Trump fuels the Israeli far right’s historic dream of Gaza ‘transfer’

Menachem Begin, the historic Israeli prime minister at the head of the same party that Benjamin Netanyahu now leads, Likud, signed — against his conscience — an arrest warrant for Meir Kahane, the ultra-nationalist rabbi who advocated expelling millions of Palestinians from Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank and outlawing sexual relations between Jews and Arabs. “He could have caused a disaster, not for our [Jewish] people, but for the Arabs. He is a dangerous man,” Begin said. The Likud deputies left Parliament when Kahane gave his first speech, in 1984, and his party, Kaj, ended up being outlawed and designated a terrorist organization. Even when Rehavam Zeevi, another leader who advocated expelling the Palestinians, entered the government in 1991, the then-prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, also a Likud politician, made clear his opposition to what is known in Hebrew as “transfer” (the forcible displacement of Palestinians from their land), which U.S. President Donald Trump turned into a formal proposal on Tuesday — with a humanitarian wrapping and delivered in the language of a real estate developer — while Netanyahu looked on, enraptured. The dream harbored by the most marginal and extremist sectors on Wednesday received, after a quarter of a century of the dehumanization of Palestinians and a right-wing drift in Israeli society, the applause of politicians and commentators from the so-called political center to the now euphoric far right.

The first to celebrate the initiative was Netanyahu himself, at the same press conference in Washington: “The third objective [of the invasion of Gaza] is to make sure that it never again represents a threat to Israel. President Trump is taking it to a much higher level. He sees a different future for that piece of land that has been the focus of so much terrorism, so many attacks against us… He has a different idea. I think it’s worth paying attention to this. I think it’s something that could change history, and it’s worthwhile really pursuing this avenue.”

Until then, Netanyahu had not publicly spoken out in favor of the mass expulsion of Gazans, although his government has been studying the possibility for months, according to local media. In January 2024, less than four months after the Hamas attack that triggered the devastating bombings on Gaza and with Joe Biden in the White House, Netanyahu said at a party meeting that he was looking for countries to absorb Gazans, but the “problem” was the lack of volunteers. At the end of the year, his ultra-nationalist Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, stated that Netanyahu was already showing “some openness” to his proposal, euphemistically called “voluntary emigration.”

Trump’s breaking of a taboo that had increasingly lost weight has shown how much ideas once considered extreme and dangerous in Israel have become mainstream. The Jerusalem-based think tank Jewish People’s Policy Institute released a poll on the issue on Tuesday, after days of Trump reiterating his position. Eighty-two percent of Jewish Israelis support “relocating” Gazans to other countries. They are divided between those who see it as “practical” (52%) or only “desirable,” but unrealistic (30%). Just 3% consider it “immoral.” Ideological differences focus more on feasibility, with majority support from the center-left to the right.

“Trump has said what we used to say when we did it; they said it was racism or apartheid… but in the end the idea is the same,” admitted Yitzhak Wasserlauf, a minister until last month when his party, Jewish Strength (led by Ben-Gvir), left the government in protest against the ceasefire in Gaza. Wasserlauf insists that Trump’s plan is “moral and the most humanitarian that exists” and hopes to convince him that the Jewish recolonization of Gaza — which the Republican sees as “too dangerous” — will bring “security and peace.”

The Israeli right has been openly displaying its enthusiasm. There is even a pun on the name of the U.S. president and the word transfer: “Trumpsfer.” “Donald [Trump], I have a feeling that this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” wrote Ben-Gvir in English, paraphrasing the famous ending of the film Casablanca, and asking Netanyahu to make preparations “immediately” to implement it. “When I said this time and again during the war, that this was the solution to Gaza, they mocked me. Now it is clear: this is the only solution to the Gaza problem — this is the strategy for the ‘day after,’” he said. Ben-Gvir’s party has already presented a bill to include an economic aid package to encourage those Gazans “without a history of terrorist activity” to leave.

The powerful Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, wants to see the Palestinian population of Gaza (about 2.3 million people) reduced by half within two years and Jewish settlements installed. He downplays the “weak opposition” from Egypt and Jordan, because Trump has already shown with Colombia (by forcing it to accept deported immigrants by theatening tariffs) that “when he wants something, it happens.” Within Likud, Speaker of Parliament Amir Ohana talked of “a new dawn”; for Minister of Transport Miri Regev, the world is today “a better place.”

An empty peninsula

Support for the proposal has come from outside the government as well. Avigdor Lieberman, the former foreign and defense minister under Netanyahu, with whom he is now at odds, applauded Trump for “finding a fair solution in Gaza.” Last week, he proposed blackmailing Cairo until it agrees to relocate the inhabitants of the Strip to the desert Sinai Peninsula, because “it is completely empty” and there is only “the smuggling of weapons, drugs, and people.” Nachalah — the radical settler movement that recently launched a campaign under the slogan “Conquer, Expel, Settle” — has called for “acting quickly” to build settlements throughout Gaza. “No part of the Land of Israel [a biblical concept that encompasses at least both Israel and Palestine] should be left without Jewish settlements. If we leave an area abandoned, it can be taken by the enemies.”

In Israel, Benny Gantz has been situated in the center. The opposition politician led the popularity polls for months, but his has deflated as Netanyahu’s has risen. His reaction: “President Trump has shown, and not for the first time, that he is a true friend of Israel and will continue to stand by it on issues important to strengthening its security. In his remarks, he presented creative, original and interesting thinking, which must be examined alongside the realization of the goals of the war, giving priority to the return of all the hostages.”

Opposition leader and former prime minister Yair Lapid praised the “good press conference for the State of Israel,” called for “studying the details to understand what the plan is in Gaza” and announced that he will present a “complementary” one at the end of the month when he visits Washington.

Among the dissenting voices is the human rights NGO B’Tselem, which denounces a “call for ethnic cleansing” and Trump and Netanyahu’s “road map for a second Nakba.” The editor of The Times of Israel, David Horowitz, says that among the “many flaws” of Trump’s initiative is its lack of morality. Moshe Ya’alon, a former defense minister under Netanyahu and considered a hawk, said last November that the Israeli leadership was “dragging” his country towards the “occupation, annexation, and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.” “Transfer, call it what you want, and Jewish settlements,” he clarified.

Even before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, some Zionist leaders considered the option of expelling the native Palestinian population from the place where they were settling. The country, in fact, was born from an ethnic cleansing, the Nakba (1947-1949). Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled before the advance of, first, the Zionist militias, and then the Israeli army, believing that they would soon return to their homes. Israel never allowed this and those refugees today number in the millions, including their descendants.

But the context is different from that which guides today’s calls for “transfer.” The Jews did not have a state of their own, six million of them had just been exterminated in the Holocaust, and the Arab states rejected the creation of Israel.

Speech

Ethnic cleansing regained prominence in national political discourse in the 1980s, but remained relatively marginal. Kahane’s party, which advocated “every Jew a .22” (0.22 inches, the caliber of the rifles he wanted to give them), only won one seat out of 120 in the Knesset. Zeevi’s party never got more than three. Lieberman would later advocate an “exchange of territories” between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority, so that only Jews would live in the former and only Arabs in the latter.

The country’s ideological, demographic, and educational shift over the past quarter-century has seen the number of Jewish Israelis who identify as right-wing or left-wing go from a tie to 62% and 12%, respectively. The parties that openly advocate “voluntary emigration” (Religious Zionism and Jewish Strength) now have 14 seats and genocidal language, calls for revenge, and support for collective punishment have soared since the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, which left nearly 1,200 dead.

It is difficult to find a radio or television panel without a commentator pointing out that Israel’s great mistake was allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza (already limited for 15 months as a weapon of war). “Without food and water [in Gaza], they will leave faster,” said one on Channel 14, favored by the right, on Wednesday. On public radio, Giora Eiland, the reserve commander-in-chief who chaired the National Security Council and shaped the siege of northern Gaza, said Trump’s idea is not only “correct and refreshing,” but the U.S. and Israel have the tools of pressure to make it a reality and that is a favor to Palestinians, who “do not want to live in Gaza, but in Tel Aviv.”

Now that Trump has let the genie out of the bottle, some are already thinking about the next steps. Moshe Saada, a Likud MP, said on Tuesday that “if the solution is successful” in Gaza, it must be applied in the West Bank, because it has “the same number and the same problem” of “refugees who do not want to be rehabilitated.” David Elhayani, head of the settlements in the Jordan Valley and a former head of the organization representing settlers, said: “Anyone who deludes himself that killing hundreds or thousands of terrorists will prevent the next attack does not understand Arab culture […] As long as there are Arabs in the State of Israel [also referring to the West Bank], we are in danger.”

“There are some words that are corrupted by accidents of history and whose use is banned by the police of political correctness,” wrote the far-right former MP Aryeh Eldad in the daily Maariv last week, after Trump had already dropped his dialectical bomb. “It is now okay to say the word ‘transfer.’ The solution is back on the negotiating table.”

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