Israel’s Far Right Calls for Palestinians to Resettle Outside Gaza
Comments spark tensions with U.S., as Blinken calls them inflammatory and irresponsible
Updated Jan. 10, 2024
TEL AVIV, Israel—Far-right Israeli ministers are increasingly calling for Palestinians to leave Gaza and for Jews to rebuild settlements there, complicating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to maintain diplomatic support for the war against Hamas while also ensuring his own political survival.
Netanyahu faces one of the greatest threats to his 16-year leadership, with dismal approval ratings after Hamas killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took more than 200 people hostage on Oct. 7. Careful not to alienate key members of his cabinet and risk the collapse of his government, he had been quiet on the remarks despite pressure to disavow them from the U.S., Israel’s most important ally.
“The United States unequivocally rejects any proposals advocating for the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he told Netanyahu in a meeting in Tel Aviv on Tuesday. He said Netanyahu reassured him that resettlement outside Gaza isn’t the policy of the Israeli government.
Late Wednesday, Netanyahu made his first public comments on the matter. “I want to make a few points absolutely clear: Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population,” he wrote on X.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who leads the ultranationalist Religious Zionist Party, said last week that Israel should rebuild Jewish settlements in Gaza that were uprooted when it unilaterally disengaged from the enclave in 2005. He also called for Israel to encourage the “voluntary migration of Gaza’s residents to countries that will agree to absorb them as refugees.” National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, head of the ultranationalist Jewish Power Party, said “encouraging emigration” is the right solution to the conflict and called for rebuilding settlements.
For Palestinians, any discussion by Israelis to uproot them from their homes brings back the collective trauma of 1948, when around 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forced to leave their homes in Israel during the Arab-Israeli war that was fought over Israel’s establishment. Arab states, including neighboring Egypt, have refused any mass migration of Palestinians into their territory, saying they won’t allow Palestinians to become refugees again.
Netanyahu and his war cabinet haven’t articulated a clear vision for postwar Gaza, raising concerns in the international community about what comes after the war.
But the Israeli leadership has said Israel has no intention of reoccupying Gaza and has no plans to push Palestinians from the enclave.
“Contrary to false allegations, Israel doesn’t seek to displace the population in Gaza. Subject to security checks, Israel’s policy is to enable those individuals who wish to leave to do so,” Netanyahu’s office told The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.
For many Israeli voters on the country’s nationalist right, Israel’s 2005 decision to evacuate 21 settlements and uproot some 9,000 civilians from Gaza was a grave injustice that they have long sought to reverse. While the idea has some support among the Israeli public, it is still a minority view and political analysts widely view it as an unrealistic outcome.
A quarter of Israelis support building settlements in Gaza, while 64% favor leaving the enclave entirely after the war or maintaining some level of security control, according to a November poll by the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute think tank.
The far-right ministers, while members of the Israeli government, don’t hold enough seats in the 120-seat Parliament, or Knesset, to overrule Netanyahu and his other allies. After the war began, Benny Gantz, leader of the center-right National Unity party joined a cross-party emergency government, meaning even without the far-right lawmakers, Netanyahu would be able to maintain his majority to lead the country.
But if the far-right ministers pull out of the coalition, it would affect Netanyahu’s ability to hold on to power in the long term, as Gantz has said he would only remain in the coalition for the war’s duration.
Still, Netanyahu’s initial refusal to disavow the comments on Gaza created diplomatic tensions with the U.S. and reflects the challenges of dealing with what analysts say is the most right-wing, religious and ultranationalist government in Israel’s history.
“This isn’t going to happen but it reflects the extremism of the government and the rage of the Israeli polity,” said Hussein Ibish, a senior scholar at the Arab Gulf states Institute think tank in Washington. “Netanyahu isn’t shutting it down because these people are venting in a way that helps Netanyahu stay in power.”
The recent comments also more broadly reflect a debate over the language senior Israeli officials have used in describing the war aims in Gaza. On Thursday, the International Court of Justice will begin hearings over a petition brought by South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The petition by South Africa, which must legally show intent to commit genocide, relies in part on comments by Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, but also a range of senior Israeli officials, including Netanyahu himself.
More than 23,000 Palestinians, a majority women and children, have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to health officials in the enclave. The numbers don’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.
While the proposals by the far-right ministers have almost no chance of succeeding, they create a diplomatic headache, not only with the U.S., but with moderate Arab allies, such as Egypt and Jordan, as well as Gulf states that Israel hopes will play a role in postwar Gaza.
“When this becomes one of the major public points of tension and even conflict with the administration, this is a strategic loss,” said Ghaith Al-Omari, a senior fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank. “It makes it much more difficult for the U.S. to support Israel.
Ari Harow, a former Netanyahu chief of staff, said that the U.S. likely understands that rebuilding Jewish settlements in Gaza is “outside the realm of something that a Netanyahu-led government would take seriously,” but “they will expect Netanyahu to make his position clear on it at some point.”
Meanwhile, Netanyahu has leveraged vagueness to keep coalition pressures in check. While the far-right ministers can’t outvote Netanyahu and his allies, they could pull out of his government.
Polls have shown Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party would lose about a third of its seats in the Knesset if elections were held now. Instead, support has grown for the center-right National Unity party led by Gantz. Gantz has said he wouldn’t allow extremists such as Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to be part of his coalition, meaning elections now would likely see the far right losing all power.
Netanyahu “knows if he goes to elections, he’s toast,” said Michael Oren, a former Israeli envoy to the U.S. and deputy minister in a past Netanyahu government. “Without them he doesn’t have a coalition.”
Write to Shayndi Raice at Shayndi.Raice@wsj.com