This must happen to the Palestinians.

“A people who will persevere in war beyond a certain limit ought to know the consequences.”

Photo by mohammed al bardawil on Unsplash

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This is a guest essay written by Daniel Saunders who writes the newsletter, “The Beginning of Wisdom.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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A month after the October 7th attacks, political scientist Shany Mor published an article on Mosaic Magazine about the Arab-Israeli or Islamic-Israeli conflict.

He divided the wars Israel has fought into two categories. The first consists of those that had short-term goals, such as the Suez War of 1956 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973¹, which were relatively easily resolved with negotiated truces and peace treaties.

In the second category are three wars which, although very different in origin and outcome, have a similar form: the Israeli War of Independence (1948 to 1949), the Six-Day War (1967), and the Second Intifada (2000 to 2005). All three began with genocidal rhetoric in the Arab world, speaking excitedly of destroying Israel and killing or expelling its entire Jewish population, with no dissenting voices raising moral qualms or asking what would happen if Israel won.

All three ended in a defeat for the Arab parties, leaving the Palestinians in particular worse off: first by many leaving Israel (by choice or otherwise), then by being ruled by Israel in Gaza and the so-called “West Bank” (Judea and Samaria), then by having an increased security apparatus of checkpoints and the security barrier separating them from Israel, alongside the growth of Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria.

After each war, the Palestinians declared themselves to be the victims of genocide and to have suffered more than anyone in history (two patently false claims), having erased the eagerness and optimism with which they started conflict from their memories, the eternally innocent, perfect victims of world history.

Shany Mor feared that the current Gaza war — that had just started at the time of her writing — would follow the same pattern. I was a little sceptical. What could be worse for them? And, anyway, the world wouldn’t allow anything bad to happen to them, even if the Israelis wanted it, which I doubted. Even the war was rapidly reined in, with Israel forced by then-U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration to essentially resupply Hamas by allowing food, water, and electricity to be allowed into the Gaza Strip, despite knowing full well that Hamas would steal them.

I continued to think that this was the case until the last few weeks. Following Hamas’ obscene carnival around the return of the bodies of the Bibas family (which later turned out not to include the mother, Shiri Bibas) and seeing the response to it online, I thought:

Possibly the most significant thing that Hamas achieved on October 7th, in the months following, and especially in the last 24 hours, is to convince many Israelis and even many Diaspora Jews (typically more dovish) that removing two million Palestinians, utterly enmeshed with Hamas regardless of legal definitions of “guilt,” from Gaza and depositing them somewhere — anywhere — else in the world is more moral than leaving them where they are to let Hamas repeat the events of the last year and a half every decade or so.

Considering this idea was utterly beyond the pale even on the Israeli moderate right on October 6, 2023 when floated by extremist Israeli politicians like Itamar Ben Gvir, this might be seen as a major achievement, if not the one they were hoping for.

I didn’t go far enough, though. The idea of resettlement was forbidden even in early stages of war, hence my refusal to countenance it when I read Shany Mor’s article and perhaps his refusal to mention the possibility. Even then it might not have occurred to me had U.S. President Donald Trump, the great disrupter of existing paradigms, not legitimised it.

Regardless of whether that’s the case, Hamas’ actions during their recent hostage-release propaganda ceremonies took Israelis and Jews worldwide back to the lows of October 7th, the early weeks of the war, and the recovery of the body of Hersch Goldberg-Polin and those with him.

After each of these, the national mood has lifted a little with events like the daring rescue of four hostages in Gaza, the exploding Hezbollah pagers, the consequent elimination of Hezbollah’s leadership, and the killing of Hamas leaders Mohammed Deif and Yahya Sinwar. But each time it cycles down again whenever Hamas attempts to regain the initiative, something they can still do while still holding numerous hostages and with worldwide support.

(Yes, Britain, the European Union, the United Nations, the U.S. Democratic Party, and most of the world’s mainstream media have been and still are at least de facto helping Hamas through their “concern” for “ordinary Gazans” — something they show in no similar situation, as demonstrated by the UN’s immediate cessation of aid to Yemen on the capture of a mere 13 UN aid workers by the Houthis.)

Only afterwards did I find out that a majority of Israelis approve of President Trump’s plan² in theory and a large minority think it practical and worth pursuing. Only 13 percent of Israelis see the plan as fundamentally “immoral” and almost all of these are Arab Israelis. Only three percent of Jews think it immoral, even if they think it impractical.

This survey was taken some time before the Bibas family’s return in caskets — and I imagine support is even greater now. In other words, most Israeli Jews find the barrier to relocation of the Palestinians to be pragmatic, not moral. A position that was considered Far-Right just 16 months ago is now mainstream.

9-month-old Kfir Bibas was kidnapped during the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023 in Israel, and then murdered in captivity. (photo: courtesy)

As I see it, there are three new factors responsible for this “vibe shift.”

First, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to eradicate the enemy on Israel’s doorstep to somehow try to save his career after being responsible for the disaster of October 7th and this eradication is failing because of the enmeshment of the Gazan population with Hamas as human shields. It is necessary to remove the civilians completely to destroy Hamas. Moreover, Hamas is continually replenishing itself from the Gazan population and arguably only removing the population of Gaza will end the threat to Israel.

The second factor is that President Trump is willing to tear up existing ways of doing things and is more than happy to demolish “Woke” dogma.

Finally, the events of the last year and a half have brought Israeli Jews and maybe Jews generally to a situation where they no longer care about the Palestinians and the mythical two-state solution (quite rightly, in my opinion) even if they want to obey international law.

It is the latter that brings the most cogent argument against relocation. The Geneva Convention of 1949 states that the population of an occupied area may not be transferred except in cases where “the security of the population or imperative military reasons so demand.” In that case, it is permitted to move inhabitants outside the area entirely if there is no alternative for “material reasons.”

This obviously has a lot of room for interpretation. The Israeli government and the Trump Administration could advocate an expansive reading of Gaza as a real and present danger to Israel, while the world would object. It would then become a game of politics, as with the settlements, which suffer from similar legal ambiguity. The question would be whether the support of the U.S. would outweigh the opposition of the rest of world. It might.

Regardless of whether it is illegal, such a transfer will certainly be denounced as immoral, especially for Jews, with their history of displacement. However, this is emotionalism. If Jewish history determined Jewish actions and Jews should not do to others what was done to them, then Jews should be total pacifists, not engaging in war at all, because many Jews have been killed.

The reality is that most Jews distinguish between self-defence and aggression in killing; they can do so in population transfer too. In any case, if Jews forcibly transferred thousands of Jews out of Gaza in pursuit of peace in 2007, it’s hard to see how a similar scheme, with relocation and compensation, could not be justified on similar grounds.

What if we take the quasi-Kantian view that not removing people from their homes should be a universal rule, something never to be allowed? But this is nonsense too. Even liberal, democratic Western governments have power of compulsory purchase (sometimes known as “eminent domain”) of private property in order to build roads and other public goods (even a football stadium in one British case).

This encourages us to take a consequentialist viewpoint whereby the saving of Israeli and Palestinian lives by preventing conflict outweighs the loss of property. In any case, Gazans can hardly claim Gaza as their “historic homeland” while simultaneously claiming to be “refugees.”

The consequentialist approach has the advantage of being a historically approved method of preventing conflict. In the aftermath of World War II, millions of ethnic Germans (not Nazis, but people of German origin who happened to have lived in countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia for hundreds of years) were forcibly moved by the Allies into Germany proper to prevent them being used again as the pretext for future wars.

Similarly, the partition of India in 1947 saw millions more people displaced, Hindus and Sikhs, from what became Pakistan into India and Muslims in the opposite direction. Nor were these examples historically unique. The decline of empires into nation states in the 19th and 20th centuries were often accompanied by significant population transfer to ensure ethnic homogeneity.

Forced transfer without compensation is ethnic cleansing, and I and many others would struggle to agree to it, however compelling the arguments, but voluntary transfer with compensation (a one-off payment to start a new life accompanying a written renunciation of refugee status and any putative “right of return” to Israel or “Palestine” — as well as removal from the roll of refugees of UNRWA³) would be morally different, particularly if it prevents war.

The big questions are practical ones, like: Where will Gazans go?

The Arab states don’t want them, both because they want to use them as a weapon against Israel and because Palestinian communities have a habit of destabilising other Arab nations from Jordan (whence the government violently expelled them to prevent a coup and civil war) to Lebanon (where they disrupted the delicate religious/ethnic balance and triggered a civil war) to Kuwait (whence they were expelled after supporting the Iraqi invasion).

Militants of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Jordan, in 1969, just before the events of Black September, also known as the Jordanian Civil War (photo: Thomas R. Koeniges/Wikipedia)

The two most pro-Western Arab states, Egypt and Jordan, won’t accept them, since Hamas’ parent body, the Muslim Brotherhood, is outlawed in both states, as it aims to overthrow the somewhat-moderate, somewhat-secular, pro-Western governments of these countries and impose an Islamist theocracy.

While there are probably enough “useful idiots” in the Western middle class who would advocate for Gazan immigration to the West, this would destabilise countries that are already rightly suspicious of Islamist infiltration through immigration and would likely lead to widespread popular protest. The very popularity of Hamas in Gaza which makes relocation so urgent also makes it a non-starter because of the fear that anyone accepting Gazans would just be importing extremists and terrorists.

I doubt that the thought of leaving millions of Gazans in limbo, however justified it might be by their support for Hamas, is something Israel and the U.S. would be able to face doing in practice, however much they talk about it, even aside from the unpredictability of President Trump.

A similar problem is the question of how many Gazans would renounce their “Palestinian refugee” status and move elsewhere. Even extremely settled, Westernised Palestinians like billionaire Mohamed Hadid (and his supermodel daughters Bella and Gigi) and the late academic Edward Said insist on their “Palestinian refugee” status for political reasons (and perhaps also for identity prestige in Left-wing, elite circles) despite their success and acculturation in the West, so what chance is there of ordinary Palestinians renouncing their status?

Islam and honour-based Islamic antisemitism are the primary cause of irrational loyalty to the Palestinian cause, the refusal to accept “infidel” and especially “lowly” Jewish sovereignty on a patch of “holy Islamic soil conquered by the heirs of Mohammed,” however small and insignificant the land in question is in comparison to Islamic territories elsewhere.

UNRWA is merely the mechanism through which this irredentism manifests itself, not the cause of the problem. This issue may be impossible to resolve by external actors.

A building belonging to UN Palestinian “refugees” agency, UNRWA, which wails and screams about the destruction in Gaza, while directly aiding and abetting Hamas (photo: UNRWA/X)

It is hard to be sure of the view of Gazans, given that Hamas still exerts a dictatorial hold over them, but as of June 2024, support for the attack on Israel remained high, although falling slightly, according to the Palestine Centre for Policy and Survey Research. There is clear support for Hamas, which indicates there may be support for staying in Gaza as human shields and “righteous victims” for propaganda in future rounds of fighting. The more dedicated to Hamas that Gazans are, the less likely they are to want to leave and start a new life elsewhere.

All that said, and although it is hard to be sure of anything in Gaza, some Gazans certainly wanted to leave the Strip and go to Egypt when the war started, but they were stopped by Hamas and also by the Egyptian government. They may have intended to return later, of course.

Ironically, a fully funded resettlement of Gazans could be the best possible outcome for them, bearing in mind that, given the situation, there is no completely “good” outcome. Resettlement is what would have happened if they had been a “normal” refugee population under the aegis of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN’s main refugee body, rather than under UNRWA, its specialist Palestinian refugee body, captured by Palestinian nationalists and their supporters.

If even half a million Gazans left and were resettled elsewhere in the Middle East and set up independently and built lives and homes, then that might finally provide an alternative to fighting for them, a place where they can live and build lives away from the conflict, with a new identity. But this too seems unlikely to work in practice.

As noted above, Palestinian “refugee” status even among those born generations after the displacement of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, combines both national and religious identity elements that Palestinians are unwilling to surrender.

The very thought of accepting a Jewish state on “holy Islamic soil” is seen as utterly dishonourable not just in Gaza, but across the Middle East, a region where honour is fundamental to life in a way that Westerners, including Israelis, can not really understand. It is certainly something for which to sacrifice peace, prosperity, and life — including the lives of children — rather than abandon it.

Any attempt to remove Gazans by force would probably just reignite the war, with few Gazans cooperating even if threatened, and Hamas fighting to stop them being moved.

My biggest fear from an attempt to move Gazans by force is a Jewish schism. If a forcible relocation took place, the Jewish community would likely split with Left against Right; Israel against much of the Diaspora. I have already seen this dynamic online.

I no longer care enough about the Palestinians to worry very much about what happens to them, as long as they aren’t cold-bloodedly murdered, but I do not want the already evaporating Jewish unity of the weeks following the October 7th attacks to be destroyed completely.

You may sense an equivocation in this article, a sense of being caught between an ethic of justice that demands punishment to avoid repeated offences and an ethic of compassion that fears that harming others, even when necessary for peace, really just harms the self. A desire to punish the wicked short-circuited by the knowledge that the wicked will see that the bulk of the suffering falls on children.

Both ethics are a part of Jewish thought and identity at a fundamental level, hence the logical impasse. I think that a voluntary relocation would be ideal, but I can’t see it happening. A legal and even perhaps a moral case can be made for forcible relocation, but it is hard to see how it would work in practice.

At the same time, I feel that something like this is going to happen, not necessarily relocation, but a dramatic new move by Netanyahu and Trump, signalling the final end of the mythical “two-state solution” — something imposed on Gazans by Israel and the Trump Administration to try to prevent October 7th from happening again.

There is an urgent need to make Palestinians suffer for what they did on October 7th, not out of revenge, but to show them that the dream of a Palestinian state and especially the dream of the destruction of Israel, is over.

Palestinian nationalism (also known as “Palestinianism,” a doctrine of hatred for Israel and the desire to destroy it) is a weapon that was invented by the Mufti of Jerusalem a century ago, sharpened for decades by the Arab League, honed to a fine point by the KGB, and is now wielded by the Iranian Ayatollahs as part of their bid for regional and eventually global dominance.

So far, no one has been able to make it safe. This has to change.

Former Israeli politician Einat Wilf, who coined the term “Palestinianism,” argues that the world has always bailed out the Palestinians and insulated them from the consequences of their violent actions. They have been allowed to hold on to their Jew-hate and rape and murder as a result of it, while Israelis bear the costs.

General William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the leading Union generals in the American Civil War, stated that: “A people who will persevere in war beyond a certain limit ought to know the consequences.” This must happen to the Palestinians.

Bear in mind that death is not a deterrent to Islamists. They believe that, if they die killing Jews or even as shields to help others kill Jews, they go to eternal bliss. Only losing more land is a price to them. They need to learn that if they make war on Israel, they will lose, they will lose badly, and there will be irreversible consequences for them and their families.

This may not happen as a result of this war, but, sooner or later, it will happen, as Israel grows more determined to create a permanent deterrent to escalating violence, and the ethic of justice comes to outweigh the ethic of compassion. I only hope that, however this happens, it does not divide the Jewish People or sully our morality.

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1. In popular Jewish thought, this is still seen as a genocidal war like the ones of 1948-1949 and 1967, but historians and political scientists now see then-Egyptian President Anwar El-Sadat’s goals as limited to the recovery of land lost to Israel in 1967 and the removal of the shame of the previous defeat despite his wilder rhetoric, hence his openness to signing a peace treaty involving full recognition of Israel five years later.

2. “Majority of Israelis Support Trump’s Proposal to Relocate Gaza’s Population to Other Countries.” The Jewish People Policy Institute.

3. The UN agency for Palestinian “refugees”