‘Voluntary transfer:’ expulsion by any other name

There are certain ideas that never truly disappear from Israeli political life. They retreat, rebrand, return – always with new packaging, and yet always with their old intentions. One of the most persistent, though, is the notion that the Palestinian question – or, at least, its demographic dimension – can be solved not through peaceful negotiation or coexistence following decades of war, but through a mass ‘departure.’ Willing or otherwise.

This time, the great question is dressed in euphemisms: ‘voluntary emigration’; ‘humanitarian resettlement;’ ‘facilitated exit.’ But that vision is the same one Meir Kahane once shouted from the Knesset floor, and yet it is also one that members of the current coalition nod to with increasing confidence: an Israel where fewer Palestinians live under its control by means of population subtraction rather than political resolution.

Since October 7, this notion, once fringe, has begun to creep its way back into the mainstream. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, a man who needs no introduction for his sentiments, has floated it explicitly; Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has spoken of ‘encouraging’ Gazans to leave, whatever that means; and an entire cottage industry of op-eds, think tank blurbs and Facebook posts has sprouted around the question of whether, if enough economic, social and military pressure is applied, might the Palestinians just go? This isn’t policy making, this is diplomatic laziness to negotiate peace.

The phrase ‘voluntary transfer’ here is the magic trick. It implies no coercion, no expulsion, no scenes of bulldozers and the settler buses that follow close behind. In practice, though, it is a solution based not on dignity or mutual recognition, but on pure exhaustion – if the far-right members of the Knesset are to succeed and make life so utterly untenable that departure becomes the rational choice, they will have access to the thousands of kilometers of what Trump described as plot of land that could potentially become ‘the Riviera of the Middle East.’ It’s unlikely, but its either that or explicitly presenting emigration as the only way out of a war zone that offers no horizon.

And yet, the idea is gaining currency – not because it is workable, but because it flatters certain instincts: that Israel’s security without grappling with Palestinian nationalism; that demography can be engineered without annexation; that varying degrees of autonomy can be devised without a reckoning. The right calls it pragmatic, but in truth, it’s theological. It believes that land can only ever, in any instance, belong to one people and one people only, and that peace for the Jewish land means someone else leaving.

Hundreds of Palestinians have left Gaza in recent years, to Europe, Egypt, Jordan, et cetera. Some supporters use this precedent to support their argument, but they ignore the cause: war, and the poverty that follows. Flight from despair is not consent – therefore, to label anything of this sort ‘voluntary’ is to insult not only the Palestinians, the language itself.

There is, of course, another issue; that to maintain the facade of the mass emigration being ‘voluntary,’ Israel cannot be seen to be actively pushing Palestinians out. But the moment it stops short of that final, forceful nudge, the entire plan collapses. And, should it choose to cross that line, Israel would enter a moral abyss.

There is also a quieter harm – not to Palestinians, but to Israelis. The indulgence of this idea only postpones the hard conversation. It allows us to believe that there is a shortcut to peace: one that doesn’t require power-sharing, recognising rights, or any sort of diplomatic imagination that we can win a war so thoroughly we never need to talk again.

Peace, contrary to the likes of Ben Gvir and Smotrich, is not ethnic arithmetic; it is politics. And politics is messy, slow, and full of compromise. The sooner we remember this, the sooner we can bury this delusion – not under more layers of euphemisms, but for good. Until then, though, every time a minister calls for ‘humanitarian resettlement,’ we should be clear-eyed. This is not a peace plan, it is a population plan – one that will not end in dignity for either side.