However, after almost a year and a half of attack and retreat in Gaza, of thousands of rockets, terror attacks, ballistic missiles, exploding pagers, assassinations, hostage deals and terrorist releases, we found ourselves at the history-shifting moment when a United States president, of all people, put the “transfer” policy back on the political map.
In a joint press conference on Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump announced his administration’s intention to “take over the Gaza Strip.”
Trump unfolded his vision to remove the entire population of Gaza “to several other countries,” after which Gaza would be leveled, cleared of rubble, and turned into an international economic development.
“This proposal has tremendously shifted the Overton window. People who were recently afraid to even broach the possibility of ‘transfer’ are now talking about it absolutely openly,” Martin Sherman, a senior researcher at the Israeli Defense and Security Forum, told JNS.
(The Overton window is the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.)
Certain corners of Israel’s news punditry responded with shock at Trump’s proposal, apparently confused as to why he did not receive the memo that you are not allowed to discuss the idea of ‘transfer’ in polite society. However, according to recent polling, Trump is more in line with the Israeli street than many of the talking heads who have been bashing the new proposal.
‘A PRACTICAL PLAN’
A Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) poll published on Feb. 3, before the White House press conference, showed that a majority of Israeli Jews thought that the proposition “Arabs from Gaza should relocate to another country” was a “practical plan that should be pursued.”
According to the study, 52% of Israeli Jews thought the plan was both realistic and positive, while 30% of Israeli Jews thought the plan was “not practical, but desirable.” Meanwhile, 13% of Israeli Jews said the plan was “a distraction,” and only 3% of Israeli Jews thought that the plan was “immoral.”
When broken down by political affiliation, there is a clear growth in support the further right down the spectrum you travel. JPPI found that 81% of right-wing Israelis, and 57% of center-right respondents, thought that transfer was an actionable solution to the Gaza crisis. Meanwhile, even among left-wing respondents, only 27% said the idea was immoral.
A poll by Israel’s Channel 13 shows that the support may have gone up since the press conference on Monday. According to the study, 93% of Likud voters, 98% of Religious Zionism Party voters, 88% of haredi voters, and 100% of Yisrael Beiteinu voters support Trump’s plan. Even center-left voters from the Yesh Atid and National Unity parties support the plan at the rate of 74% and 80%, respectively.
When comparing this to polling data from the mid-2000s, one can see an almost 30-point rise in support for “transfer.”
To summarize, the idea of “transfer” broadly, and Trump’s proposal specifically, boasts one of the broadest levels of consensus on any issue in Israeli politics. Beyond being popular, many commentators believe “transfer” is the only practical solution to the Gaza crisis.
“For a long time, Israel has been faced with a difficult dilemma: either there will be Jews in the Negev or Arabs in Gaza, but there cannot be both,” Martin Sherman explained. “If the Jewish state is to continue to exist, Gaza must be vacated of its population.
“All of the alternative proposals on the table so far are just reruns of old failed ideas that led us to October 7. They’re all predicated on the yet-to-be-proven idea that somewhere out there is a Palestinian leader who has both the will and the authority to impose some form of peace agreement on the wider population. There’s never been evidence of such an option existing. We have been operating under this false assumption for the past 40 years,” he said.
Sherman further pointed out that the movement of the civilian population is an entirely normal direction in times of military conflict, and that the forceful containment of Gaza’s civilian population was a deeply unprecedented decision.
“Wherever there has been warfare, whether it’s in Syria or Ukraine, you see civilian populations fleeing the combat. Only here in this one case in the world has the population been trapped where the battles are happening and the entire world has just refused to let them go,” Sherman said.
LT-COL. (RES.) MAURICE HIRSCH, director of the Palestinian Authority Accountability Initiative at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA), expanded on this point, calling the refusal to let Gazans leave “disgraceful.”
Hirsch explained that the current policy of refusing to let Gazans leave was problematic purely on humanitarian grounds.
“The first question when considering ‘transfer’ is do you actually care about the Gazans. According to possibly embellished U.N. reports, between 75% and 80% of the homes in the Gaza Strip have been damaged or destroyed. There are thousands of unexploded munitions lying around the entire area. There’s no water, no electricity, no utilities, no shops. To put it simply, the Strip is uninhabitable.
