It’s been my contention, since the very beginning of the latest war between Israel and Hamas, that Israel’s true goal is mass displacement of the Palestinian people. Now, it seems, I may just be right. We need to prevent this at all costs.
I wrote a detailed essay on this subject in November 2023, a little more than a month into the conflict.
It wasn’t just a hunch. Senior Israeli figures, including cabinet members, were saying as much; although they sometimes used coded—barely coded—language.
As Israeli forces entered Gaza, they called for a general evacuation, and suddenly a million people or more were on the move. Then Israeli cabinet member Avi Dichter let slip a fatal word: “Nakba.” That’s the Arabic word for “disaster,” and it’s generally used by the Palestinians to describe the foundation of Israel in 1948 and the massive permanent resettlement of Palestinians that followed.
Dichter actually said it: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.” He seemed to be implying that the Palestinians were about to be removed from their territories for good. This wasn’t going to be a limited operation like previous incursions into Palestinian territories. The Israelis weren’t going to pull back.
This would be a final… well, you get the idea.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a chance to set the record straight and allay fears, across the region and the wider world, especially in the West, that he was about to trigger a fresh wave of mass migration. But instead of reproaching Dichter or contradicting him, Bibi simply told him and others “to be careful with your words.”
Deaf ears. Days later, hardline Israeli politicians, including a former Mossad deputy director, penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, “Why the West Should Welcome Refugees from Gaza.” Ram Ben Barak and Danny Danon said that large-scale emigration from Gaza would have to be part of the solution to the crisis, and that Europe, with its “long history of assisting refugees fleeing conflicts,” should be where most of the Gazans go. They said individual nations could take 10,000 Gazans each, and noted approvingly Angela Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das!”—“We can do this!”—in response to the Migrant Crisis in 2015.
Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, an ultra among ultras who previously denied that the Palestinians were even a people, rushed to give his seal of approval to the plan. Congratulating Ben Barak and Danon on Twitter, he wrote, “voluntary migration and the absorption of Gazan Arabs in the countries of the world is a humanitarian solution that will bring an end to the suffering of Jews and Arabs alike.”
Smotrich went on to say “the state system” in Gaza should be allowed to “collapse.” With the refusal of neighboring states to shelter the Gazans—King Abdullah of Jordan said, right from the start, that he would not take Gazan refugees, and the Egyptians said the same—this could only make the need for resettlement outside the region a fait accompli, unless death by starvation was and is the goal. In some sense, the two goals—extirpation and extermination—amount to the same thing.
Gilal Gamliel, Israel’s intelligence minister, also added her support to the plan for a Gazan exodus. “We must try something new, and we call on the international community to help make it a reality,” she wrote in The Jerusalem Post.
Anyway, that was November 2023, the early days, and there were various indications that the promised resettlement might be at hand. The Germans, of course, appeared enthusiastic—more immigrants!—and there were rumours of preparations for mass evacuations via the German embassy in Cairo. Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousef, who has family in Gaza, said he would be willing for Scotland to take as many Gazans as wanted to come; although, mercifully, he had no control over British immigration policy. Canada looked like an obvious destination, parts of the Midwest too.
It didn’t happen. Sixteen or so months later, Gazans have fled to the West, but not in the numbers—hundreds of thousands or millions—that would be necessary to drain the territory and leave it empty for Israeli occupation, annexation and repopulation.
Now that Donald Trump is back in power, hostilities have been brought to a close—temporarily, maybe permanently.
But that doesn’t mean the Gazans are staying put.
On Saturday, President Trump spoke to King Abdullah of Jordan on the phone. Aboard Air Force One, he told reporters that Gaza looks like a “demolition site” and expressed his opinion that it would probably be better for the Gazans to leave the territory and go to Jordan or Egypt.
“I said to him I’d love you to take on more [Gazans] because I’m looking at the whole Gaza strip right now and it’s a mess, it’s a real mess. I’d like him to take people,” Trump said.
“I’d like Egypt to take people,” Trump continued, adding that he would speak to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Sunday.
“You’re talking about a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Trump said.
The official US position since the beginning of the conflict has been to resist any calls for resettlement. Was Trump speaking on behalf of the US government, or was he simply opining? Nobody could disagree that Gaza is a mess. It really does look like a demolition site. It’s hard to imagine rats, let alone humans, existing in such an environment.
Let’s not be coy about what it really means if the US now favours the resettlement of the Gazans. If King Abdullah and the Egyptians say “no”—and it’s hard to see how they could be forced, frankly—then where do the Gazans go? Europe and the West. European nations will come under pressure to step up and they will.
But even if the Gazans do end up in Jordan and Egypt, in makeshift camps, many aren’t likely to stay. Such camps, in Lebanon and elsewhere, have been cesspools of despair and breeding grounds for terrorism. The young—the young men—will leave, en masse. And where will they go? Europe and the West, and there will be people who’ll take them.
The truth is, if the Gazans leave Gaza, full stop, wherever they go initially, a large number of them will end up in Europe and the West. This may very well suit the Israelis, especially hardliners like Bezalel Smotrich and probably Netanyahu himself, but it’s a bum deal for us. We didn’t sign up for this. We have no obligations here.
The Gazans are not the West’s problem. I don’t believe President Trump thinks they are either. But if he’s not careful, that’s exactly what they’ll become.