Is transfer the answer?

Shortly before October 7, the owner of our favorite Arab restaurant said to us: “We are seventh generation in this city.” As I watched three of those generations slinging plates of pita, skewers and freshly mashed hummus, I wondered what that kind of family would be like. My husband was first generation American, I was second. Before that, we could trace our families back another generation – two at the most. My own childhood was marked by moves around the US as my father sought better jobs.

Here, I thought I had found a place to put down roots – to begin something as meaningful as a family tied to a place. I was wrong, of course. My children have chosen a more rootless existence outside the country. We remain, as a family, wandering Jews, spreading garden flowers rather than a multi-generational family tree imbued with deep roots. But I have, for the past 45 years considered this my home – a home I share with the Arab restaurant owners, doctors, shepherds and tractorists I meet and know.

When Haaretz published the results of a recent survey claiming 86% of Jewish Israelis are for the transfer of Palestinians from Gaza and 56% support the transfer of Palestinian citizens of Israel to foreign countries, left-wing Jews were shocked and appalled, but many Arabs said they were not surprised.

Clearly, this is an opinion born of wartime, of fear, of the need for a scapegoat in terrifying times. But if we can unpack the question a bit, we see that the very idea of a Jewish state is changing, egged on by right-wing social media. And that concept, in its most extreme form, needs the transfer to be complete.

Transfer is not a new idea – Ben Gvir has been a proponent from the start, but Avigdor Liberman, for example, proposed “population exchange” 15 years ago. Resettling the population of Gaza has gained traction in part due to Trump’s grand plan for the tiny strip of land and, in part, because we’ve realized that half the population of Gaza would already be on the next plane, if only Canada would take them in.

I understand the attraction. After all, people move around all the time, right? Most of us Jews are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, and most of those moved out of necessity, not real choice. So, what’s the big deal?

On the face of things, transfer would seem to solve some problems. Gaza has been one of those “problems” since 1948, when the refugee camps went up, and they became more problematic once Jewish Israelis occupied part of Gaza and then pulled out, leaving an opening for Hamas to step into. If we haven’t “won” the war by the conventional means of razing whole neighborhoods and killing a lot of people, expelling the entire population by force would do the trick.

And if we transferred our own Palestinian population, citizens who currently enjoy somewhat equal rights? Then, instead of having to share, we could keep our state (and our daughters) purely Jewish.

I hope you are reading the same overtones in that statement that I am hearing in my head. Yesterday, I heard a Palestinian citizen of Israel say: “When I walk around Haifa, I feel like a Jew in Berlin in 1939.” Is this the state we want?

Following the expulsion, in our Declaration of Independence, we could draw a red line through “democratic Jewish state”. My fellow secular Jews, what do you think the resulting Jewish state will look like, after we have removed that particular 20% of the population?

Let’s start with elections. Lapid, Gantz, Eisenkot, Lieberman, Golan, everyone from the center to the left: In elections you will not be able to form a government coalition without the tacit support of the Arab parties. That will leave ever more religious, more extreme, parties in power.

And if you think that, by expelling Arabs, we can be a happy Jewish state, all living in peace, I fear you are sadly mistaken. As the pre-October riots showed, we Israeli Jews were deeply divided then and we are just as deeply divided now. Without Arabs to blame, without Arab-own shops in Jaffa fronted in windows that can be smashed, we’ll tear each other to pieces.

Whether the result would be civil war or a Torah-based theocracy (or both) I can’t predict. Neither, obviously, would be my first choice. But we are already heading in that general direction, and we will need a mixed population – one that would rather opt for shared society — in order to apply the brakes.

Plus, do we really want to add to the Palestinian diaspora? Palestinian exiles are behind much of the unrest on college campuses around the issue of Gaza, and their numbers are already large enough to influence US elections. We could simply be transferring the “problem” along with the people.

Just as obviously, I am not insisting we refrain from transferring Palestinians just because they are today’s convenient punching bags, nor do I think we should drop the idea because it will look bad to the rest of the world. I do believe, however, that we on the left need to figure out how to subvert the idea that transfer is acceptable, or that it will benefit us in any way.

Because from the very beginning, we have been a part of Palestinian society and they have been a part of us. To expel Palestinians would be to cut off a part of ourselves and send it wandering into the desert. It is not just bits and pieces of culture and language that we have adopted. It is not just that we eat hummus and they feed their children schnitzel. We Israelis think we created a new culture out of a mix of the old ones, and Palestinian Israelis may identify with cultures across our borders. But if you look more closely, you will see an ecosystem of cultures that have evolved together over the past 80 years. Even if you do not have close Arab friends, our daily encounters with one another shape who we are, and who we have become.

My plea is that we stop thinking of our neighbors as “problems,” and see them as human beings. When I think of my friend the restaurant owner, when I think of expelling her from her generational home, when I think of those who were already expelled: Their roots may get pulled up, but those forced to leave take the dirt between their roots with them. That is something we Jews understand – the longing for a bit of land that nourishes us and sustains us. That longing for the land can be what divides us, or we can choose to let it be what unites us.