“How many Arabs have you dispatched?” Prime Minister Levi Eshkol asked Ada Sereni in March 1968. Sereni oversaw a secret unit tasked with “encouraging emigration” of Palestinian refugees from Gaza after the territory was occupied in 1967. The unit operated as part of a broad Israeli campaign initiated immediately after the war and designed to remove as many Palestinians as possible from the newly captured territories. It soon became clear that efforts to encourage immigration also encourage violence.
In the film, historian Dr. Omri Shafer Raviv, who has studied the early years of the occupation, describes Israel’s efforts to push Palestinian civilians out of the territories from the late 1960s and into the present day, as the Israeli government openly advances a forcible transfer under the euphemistic banner of “encouraging emigration.”