Anne Irfan 09/22/2026
London (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – With major elections looming in both the US and Israel, fractures over Gaza are increasingly prominent on both sides of the American political spectrum. Adding fuel to the fire, Israeli government figures recently reiterated calls for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. After National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir set out a plan to permanently expel all Palestinians from the Strip, Defense Minister Israel Katz confirmed that Israel was ready to remove the Palestinians “by every way possible.”
Of course, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is nothing new – far from it. The state of Israel’s very foundation depended on the deliberate forced migration of at least 750,000 Palestinians during the original Nakba of 1947-49. Since then, Israel has continually expelled and displaced Palestinian communities across and beyond historic Palestine – leading many to speak of an ongoing Nakba that has unfolded over nearly eight decades now.
Gaza has always had a central place within this process – unsurprisingly, given its demographics. The Strip absorbed at least 200,000 refugees from across Palestine during the original Nakba, more than trebling its population and leaving it as the only territory where refugees formed the majority. As a result, Gaza became key to the Palestinian struggle for the right of return, and a particular target for the Israeli military. From the early aftermath of the Nakba, Israeli politicians had covert and intensive conversations about depopulating and annexing the Strip. Leading Israeli statesmen and women, including David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, proclaimed from the outset that Gaza should be fully part of Israel.
When Israel occupied Gaza for the first time in 1956, it looked to put these ideas into action. Then Finance Minister Levi Eshkol allocated half a million US dollars to a pilot scheme that would fund the permanent emigration of 200 refugee families, on the condition they never return. The scheme didn’t get off the ground, because US intervention forced Israel to fully withdraw from Gaza in early 1957. But the idea did not go away. By the time Israel re-occupied Gaza a decade later – this time along with the West Bank – Eshkol had become Prime Minister and saw a chance to expand his earlier pilot scheme. And with the US adopting a decidedly more pro-Israel position by the late 1960s, he faced far fewer obstacles.
Just a week into the second occupation, the Israeli cabinet discussed expelling Gaza’s Palestinians to Jordan en masse, euphemistically describing the forced resettlement as “transfer.” The Israeli military, now in charge of Gaza, began bussing large groups of Palestinians to the Jordanian border and depositing them there; anyone who tried to cross back was shot on sight. As word spread that Palestinians from Gaza were being deported against their will, the Jordanian authorities instituted a blanket ban on their entry. Israel, undeterred, simply looked elsewhere.
In 1968, Israel set up so-called “emigration offices” in Gaza’s refugee camps. With tacit US approval, these offices worked to foment depopulation, offering Nakba refugees money and foreign passports if they agreed to permanently relocate abroad. Eshkol had originally considered Iraq as a possible receiving country, but in the end Paraguay was the main destination – although many Palestinians who travelled there under the Israeli scheme were deceived that they would be joining a fixed-term employment program in Brazil before returning to Gaza. On departure from Gaza, they had to forfeit their Palestinian ID cards.
The scheme continued after Eshkol’s sudden death in office in early 1969, but it had little success overall. Few Palestinians were willing to leave Gaza, even for the false promise of a work opportunity abroad. Having been expelled from their homes two decades earlier, and often still living in sight of their old villages, most refugees wanted to go in the opposite direction – back to the land that was now Israel, rather than further away from it. Recognizing this, Israel shifted its short-term focus to more local displacement, demolishing thousands of refugee homes in the 1970s and forcing residents to relocate elsewhere within Gaza or to Israeli-occupied Sinai.
If we fast forward to the present day, the parallels are striking. Since the beginning of the genocide in October 2023, the Israeli military has destroyed more than 90 percent of homes in Gaza and forcibly displaced virtually the entire population. With the Strip’s residential infrastructure now in tatters, the authorities are openly looking to permanently expel its population. In earlier decades these conversations took place covertly, with tacit US support, and were often denied publicly. Today, the subject has lost any stigma in either the Israeli or US political spheres. Thus the Trump administration has regularly and openly proposed that Gaza be ethnically cleansed, with its Palestinian population “transferred” en masse to Indonesia, Somalia, Sudan, Libya or the Democratic Republic of Congo. In one of several plans, Trump offered to pay $5,000 to every Palestinian who leaves “voluntarily.”
Nor is this just talk. Over the last year, a settler organization linked to the Israeli army’s so-called Voluntary Emigration Bureau has transferred hundreds of Palestinians out of Gaza. They are first bussed to southern Israel and then flown to a range of destinations, including Indonesia, South Africa and Malaysia. Some report being hoodwinked by a faux humanitarian agency offering emergency evacuation, and not knowing where they were going on departure.
As Americans and Israelis prepare to go to the polls, there has been strikingly little media coverage of these ongoing schemes. Yet with strong cross-party Israeli consensus against Palestinian sovereignty, it is more important than ever to pay close attention to these plans for Gaza – and to understand what’s happening before it’s too late.