'Compassionate' Expulsion: '60 Minutes' Exposes Ben-Gvir's Great Replacement Plan for Palestinians -
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the convicted Kahanist, racist inciter and terror group supporter who serves as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's national security minister and Otzma Yehudit party head, has translated his plan for the Palestinians into an AI-assisted fantasy video for his election campaign.
That plan, of course, is predicated on their disappearance from Palestine. It is an instructive visual text that parlays well with the blatant settler violence shown on this week's "60 Minutes": The packaging and the implementation are two sides of the same coin.
The golden hour-hued election video is intended to present Ben-Gvir's "voluntary migration" policy for Palestinians as an act of kindness. It opens on a beach in Gaza, with a young Palestinian girl, backed by her brother and proudly smiling parents, placing a message in a bottle addressed to Ben-Gvir (spelled "Ben-Gafir," in a racist nod to supposed Palestinian pronunciation of his name), which washes up at his feet on an Israeli beach.
The message, which Ben-Gvir pins up in his upgraded office, since he's now the defense minister – the position he is demanding in a post-election government – says that they want to leave Gaza for "somewhere else." At his desk, he starts signing certificates of "voluntary migration." The final scene shows the Palestinian family waving their certificates as they happily board a huge Israeli-flag adorned cruise ship taking them to their new life.
True to the authoritarian-Orwellian playbook, Ben-Gvir is creating an inverted lexicon and then challenging the viewer to oppose the "new" language. He presents the transfer of Gazans out of Gaza as a form of humanitarian rescue and relocation, in happy partnership with the Palestinians themselves.
Ben-Gvir's pitch is to present cruelty as kindness, immorality as hope and ethnonationalism as fairmindedness. Let's call it assisted self-deportation, civilized expulsion, compassionate ethnic cleansing. Indeed, he constantly reiterates that "Gazans are begging to emigrate" – and because of his famous empathy with Palestinians, he is ready and willing to be their emigration fairy godmother.
In general, Ben-Gvir tries to remember to call this voluntary migration, but when he originally posted the video on X, the mask slipped entirely: The accompanying text said that as putative defense minister, he would enact a "migration program from Gaza, Judea and Samaria." Not only did he forget the "voluntary" modifier, but he widened the scope to include the entire West Bank. No need to worry that he's forgotten about Israel within the Green Line, as he would never call the boundary that separates Israel from the West Bank: Both he and fellow far-rightist Bezalel Smotrich are also committed to "Judaizing" the Galilee, to overturn its "occupation" by Arabs.
Days after he posted the video, it disappeared from his X feed, although it's still availableon the YouTube account of his Otzma Yehudit party. It's not the first time in recent months that Ben-Gvir has deleted an AI campaign video; last month, he deleted one showing emaciated Palestinians leaving an Israeli prison, which attracted comparisons to a concentration camp, leading Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego to call him a "piece of shit."
Don't confuse partial deletion with contrition: At an election event in Tel Aviv on Monday, Ben-Gvir declared that Israel should "conquer all of Gaza, because it is all ours," called for Palestinians to leave Gaza and the West Bank (yes, again without the qualifier "voluntary") and expanded the circle of deportation to include the Palestinian Authority, whose officials he called Nazis who need to be expelled.
Ben-Gvir has long been agitating for a Palestinian expulsion plan dressed up in the terms of voluntary emigration. The October 7 massacre and the Gaza war presented the unexpected opportunity to push forward what he called in January 2024 the "right solution," accompanied by the wholesale Jewish settlement of Gaza.
U.S. President Donald Trump delivered a helpful headwind in February 2025, with his comments about "cleaning out" Gaza of its population and constructing a Riviera on this "beautiful piece of property." His backpedaling on expulsion a month later made no discernible impact on Ben-Gvir or larger swaths of the Netanyahu government, including ministers from Netanyahu's own Likud party, who have enthusiastically participated in conferences and encampments pressing for resettling Gaza.
'The owners of everything'
But it was another video this week from a veteran American journalist that stripped Ben-Gvir's doubletalk about "voluntary" emigration down to its most naked, fascist form.
Reporting from the West Bank on the violence of increasingly brazen and expansionist settlers against Palestinians and their land, Lesley Stahl of "60 Minutes" captured the moment when a settler headbutted a Palestinian trying to access his property, fracturing his nose. Soon after, an Israel Defense Forces captain appeared and told the Palestinians and the film crew to clear off, not only failing to take any action against the settler in the wake of the attack but also actively protecting the settlers when they returned to the usurped property.
Hassan Faraj, a member of the family that owns the Palestinian land, told Stahl that in March, settlers had shot dead his cousin and then beat his body with a wooden stick. He noted that the campaign of intimidation and lethal violence was working: Villagers living near the settler outpost were abandoning their houses. The settlers behaved "as if they were the owners of everything," Faraj said.
This is the unvarnished version of "voluntary" emigration, but it is part of the same overall plan. While Smotrich diligently creates the bureaucratic, budgetary and logistical framework for supercharging settlements and displacing Palestinians, Ben-Gvir provides the bullying and the blood.
His party apparatus is riddled with thugs and convicted criminals. His reign as national security minister has seen violent crime in the Arab community skyrocket, amid a complete absence of police efforts or accountability; meanwhile, he keeps pushing for more guns "in Jewish hands," as he put it at Monday's election event. He has so thoroughly corrupted the police and the prison service that Israel's attorney general recently called for the Supreme Court to intervene to "protect police independence and human rights." But he spits on the idea of human rights, boasting about malnutrition of Palestinians in prisons that have effectively become torture sites.
Two days after Stahl's report was aired, Ben-Gvir confidently claimed at the Tel Aviv event that "settler violence is mostly fake." This wasn't just denialism.
He sees every settler conquest of territory as legitimate, by any means necessary. It is, in his eyes, the correct, inevitable result of asserting Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea. The brutal devastation of Gaza and its tens of thousands dead are a source of pride.
In another election video, he gloated about demolishing an East Jerusalem building that housed 10 Palestinian families. They "saw the [security] forces, understood the message, and evacuated voluntarily," he says, adding, "We demolish and demolish and demolish and demolish again. We are the masters of the house here."
An exile for an exile
This is the Israeli right's Great Replacement Plan for the Palestinians, from Gaza to the West Bank, from the Galilee to the Negev: to make homes unlivable, life unbearable, death a constant presence.
In this narrative, offering a way out is a humane solution, while closing the historical circle: Just as desperate Jewish survivors sought to immigrate to pre-state Mandatory Palestine on boats like the Exodus, desperate Palestinian survivors can emigrate to an unknown sanctuary on boats, too – and benevolent Israel will ensure far better onboard conditions. An eye for an eye, and an exile for an exile. And if Palestinians don't embrace their expulsion with joy – there is always the gun, the tank shell, the bomb.
There is no doubt that Ben-Gvir taps into many Israelis' id, which prefers that the Palestinian conflict, and Palestinians themselves, would simply disappear. Polls from last year showed popular support for the transfer of the Palestinian population from Gaza ranging from 53 percent to 82 percent. Indeed, roughly half of Israel's Jewish population is intending to vote for parties in Netanyahu's coalition, or newer far-right parties that also endorse this position.
Far-right populist politics is about pandering to the voters' most basic urges. But at least half of the electorate oppose the grotesque caricature of governance and norms embodied by the current coalition. Politicians are not puppets; they have agency and responsibility. If Netanyahu had not midwifed Ben-Gvir and Smotrich's dark journey into the halls of power and acceptability, their policies would never have reached such levels of amplification and execution.
That's why the election in 13 days is so momentous: It's not only about Netanyahu's personal fate, the government's assault on language, truth and norms, and whether Israel becomes a fully-fledged authoritarian and pariah state, even though these are crucial issues. It's about war, exile, life and death – for Israelis and for Palestinians.