For the fifth time since taking office, US President Donald Trump last week reiterated his controversial proposal to depopulate the Gaza Strip and transfer its people permanently to Jordan, Egypt, and other countries.
“There are no conditions anywhere in the world that are worse than the Gaza Strip right now,” the Republican president said. “They’re living in hell. It’s a death trap.”
While the rhetoric surrounding Trump’s proposal is disingenuously couched in terms of a humanitarian gesture, the idea of dispossessing and displacing Palestinians has been a foundational cornerstone of Israel.
This is merely the latest chapter in a long colonial history of successive Israeli governments repeatedly and openly seeking to empty out Gaza, in particular, at least since 1948. Israel has tried virtually every possible tactic to achieve this goal, from massacres, violent suppression, impoverishment, and immiseration, to bribes and incentives, but they have always failed to outright expel and exile Palestinians.
As Israel’s Defence Minister Moshe Dayan put it in 1967, “You shall continue to live like dogs and whoever wants to can leave – and we will see where this process leads… In five years, we may have 200,000 less people – and that is a matter of enormous importance”.
Additionally, emptying out Gaza is not only ethnic cleansing but also complicity in genocide. Israel has rendered Gaza inhabitable and created conditions that bring about the destruction of a group in whole or in part. Trump dispersing Gazans to other countries would mean Palestinians cease to exist as a group.
The Gaza Strip became one giant refugee camp in 1948 when Israel ethnically cleansed and destroyed over 400 Palestinian villages. Over 200,000 out of the more than 700,000 displaced Palestinians sought refuge in the enclave, tripling its population. Today, more than 80 percent of Gaza’s population are refugees who were expelled or fled during the Nakba.
Those refugees became an intractable problem for Israel as some of them attempted to return to their homes, often just a few kilometres from Gaza, while others engaged in armed or popular resistance to fulfil their right of return.
Israel was quick to respond violently in the years after the Nakba and killed over 2,700-5,000 Palestinians who tried to cross back into the villages they were uprooted from.
The Israeli government and the US then pressed Egypt to sign an armistice deal in 1949 that swallowed a further 200 km2 from the Gaza Strip’s land mass to make it harder for Palestinian refugees to cross into Israel.
In 1951, the US and Israel began pressuring Egypt to relocate thousands of Palestinians from refugee camps in Gaza into the Sinai desert. The 1952 Egyptian revolution government, seeking international legitimacy and grappling with internal problems, proved amenable to this pressure.
They agreed in 1953 to relocate 12,000 Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai with UNRWA in return for $30 million from the US (equivalent today of $355 million).
|
|
This deal, coupled with simultaneous Israeli assaults on Gaza, particularly the refugee camps to terrorise people to flee to Egypt, is reminiscent of Israeli tactics today. For instance, in 1953, the Israeli military raided the al-Bureij refugee camp and killed over 50 Palestinians.
Palestinians took to the streets to demonstrate against their ethnic cleansing. Those protests climaxed in early 1955 with chants like, “They drafted the Sinai project in ink. We’ll erase it with blood,” prompting Egypt to cancel the deal.
The following year, Israel engaged in the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt and occupied Gaza for over four months, where the Israeli army destroyed vital infrastructure, including refugee camps and the railway, and massacred over 1,500 people in Gaza, 275 in the Khan Younis refugee camp alone.
Israel used other brutal tactics to terrorise Gaza’s population into fleeing to Egypt, including arresting all males aged 15-60 and incarcerating many of them, committing summary executions, assassinating activists engaged in armed or popular resistance, and taking children as human shields. This prompted some Gazans to escape to Egypt on foot, camel or donkey, as Dr Anne Irfan documents in her upcoming book ‘A Short History of the Gaza Strip’.
In 1967, Israel reoccupied Gaza and coerced over 45,000 Palestinians in Gaza to move to Egypt or Jordan during the war and its immediate aftermath. Anyone who attempted to return was either killed or deported. Israel encouraged Gazans to leave for Jordan and provided them with shuttles until Jordan in 1968 banned them from entering its territory.
Israel also tried to lure Gazans into leaving in 1968 by setting up “emigration offices” in refugee camps and offering “money and foreign passports to Palestinian refugees who agreed to permanently relocate abroad, primarily to Canada, Australia and Brazil,” Dr Irfan noted. Israel even paid the costs of relocation, which reached half a million dollars for 200 families. But the scheme didn’t attract many Palestinians.
Israel’s coercion and immiseration of Gaza pushed some 20,000 Palestinians to leave in the first six months of 1968. Then, in the 1970s, Ariel Sharon, who led the 1953 al-Bureij massacre and went on to lead the Israeli army’s Southern Command, rushed to seal Gaza off “with a ring of fences and a few entry points,” Dr Irfan highlights.
She adds that Sharon then launched a ruthless campaign of “forcible expulsions, house demolitions and intensive indiscriminate violence” as well as summary executions. Sharon, who went on to become Israel’s Prime Minister, took particular aim at Gaza’s overcrowded refugee camps and tried to dismantle them altogether.
Just like Israel’s systematic wiping out of Jabalia in 2024, Sharon ordered his forces in 1971 to demolish over 2,500 homes in the Jabalia, Shati, and Rafah refugee camps. Over 16,000 Palestinians were displaced as a result. Israel continued this three-fold strategy of destruction, slaughter, and forcible expulsions in the 1970s until 2005.
It was coupled with creeping colonisation in Gaza in what Israel called “the Five Finger Strategy” by building settlement blocks in strategic locations that fragmented Gaza into five discontiguous cages (Israel reimplemented that five finger strategy during the 2023-2025 war).
|
|
By the 1980s, over a third of Gaza’s entire area was expropriated by Israel, giving settlers 400 times as much land and 1891% as much water as an average Palestinian.
Even after the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords were signed, Israel’s fantasy of thinning out Gaza’s population continued. In 2004, Israel’s National Security Council chief, Giora Eiland, called Gaza “a huge concentration camp” and proposed annexing 600 km2 from Sinai to disperse the Palestinian population.
Israel’s blockade, by design, was meant to cage its population in a permanent state of non-life in an unliveable “toxic slum” to force its people to either “live like dogs” as Dayan prophetically put it or leave. This was made crystal clear in 2019 by a senior Israeli official who admitted that Israel was “actively pushing Palestinian emigration from Gaza” and is “working to find other countries who may be willing to absorb them”.
Conditions in Gaza are a direct result of Israeli policies of blockade, repeated military assaults, and restrictions on movement that pushed the enclave into a state of chronic poverty and underdevelopment.
Rather than addressing the root causes of the suffering, Trump’s proposed solution shifts the blame onto the displaced people themselves. It frames the Palestinians as a problem to be “solved,” rather than as a population entitled to self-determination, dignity, and justice.
The idea that Palestinians could be “resettled” in neighbouring countries means an acceptance of the legitimacy of Israel’s long dispossession of Palestinians.
It also dangerously normalises displacement and ethnic cleansing as a legitimate mainstream political opinion, which holds grave implications not just to Gaza, but also the West Bank, Ukraine, and elsewhere around the world.
Muhammad Shehada is a Palestinian writer and analyst from Gaza and the EU Affairs Manager at Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
Follow him on Twitter: @muhammadshehad2
