Trump’s vision for Gaza revives an idea once reviled in Israel

livemint.com:

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. TEL AVIV : When President Trump proposed to empty Gaza of close to two million Palestinians, he revived an idea that has long been taboo in mainstream Israeli politics. But this week, no Jewish leader of a political party in Israel condemned the comments.

Some even said they supported such a move. Right-wing lawmakers celebrated the statement as going beyond even their ambitions, and some pushed for the plan to be implemented as soon as possible. “Donald, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship," Itamar Ben-Gvir, an Israeli far-right lawmaker, wrote on X.

On Thursday, Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz said he had instructed the military to prepare a plan for Gazans to “leave voluntarily" to countries that would accept them. In Trump’s vision, moving people out of Gaza is a humanitarian effort to get them out of the devastated enclave and to a safer place. A White House spokeswoman said any displacement of Palestinians would only be temporary.

The president has also said the U.S. would take control of Gaza and redevelop it, which he says will bring “great stability to that part of the Middle East." The president doubled down on Thursday, saying that Palestinians would be “in far safer and more beautiful communities" outside of Gaza and that the U.S. would control the enclave.

“Stability for the region would reign!!!" Trump wrote. Displacing Palestinians from Gaza, which has been described as ethnic cleansing, has a long history as a red line in mainstream political discourse in the Middle East, including for many years in Israel. Two Israeli extremist political groups that promoted the idea were ultimately outlawed in the mid-1990s.