 and never extended citizenship to people living there. When Egypt retreated from Gaza in the 1967 war, the Gazans who were left behind under Israeli rule weren’t treated as Egyptian or Israeli. They were stateless under Meir, stateless after Camp David, which Sadat negotiated without returning Gaza to Egypt, stateless under Oslo’s interim status, and stateless today. Her framework had no exit for the Gazans, which is how it grew into the crucible of Palestinian nationalism, from the fedayeen era onward.
When you look at the Meir foundations, the exit paths are the focus. Palestinians were to become citizens of Israel and Jordan. Yet Jordan withdrew the exit in 1988, responding to the First Intifada (because Jordan was undermined by the Arab League reaffirmation of its own 1974 Rabat designation of the PLO as “sole representative”, despite King Hussein objections), and the Israeli citizenship track was locked to the 1948 population. So the Gaza equation escalated as an address for people with no address, while Jordan was losing control, challenging her theory.
Fast forward to today and Israeli state officials speak publicly in the register the Genocide Convention defines as incitement.
The Chief Rabbi holds a salaried state office. Under Article III(c) of the Genocide Convention and the ICTR’s Akayesu and Nahimana precedents, authority and audience are what convert dehumanizing rhetoric into incitement.
The Chief Rabbi holds a generational, descendant role. His father Ovadia Yosef, also a former Chief Rabbi, said in 2010 that Palestinians should perish from this world and that Abbas should be struck with a plague. His brother Yitzhak preceded him in the same office.
The Chief Rabbi chose a venue with a particular political meaning. Gush Katif Museum commemorates the settlements evacuated from Gaza in 2005, which frames the topic as taking land.
The Chief Rabbi’s speech lands precisely on that old Meir citizenship gap: the one population she never accounted for is the one he dehumanizes, denying their rights, marking their land for destruction and settlement by Jews only.
In an address at West Jerusalem’s Gush Katif Museum, Israel’s Chief Rabbi David Yosef denied Palestinians exist as a people and said they ‘have no rights’. He also claimed Gaza and occupied West Bank cities for Jews, and called for Gaza’s destruction and Jewish settlement.