President Donald Trump. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Contributing Columnist
Sruli Fruchter
February 19, 2025
President Donald Trump’s proposal to forcibly displace Gaza’s two million Palestinians is widely supported among Israelis — and has been welcomed by politicians on the far right, and even tacitly endorsed by those more in the center, like Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz. I understand why: After the horrors of Oct. 7 and the exceptional pain of the war that followed, effectively expelling all Palestinians from Gaza could seem like a tempting solution to an intractable conflict. Israelis want to ensure that a rebuilt Gaza will never again pose a threat to them.
But Jews and Israelis must wholeheartedly reject the plan.
This opposition must stem not only from a legal standpoint — as the plan would amount to a terrible war crime — but also from a moral one. After all: What will the Jewish state become if it forces two million Palestinians from their homes? Who will Israelis and Israel’s Jewish supporters be if we back another people’s expulsion — especially after experiencing the pain of similar traumas throughout our own history?
The state of Israel was created with the highest moral aspirations, “based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel,” as its Declaration of Independence maintains. Ridding the Palestinian territories of Palestinians was once considered an unconscionable fringe idea in Israel’s political discourse, pushed only by Meir Kahane and his band of fanatical followers. In 1984, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of the right-wing Likud party denounced Kahane’s movement as “negative, dangerous and damaging.”
Now, Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who has heralded the plan — are turning the unacceptable into the feasible. Israel must play no part in it.
Our biblical origins repeatedly reinforce how central a heightened sense of morality is to the Jewish people.
In the Book of Bereishit, God reveals his plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah to the patriarch Abraham, who fiercely challenges it. “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” Abraham asks. He pleads for God to avert his judgment, lest even 10 innocents be wrongly killed among the swarms of guilty. (Ultimately, even 10 could not be found, so God overturned the cities — but the lesson of Abraham still stands.)
The 13th-century commentary Nachmanides explains that God intentionally sought Abraham’s outrage in this situation, to teach him and his descendants to pursue justice and righteousness endlessly, and to demand mercy whenever possible.
If Abraham stood before Trump at the Oval Office, or Netanyahu at the Knesset, I imagine he would decry Trump’s plan for Gaza. To expel Hamas terrorists would be just. But to collectively banish an entire people would be cruel — a sweeping away of the innocent alongside the evil.
I have heard many justifications to combat that argument. “There are no innocent civilians in Gaza,” I have heard some say. “Maybe it’s not right,” others say, “but at least it’s something new and fresh and out of the box.”
These are poor vindications for clear abuses of power. Is there anything more perverse than the idea of a people famed for experiencing exile, from so many different lands, inflicting the same fate upon another people? (Today’s situation is distinct from Israel’s War of Independence, when Arabs largely fled, with Israelis destroying villages after the fact; some historians argue there were few instances of direct expulsions.)
The biblical prophets teach us to be skeptical of those who are seduced by the ability to wield power. “Their course is evil,” Jeremiah accused, “their might is not right.”
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel identified an adoration for force for force’s sake as a perpetual threat to our morality. “When the prophets appeared,” Heschel writes in The Prophets, “they proclaimed that might is not supreme, that the sword is an abomination, that violence is obscene.”
By welcoming Trump’s plan, I see the Israeli society I love threatening to reject its moral foundations in the name of power.
Trump fantasizes about removing Palestinians from Gaza because he is fascinated by the idea of his own might. Netanyahu flirts with the displacement because he knows the United States will back him, and doing so is politically expedient for appeasing his far-right coalition. If everyday Israelis hail the plan, too, they will eviscerate the ethical sensibility that is so definitional to our people.
I understand why the plan might gain approval. So many Israeli lives have been upended by Hamas’ barbarism that it is understandable why they might see the displacement of Palestinians as Israel’s only sensible option. But they are wrong: There are many thoughtful plans for how to protect Israel while keeping Gaza’s population in place. While Israeli pain deserves empathy, we cannot allow fear and emotion to guide us — not when our moral core is at stake.
There is a false binary set before us: rule or be ruled, chase or be chased, expel or be expelled. Israel must not succumb to it, and allow its moral standing to be compromised. After so many months of destruction and chaos, we must ensure our conscience emerges unscathed.
Israel has lost too many lives in this conflict. It cannot also afford to lose its soul.
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