Trump's Gaza plan: The century-old Zionist illusion of 'voluntary' emigration of Palestinians

On Sunday, US President Donald Trump proposed that one and a half million Palestinians in Gaza be relocated to Jordan or Egypt as part of a plan to "just clean out" the enclave. His special envoy for the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, even suggested relocating a portion of the Gaza population to Indonesia.
Israel's former far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir supported Trump's suggestion in a post on X.
"One of our demands from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to promote voluntary emigration. When the president of the world's greatest superpower, Trump, personally brings up this idea, it is worth the Israeli government implementing it - promoting emigration now," he wrote.
This ethnic cleansing would pave the way for Jewish colonisation projects and the transformation of Gaza into the futuristic technological hub that Netanyahu dreams of.
With this plan, Trump is in keeping with the long-term movement of Zionism and, more precisely, the war objectives set by the Israeli far right.
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On 20 December, Ben Gvir reiterated his proposal of "encouraging the voluntary migration" of Gaza residents in order to recolonise the Palestinian territory from which the Israelis had disengaged in 2005.
That is, in his view, a necessity for Israel's security and a better solution for Gaza residents: "Gaza is unsanitary while other countries need workers, they will be better off there," he said.
That was not the first time since the war erupted on 7 October 2023 that the far-right minister had put forward this idea.
For instance, on 14 May 2024, Ben Gvir presented his proposal in a humanitarian light: "Encourage the voluntary departure of Gaza's residents… It is ethical! It is rational! It is right!"
The "return" of the Jews to Gaza would be both the fulfilment of a prophecy and justice rendered to the Jewish people: "We have to return home, because that is the Torah, that is morality, that is historic justice, that is logic and that is the right thing," he said.
On the same occasion, Israeli MP Zvi Sukkot, a member of the Religious Zionist Party, went further by saying: "Tell the countries of the world who with hypocritical morality care for the Gazans that they [Gaza Palestinians] will be much safer with them in other countries. If they love them so much, South Africa should take the residents of Jabaliya."
As illustrated by Sunday's comments, the ceasefire has not fundamentally changed this perspective, which goes back to the origin of Zionism.
‘100,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million’
Despite some disapproval from the Israeli opposition and even the United States under President Joe Biden, once again in the history of Israeli colonisation, the project was advanced through war, in a fait accompli policy.
This was particularly the case in northern Gaza, where the army methodically implemented a plan to expel, exterminate and relocate Palestinians, following the recommendations of the so-called Eiland Plan or Generals' Plan, designed by a group of senior reservists to ethnically cleanse the area.
There is no doubt that for many Israeli leaders, the departure of the majority of Gaza Palestinians would be the logical, even if gradual, outcome of military operations.
The notion of 'voluntary' departure sounds like a cynical term taken from the lexicon of Orwellian newspeak
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich made no secret of this in a statement in December 2023: "What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration," he said. "If in Gaza there will be 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs and not two million, the entire conversation on 'the day after' will look different."
The idea has become part of the Israeli public debate. According to a survey presented in early 2024 at a conference on the theme "Lessons from Gaza - an end to the idea of two states", when asked "Are you for or against voluntary transfer emigration of residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries?", 76 percent of respondents said they were in favour - a majority across all political leanings.
The fact that the Israeli public is being asked to decide what the Palestinians would like reveals the extent to which the latter have been stripped of the right to be actors in their own history.
The desire to see the Arabs disappear to leave the field clear for a Jewish state that includes Gaza, the West Bank and even the Syrian Golan and the south bank of the Litani River in Lebanon is not surprising. On the other hand, the notion of "voluntary" migration seems more incongruous.
Given the violence deployed to starve the population, systematically destroy all the infrastructure necessary for life and eradicate any possibility of a future return to northern Gaza, the notion of "voluntary" departure sounds cruelly like a cynical term taken from the lexicon of Orwellian newspeak.
‘Fold their tents and silently steal away’
However, from the outset, it has been part of the range of means contemplated for the creation of the Jewish state, as attested by the work of British-Palestinian historian Nur Masalha on the permanence of "the concept of transfer in the Zionist political thought".
With the slogan "a land without a people for a people without a land", coined by Israel Zangwill, one of the earliest organisers of the Zionist movement in Britain, Zionist leaders refuted above all the existence of a people in the sense of a nation.
But the Arab presence had always been seen as an obstacle. The same Zangwill expressed it without false pretence in 1916, arguing that "the removal of Arabs from Palestine to make room for the settlement of Europe's Jewish masses was a precondition for the fulfilment of Zionism", as quoted by Masalha.
In a vision loaded with orientalist prejudices, Zangwill wrote in 1920: "We cannot allow the Arabs to block so valuable a piece of historic reconstruction… And therefore we must gently persuade them to 'trek'. After all, they have all Arabia with its million square miles.
"There is no particular reason for the Arabs to cling to these few kilometres. 'To fold their tents' and 'silently steal away' is their proverbial habit: let them exemplify it now."
But the dreamlike illusion of Arabs descended from the ancient Hebrews willing to return to their ancient faith, as David Ben Gurion wrote in 1918 before the idea was erased from the Zionist narrative, or, on the contrary, without ties to the land "promised" to the Jewish people and which "could be spirited across the border", according to a formula noted by Theodor Herzl in 1895 in his diary, has given way to a more realistic understanding.
Indeed, there was little chance that the Arabs would abandon the fertile lands they had worked for generations to the new Jewish emigrants.
"To drive out by the sword the [Arab] tribes," as Zangwill put it in 1905, was not a feasible option, for lack of the necessary strength. Consequently, the question of how to induce the Arabs of Palestine, whose national consciousness was growing stronger in the dynamics of tensions caused by land dispossession, to leave "voluntarily" has continuously occupied the minds of the Zionist movement.
Leave no option but emigration
This reflection culminated in 1937, when the Peel Commission, sent by the British government following the Arab Revolt of 1936, proposed on the one hand the partition of Palestine into two states and on the other hand the transfer of Arab populations outside the territory assigned to the Jewish state.
After an intense debate, the Zurich Congress of the World Zionist Organisation rejected a plan that restricted the territorial ambitions of the movement - which claimed the entirety of Palestine - without the British government's commitment to deploy forces for this transfer.
By 'voluntary' emigration, Zionist leaders did not mean a free individual choice, but the result of a set of measures which would leave no other option than emigration
By "voluntary" emigration, Zionist leaders did not mean a free individual choice, but the result of a set of measures which would leave no other option than emigration.
As Masalha mentions, Yehoshua Sofersky, the leader of the General Zionists in Palestine, "proposed that by supervising citizenship of the state in the transitional period, imposing agrarian legislation aimed at confiscating large Arab land estates and preventing the Arabs from buying land in the country, 'a large part of the Arabs will leave the land of Israel'."
Eliyahu Berligne, the leader of the Zionist religious party Knesset Yisrael and a member of the Zionist Action Committee, "suggested that 'taxes should be increased so that the Arabs will flee because of the taxes'."
It was not so much the consent of individuals that was to be obtained as that of the leaders of neighbouring Arab countries, subjugated by the British Empire, such as Abdullah Ibn al-Hussein (emir of Transjordan) or his brother Faysal Ibn al-Hussein (king of Iraq) who, in return for financial aid, would agree to welcome this new population.
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One of the most sophisticated plans, regarded with the greatest interest by Zionist leaders and US and British authorities alike, until the mid-1940s, had been developed by Edward A Norman (1900-1955), described as Masalha as "a New York-based Jewish millionaire who devoted much of his fortune and his political activity to supporting the Yishuv".
His idea was to organise a resettlement in the Shatt-al-Gharraf, in the heart of the fertile valleys of Iraq, rather than on the eastern bank of the Jordan, which should not be, according to him, "conceded by the Jews as being permanently outside their colonising area … in view of the number of Jews requiring emigration from Europe, they can be expected to need it.”
These projects, some of which were intended to be "humanitarian" but totally chimerical, were completely out of step with the political conscience that the Palestinians developed of the colonial character of the Zionist enterprise, as with their feeling of belonging to the Palestinian territory.
The idea that Ben Gurion formulated, for example in 1941, that "the Land of Israel is only a small part of the territories inhabited by Arabs and the Arabs of the Land of Israel are only a negligible group among the Arabic-speaking peoples," is one of the permanent features in the Zionist understanding of Palestinian Arabs' connection to their land.
The tensions created by the expulsion of the Palestinians by a terror campaign led from 1947 by the Zionist militias of the Irgun, Stern and Haganah finally led to the confrontation of 1948 between Israel and neighbouring countries (Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq).
In the dynamics of the war, three-quarters of the Arabs of the territory of the Jewish state (expanded in doing so) were expelled. Thus, the "Arab question" was "miraculously" resolved, for the most part.
Israeli propaganda forged afterwards the myth of the "voluntary" departure of the Palestinians at the call of Arab leaders, to leave the field clear for military operations, pending their return after victory. Defeated, they would therefore have lost any legitimate right to return home. A myth which has since been completely deconstructed by Palestinian historians, and then by the Israeli "new historians".
After 1967, emptying Gaza
The "Arab question" arose again after the conquests of 1967, particularly in Gaza. Haaretz journalist Ofer Aderet recently documented Israeli plans to relocate the inhabitants of the newly conquered territory. Once again, the Israeli rulers sought to obtain a "voluntary emigration" to the Sinai or Jordan, in order to leave only 70,000 or 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
Then-Prime Minister Levi Eshkol’s idea, writes Aderet, "was to create a 'quiet emigration, in such a way that Israel wouldn't be seen as being involved in it'."
"Toward that end, Israelis with a security background, who were familiar with Arab society, were sent directly to the population centres in Gaza in order to persuade their leaders to encourage voluntary departure. 'Because of these suffocating conditions and the enclosure there, maybe the Arabs will move from the Strip,' the prime minister believed."
But Gaza Palestinians remained unmoved by these attempts.
In 1971, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan formulated a more expeditious version of "voluntary" emigration: "We give them 48 hours to leave. We tell them, for example, you're moving to El Arish [in the Sinai] or to another place, we'll drive you. First you give them an option of moving voluntarily. You remove the furniture from the house.
"If the person doesn't come to arrange his affairs - we bring a bulldozer to demolish the house. If there are people in the house, we evict them from the house. Since we give him 48 hours, there's no critical moment here when you come and say 'we'll load you and your furniture on the truck,' but you give him an opportunity to do so voluntarily."
This process is reminiscent of that of the Spanish Conquistadors facing the natives of pre-Columbian civilisations. Before going into battle, they read them the "Requirimento" in which they proposed that they convert to the Catholic faith. A proposal that was obviously completely foreign to their cosmogony.
If they refused, the Spanish threatened: "We will invade you in force and we will wage war on you everywhere and in every way." Since, by their refusal, the natives had proven their demonic character, the most extreme violence was thus legitimate and moral.
Transfer policy
We can retain from this historical overview the constant features of the notion of "voluntary migration". It is based on the negation of the system of representations and aspirations of the other, who is ordered to step aside in the face of the achievement of an objective that proclaims itself as morally superior (establishing a refuge for Jewish victims of persecution).
Maintaining the fiction of a possible voluntary choice allows the transfer of responsibility to the Palestinians for their own misfortune if they persist in not leaving, then to the Arab states accused of refusing to accept refugees out of political calculation and hostility to Israel and therefore to the Jews.
Ultimately, it is transferred to organisations such as Unrwa, which has been accused by Israel since its creation in 1948 of maintaining the refugee issue, perceived as an existential threat. This is the reason why the UN agency for Palestinian refugees was banned from Israeli territory by a law last October.
The fiction of an offer of 'voluntary' migration allows the exoneration of a project consisting of dispossessing a people of its land while preserving one’s moral purity
The fiction of an offer of "voluntary" migration allows the exoneration of a project consisting of dispossessing a people of its land while preserving one's moral purity. But in practice, it is only one dimension of the transfer policy, the more or less soft nature of which is indexed on the balance of power.
In 1970, when Gaza Palestinians refused to leave, Religious Affairs Minister Zorach Warhaftig told Prime Minister Golda Meir: "It would be better to use force if there's a need for force, but only in the midst of a major commotion."
Still to this day, despite the Israeli army plunging Gaza into hell for more than 15 months, its inhabitants have refused to "voluntarily" leave what they consider their homeland.
Unless a sustainable political framework is set up, the project to take over the Gaza Strip and to transfer most of the Palestinians in order to settle a Jewish population remains in the mind of a large spectrum of the Israeli political class, as well as the ultimate hope of settler organisations - and could be a strategic goal of a future crisis.
This is exactly what the government and the army started to complete in the north during their latest war on the enclave.
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