Population transfers are wishful thinking and a recipe for grievance

Prime Minister Netanyahu was only informed about Donald Trump’s ideas about relocating the Palestinians of Gaza on the day before his meeting with the president. It also came as a surprise to US Secretary of State Rubio and most of Netanyahu’s delegation.

Even Netanyahu seemed bemused at this turn of events. As the Trump look-alike in the Israeli satirical program, Eretz Nehederet, put it: “We’re gonna find the Palestinians a great home; we gonna call it Gazaville” – as he pointed to Greenland and Panama.

Even so, the desire to leave Gaza is not a Trump fantasy. It is estimated that some 300,000 Palestinians have left Gaza since Hamas’s takeover in 2007. The Arab Barometer poll, conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in the weeks before the killings of October 7, found that 44% of young people in Gaza (aged 18 to 29) have considered emigrating.

It appears that Trump’s ideas emerged a couple of weeks ago when his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, visited the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza and subsequently conveyed his dark impressions of its barren moonscape. Trump’s economic vision of a future Gaza was seeded by a paper, published last July by Joseph Pelzman, a professor at George Washington University, which had reached the president’s aides.

It argued that “the Hamas experiment”, since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in 2005, has proven to be a complete failure. It has left Gaza in a devastating bankruptcy. To solve this bankruptcy problem, we suggest an approach based on the classic Build – Operate – Transfer (BOT) framework. The countries that invest in this project will become equity shareholders with a 50-year lease. The civil administrators that will be brought into Gaza will develop an economic model based on the principle of ‘private provision of public services’.”

Perlzman painted a picture of a three-sector Gaza economy, based on tourism, agriculture and high tech. It would be a society, governed by the rule of law, possessing an independent airport, port facility and power station. A light railway, on the Israeli model, would be constructed for Gaza.

All well and good – but the fundamental question of what to do with up to two million displaced people at present was not addressed. Trump’s entry into the question simply led to the usual confusion, deception, deflection and puzzlement.

While Trump described a Gazan Disneyland, the global reaction to the plan was profoundly negative because it implied either a voluntary or involuntary transfer out of Gaza and either a temporary or permanent exile. Outsiders, particularly in the Arab world, interpreted Trump’s words as meaning “ethnic cleansing”. On one level, this was a tried and tested Trump exercise in causing outrage to gain leverage before retreating – a transactional pas de deux, three steps forward, two back.

The orchestrated outrage conjured up an imagery of a new Nakba for the Arabs. The expulsion of Jews and Christians by the Caliph Umar from most of Arabia at the very beginning of the Muslim era in the year 641 was never mentioned. Simultaneously, a remembrance of the departure from the mythical but symbolic Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof was uppermost for many Diaspora Jews.

Even so, an angry Egypt hinted that it was prepared to abrogate its peace treaty with Israel, signed by Begin and Sadat in 1979. The hostages’ families worried that it would impede the release of their loved ones. Representative Jewish organisations in the Diaspora genuflected and thanked President Trump for his stand against Hamas – and balanced this with a mild disapproval of his plan.

The Trump idea was enthusiastically endorsed by Netanyahu’s public relations people in the international media, arguing that a two-state solution had had its day. They said that it had not worked despite multiple efforts over the years. The blame was put solely on the Palestinians – yet both Netanyahu and Hamas have attempted to scupper a two-state solution during the past 30 years.

Partition into two states is anathema to many on both sides of the current conflict. Jewish and Palestinian nationalism arose during the same period of history with claims over the same territory. The logical solution would be partition rather than a Greater Israel or a Greater Palestine – and an everlasting war. Both the Israeli Right and the Palestinian Islamists, however, have viewed the Gaza conflict as little more than a continuation of the war of 1948. The Gaza conflict today is one between the rejectionists of partition.

For many Zionist thinkers, the very idea of the transfer of the Palestinian Arabs was tantamount to wishful thinking. Herzl confided the idea to the privacy of his diary. Jabotinsky looked to the Greek-Turkish exchange of 1923 in which hundreds of thousands were forced to leave their homes. The Peel Commission of 1937 suggested a partition into two states but that 225,000 Palestinian Arabs would have to move from the Jewish State to the Arab state. 

During the war of 1948, most Palestinian Arabs fled in “a psychosis of flight” for fear of what might be their fate at the hands of the Jews. Yet some were indeed expelled. In a lecture in 1950, Yigal Allon, one of the leading IDF commanders in the war, commented that the expulsions of Palestinian Arabs from Lydda and Ramle in the path of advancing hostile forces, weakened and eventually halted their assault.

Allon said the process of Arab flight was “a positive process…a justified case of no-choice, not only momentarily in the heat of battle, but justified over time”. Other Israelis found such an approach unacceptable.  

How would Israelis today react today if Trump’s words were translated into reality? It is likely that as in 1948, there would be dissent. Any mention of “transfer” was previously a taboo in public discourse. Yet its very consideration today is in itself a sign of the times.

Last Saturday’s return of hostages in such an emaciated state will further diminish any identification with “the other”. No imagery of the devastation of Gaza is shown on Israeli television.

A year ago, the prominent Israeli writer, David Grossman wrote: “Gershom Scholem, the renown Kabbalah scholar, coined a phrase, saying: ‘All the blood flows to the wound’. (After 7 October) the fear, the shock, the fury, the grief and humiliation and vengefulness, the mental energies of an entire nation — all of those have not stopped flowing to that wound, to the abyss into which we are still falling.” (New York Times, March 1, 2024)

Benny Morris, the Israeli historian of the 1948 exodus, further commented that “the dehumanisation …is already there”.

Both Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, leaders of the political opposition in Israel, responded with “an open mind” approach to Trump. It is clear that they and Netanyahu are positioning themselves for a future election with the opinions of the Israeli electorate in mind.

 Aryeh Deri from the religious Shas party, a veteran of Israeli politics, took the adulation of Trump one step further, by labelling him “the messenger of God”.

Given all the self-evident obstacles, it is unlikely that Trump’s sketch of a plan will be enacted even if it has been a welcome distraction for many on the Israeli Right. Even so, it appears that despite the idol worship for Trump and the president’s silence on future Jewish settlement in Gaza, it has not stabilised Netanyahu’s disintegrating government in the eyes of the Israeli public.

Opinion polls indicate that a party led by Naftali Bennett would still win the next Israeli election and a different Israeli government would then take a serious approach to the problems of Gaza.