Tipping Point?

Israel is still trying to displace the entire population of Gaza, and there's only one place it will go

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Since the very earliest days of the latest Israel-Hamas war, I’ve been warning that Israel’s main objective is to displace as many of the Palestinians as possible—perhaps even all of them—from Gaza, and that the only place they’ll end up, if this is allowed to happen, will be the West, most probably Europe. This remains a real risk. Actually, the risk is growing.

Back in November of 2023, I wrote a long article for American Mind in which I noted the various early signs that this was the case. Even in those first weeks and months after Hamas’s deadly surprise attack on southern Israel, Israeli hardliners were saying a mass exodus of the Palestinians from Gaza would be the only way to ensure lasting peace. Coexistence simply doesn’t work.

As Israeli forces entered Gaza’s northern territory, and a general evacuation of around a million Palestinians was called, Avi Dichter, an Israeli cabinet minister, proclaimed, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.” “Nakba,” of course, is the Arabic word for “disaster,” a word that’s used to describe the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 and the subsequent mass displacement that took place. Dichter was clearly implying the Palestinians were about to be displaced from their territory again—maybe for good.

At around the same time, two members of the Knesset wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal explaining “Why the West Should Welcome Refugees from Gaza.” The two men explained that since Europe has a “long history of assisting refugees fleeing conflicts,” it would be the perfect place for the Gazans—all two million of them—to go. Each European nation could take tens of thousands of Gazans, and pretty soon there would be none left in Gaza. What’s ten or twenty or fifty thousand when Germany welcomed a million people in 2015, at the height of the Migrant Crisis?

Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, a man who had previously said the “state system” in Gaza should be allowed to “collapse,” congratulated the authors of the article, and Gilal Gamliel, the intelligence minister, added her support. “We must try something new, and we call on the international community to help make it a reality,” she wrote in The Jerusalem Post.

There even seemed to be some support in the US for this plan. Nikki Haley, never the most eloquent of public speakers, managed to butcher a television defense of the Palestinians and make it seem like they were all welcome to come and live in the US if they didn’t want to stay and be tyrannised by Hamas. After an outcry drummed up by Ron DeSantis supporters, she did at least issue a clarification: “Let the Gazans stay within the region.”

In Europe, it seemed as if the plan was already in motion, and Gazans would soon be coming in large numbers. Germany began making not-so-secret preparations at its Cairo embassy, building a makeshift processing facility in the grounds. The transfers would begin with 300 or so German citizens who had families in Gaza, but given Germany’s role in the Migrant Crisis, it seemed pretty likely that far more—thousands or tens of thousands—would come.

But—nothing. Nada. The plan seemed to go away. Only small numbers of Palestinians ever made it to Europe or the West, including Canada.

Then Trump returned to the White House, and in February proposed removing the Gazans to somewhere else so the whole enclave could be reconstructed. Trump had in mind neighbouring Arab countries like Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, but they were having none of it. Previous settlements of Palestinian refugees had radically destabilised every country in the region that had taken them. They helped cause Lebanon’s bloody civil war. Let the Palestinians f*ck up somebody else’s country.

Israel isn’t giving up, though. Just this week, the director of Mossad visited Washington to seek US help convincing three nations to take Palestinian refugees. David Barnea told White House special envoy Steve Witkoff that Ethiopia, Indonesia and Libya have expressed their willingness to take large numbers of Palestinians.

According to the Israelis, any transfer to these countries would be “voluntary,” but it’s hard to see how that could be the case at this late stage, after more than eighteen months of concentrated destruction. The entire population of Gaza has been displaced, and pretty much every building in Gaza has been damaged or destroyed.

Israel is now planning to shepherd all two million Gazans into a “humanitarian zone” on the border with Egypt so they’ll be safer. Read: easier to force to leave.

The real question, if Israel is going to persist in its plan, is where the Gazans will actually go. I don’t believe for one second they’ll go to Ethiopia, Indonesia and Libya. To me, this just looks like a clever bit of manipulation, intended to tug on the heartstrings of Western liberals and enrage the large numbers of Palestinians and Muslims who are already in the West and wield increasing political power. Western governments will step in to save the Palestinians from going to live in far-off Indonesia or sandy war-torn shithole Libya, however much the latter might resemble their current home. Germany will probably be the first, then others will follow, chastened by her example.

And so Israel will get what it wanted right from the start: the Palestinians will all go to Europe.

Of course, nobody in the West has ever voted for mass resettlements of Gazans, and Europe is already on a knife edge because of mass immigration. Just look at the UK.

Over the last year, the UK has received tens of thousands of Afghans “interpreters”, a population not entirely dissimilar from the Palestinians—and the results are already proving explosive. Secret Cabinet briefings that took place last autumn, after the summer’s riots, showed that 15 out of 20 hotspots for violence were towns that had seen a recent influx of Afghans, who commit violent crime and especially rape—of both sexes—for sport. As many as 200,000 could arrive in total.

My concern with the plight of the Palestinians is selfish. I don’t want them in the West. They have no right to be here, and they will only cause trouble and exacerbate social tensions even further. Maybe they’ll help tip European societies into open civil war, as some, like academic David Betz, are now warning.

The unfortunate truth, however, is that Western governments long ago ceased to govern in the interests of their citizens. If they decide, on their own, to accept large numbers of Palestinians, what can ordinary people do?