Moving Palestinians out of Gaza? Trump’s idea takes on a life of its own in Israel

JERUSALEM — President Trump’s proposal to move all Palestinians out of Gaza has taken on a life of its own in Israel.

Israeli officials say they’re working on a plan to create a migration authority to help relocate the vast majority of Gaza’s two million people. A senior Cabinet minister, Bezalel Smotrich, says Israel is working with the Trump administration to locate countries that would take them in. Surveys suggest the majority of Israelis are open to the idea.

Whether it will actually happen is another matter. Dozens of Arab and Muslim-majority countries have rejected the notion as ethnic cleansing. Trump said he would not force the idea after Egypt and Jordan rejected it.

“We paid Jordan and Egypt a lot — billions of dollars a year, and I was a little surprised they’d say that, but they did,” Trump said on Fox News Radio on Feb. 21. “I think that’s the plan that really works. But I’m not forcing it. I’m just going to sit back and recommend it.”

What remains is a radically changed discourse in Israel.

The notion of expelling Palestinians, euphemistically called “transfer” in Hebrew, used to be considered extreme in Israeli politics and taboo in polite company. The party that advocated it in the 1980s was banned from Israel’s parliament as racist.

Now Trump has breathed life into the idea, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time has publicly praised it as “revolutionary.”

A poll this week from the Israel Democracy Institute found 73% of Jews living in Israel believe that, whether or not it’s practical, Trump’s plan has started “a more relevant discussion of possible solutions” for ending the war in Gaza.

“I think this idea is dramatic and crazy, but the situation is also crazy. We cannot keep living like this,” said Itamar Lavie, a 27-year-old medical student, sitting at a Jerusalem coffee shop. “I think it’s horrible to move a population, but maybe, eventually, it will be also better for them, because right now they live actually in a ghetto.”

Lawmakers in Israel discussed how to make Trump’s plan a reality

Sundays are usually slow days at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, but many prominent right-wing lawmakers attended the caucus hearing titled “The New Middle East: The Plan For Voluntary Emigration From Gaza.”

Chinese diplomats and Panama’s ambassador to Israel were sitting at the roundtable along with Israel’s parliament speaker. On the agenda: how to turn President Trump’s recent proposal into reality.

“This has the potential for historic change,” said ultranationalist Finance Minister Smotrich at the hearing. On a visit to Washington last week, he said he told Trump administration officials that mass emigration from Gaza could “end the conflict” between Israelis and Palestinians.

Most people living in Gaza could be gone within half a year, at a rate of 10,000 people leaving per day, and Israel is working on building a migration authority to handle the logistics, Smotrich said.

“Getting the population out of there, because they are in grave danger when they stay there, and they pose a grave danger to us when they are there — this makes sense,” caucus co-chairman Simcha Rothman, a lawmaker in Israel’s governing coalition, told NPR.

Lawmakers repeated Trump’s humanitarian argument — that removing Gazans was for their own good because of the immense destruction caused by Israel’s war against Hamas following the Hamas assault on Israel Oct. 7, 2023. They also made a security argument — that the population of Gaza poses a danger to Israelis after the Hamas attack. Nearly 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage in the attack that sparked the war in Gaza, according to the Israeli government, and more than 48,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in Israeli strikes, according to Gaza health officials.

Some promoted other ideas: clearing away Gazans for Jewish settlement, and forced expulsion.

“It’s either us or them,” said Osher Shekalim, a lawmaker in Netanyahu’s Likud party. He said leaving Gaza should not be voluntary. “Anyone who defines themselves as Palestinian is saying, I am your enemy. I don’t want you here.”

In Gaza, some Palestinians say they’ll never agree to be displaced from their homes. Others say they’d welcome the opportunity to move away for a better life following the recent war.

Many Israelis see Gazan emigration as a good idea but not practical

There has been little vocal objection from prominent opposition politicians in Israel.

Centrist lawmaker Alon Schuster says Palestinians should be able to make up their own mind, and because many Palestinians don’t want to move, he’s afraid to evoke dark chapters of Jewish history.

“I don’t want to be in a place where the Jewish state is pushing people from their home if they don’t want to,” Schuster told NPR.

Liza Dryer, a 30-year-old Israeli dentist at a coffee shop with her dog, said the Gaza resettlement idea was ideal but would pose problems for Israel.

“I would like it to happen, but I’m not sure it’s the practical, right solution, because then there will be more stories about more lands that we took over, that we occupied, that we were violent towards. So I really feel it will lead to more harsh feelings towards Israel,” Dryer said.

In Sunday’s parliamentary caucus hearing, right-wing lawmakers acknowledged they were discussing Gazans leaving Gaza in theory. What they said was important was Trump helping shift the Israeli discourse.

Yuli Edelstein, a member of Netanyahu’s party, marveled that the idea, once forbidden to talk about, now seems “super legitimate” to discuss.

Yanal Jabarin contributed to this story.