There is an old axiom in Israeli politics that no mainstream politician can espouse positions to the left of a U.S. president. But what happens when the U.S. president positions himself to the right of the entire Israeli establishment?
On Jan. 19, a ceasefire brokered by the U.S., Qatar and Egypt came into effect in Gaza. After 15 months of conflict, Gaza is devastated. International agencies estimate that 60% of its structures have been reduced to rubble and at least 46,500 Palestinians have been killed, with many more wounded. Now, Israel and Hamas have agreed to a framework for a suspension of hostilities predicated on an exchange of Palestinian prisoners for Israeli hostages. But almost from the day the Israeli army responded to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks with a deadly assault on Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced persistent criticism that his government lacked a coherent vision for the Palestinian territory’s postwar future. This weakness became particularly glaring as ceasefire negotiations drew closer, with both Israelis and international stakeholders pressing for clarity on the government’s endgame. Earlier this month, in a single White House press conference, President Donald Trump resolved the prime minister’s dilemma by proposing American “ownership” of Gaza and the relocation of its Palestinian population. With this statement, Trump accomplished what no Israeli politician has: He transformed “population transfer” from a fringe, near-taboo concept in Israeli political discourse to a viable policy option. In doing so, he provided the Israeli right with a long-sought legitimate endgame for what many in Israel and the international arena think of as the Palestinian “challenge.”
The implications of this paradigm shift transcend the practicality of Trump’s proposal. Netanyahu, who throughout his political career has carefully avoided explicit endorsement of transfer policies, now finds himself in an unprecedented position. Rather than being pushed by the U.S. president to moderate his stance, as has historically been the case, he is being pulled further right.
As sympathetic as American presidents have been to Israel, or as hostile as they have been to the Palestinians or Arab nations, Washington has also kept global and regional interests in mind. It couldn’t afford to delegate its politics to Israeli leaders or, worse, to their most extreme coalition partners. In fact, Israeli leaders have used U.S. pressure to explain unpopular political and policy decisions as “necessary.” This room for maneuver is suddenly gone, and a new dynamic has already begun to reshape the entire Israeli political landscape, as politicians across the spectrum rush to align themselves with the new U.S. policy.
What makes this moment particularly significant is that it comes amid complex ceasefire negotiations and intense international scrutiny of Gaza’s humanitarian crisis. While previous Israeli military incursions into the Palestinian territory garnered limited global attention, this time the eyes of the world are on Gaza. Still, it is Israel that holds the key to the Palestinian issue — not only through shaping reality on the ground but also because any resolution requires Israeli consent. This seismic shift in its political discourse could redefine both the current landscape and the terms of any future agreement. The challenge ahead is not merely to oppose Trump’s vision but to articulate a viable alternative that goes beyond a return to the status quo ante. After all, it was the failure of that status quo that produced the unprecedented violence and suffering of the current moment, with all the risks that still lie ahead.
Trump’s proposal, which followed a meeting with the Israeli prime minister, landed like a bombshell; even Netanyahu was clearly taken by surprise. While the White House attempted to soften his statement — with press secretary Karoline Leavitt later offering assurances that Palestinian displacement would be “temporary” and involve no U.S. troops or taxpayer funding — Trump himself doubled down in subsequent media appearances. In a Fox News interview, he said explicitly that Palestinians would not return to Gaza but would instead receive “much better housing … a permanent place” elsewhere. These clarifications effectively precluded the possibility of interpreting his position as anything other than support for ethnic cleansing.
The impact on the fragile ceasefire was immediate. For Hamas, the prospect of permanent population transfer undermined their incentive to proceed with the negotiated deal, which includes an exchange of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails for Israeli hostages held in Gaza. The group’s political leadership quickly signaled they might halt the hostage release, demanding further assurances from the U.S. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s coalition partners from the extreme right, emboldened by American support for their most radical fantasies, increased pressure to abandon the temporary ceasefire altogether. While implementation of the deal continued as planned, the framework for further hostage releases and humanitarian access is now increasingly tenuous.
Regional rejection of Trump’s proposal has been swift and unequivocal. During a Feb. 11 White House meeting with Trump, King Abdullah II of Jordan reportedly rejected any suggestion that his country should absorb the population of Gaza; he later reiterated his rejection in a public statement. If this plan were realized, it would fundamentally destabilize Jordan, where Palestinians already form a majority of the population. Egypt, already grappling with an Islamist insurgency in the Sinai, has maintained equally resolute opposition.
Trump’s plan — and his threats to withdraw U.S. funding from countries that oppose it — undermines a fundamental understanding of the 1978 Israeli-Egyptian Camp David Accords and the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan. These U.S.-brokered agreements were meant to provide the stability both Arab countries needed to make peace with Israel. Now, Trump threatens to unravel the region’s most durable and stable diplomatic achievements, which were forged after decades of bloodshed.
The Middle East is complex; pulling at one thread can unravel the entire fabric. Recent history provides a sobering lesson: The Abraham Accords, the crown jewel of Trump’s first term, removed the Palestinian component from Arab-Israeli peace deals — a precedent the Biden administration unwisely embraced. This supposed success contributed to Hamas’ strategic decision to break out of isolation through the Oct. 7 attacks, which, in turn, led to the once-unimaginable demise of the Assad regime in Syria. As we contemplate Trump’s latest improvised policy shift, we can only begin to imagine its far-reaching consequences. But the first and most immediate effect is already felt in Israel, where Trump’s intervention has triggered a transformation of the political discourse.
Israel’s Channel 13, a mainstream commercial television station, conducted a news poll shortly after Trump made his statement about the U.S. taking over Gaza. The results shocked observers and analysts of Israeli society. According to the poll, the idea of transferring Palestinians out of Gaza had the support of nearly three-quarters of Israeli Jews, across the political spectrum. Among Likud voters, 93% backed the plan, as did 98% of voters for the extreme-right Religious Zionism and Jewish Power parties — headed by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, respectively. More revealing was the support from traditionally moderate camps, with 80% of voters for Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party and 74% of voters for Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party endorsing the proposal. Among those who identified as left-Zionist Meretz or Labor voters, one-third supported the plan. Altogether, a staggering 72% supported the plan (though, interestingly, only 35% believed it would ever be implemented).
Netanyahu was not the only one who hailed his meeting with Trump as “a historic visit, with far-reaching consequences for Israel’s future.” Opposition leaders quickly aligned themselves with this shift in public sentiment. Gantz, a former minister of defense, praised what he called Trump’s “important principle” of transferring responsibility for Gaza’s residents from Hamas to “the world,” arguing that Israel had “nothing to lose” from the plan. Lapid offered a response that was only slightly more measured; he lauded Trump’s ideas as “good for Israel” while suggesting a need to study the details. Only retired general Yair Golan, leader of the liberal-left Zionist Democrats (a union of Labor and Meretz), spoke out in clear opposition to the plan. “We don’t have time to waste on Trump’s nonsense,” Golan said, adding that there would be no transfer of Gaza’s population.
Trump’s impact was also evident in the Israeli media discourse, beginning in right-wing circles close to the government. Amit Segal, the influential Channel 12 political correspondent who was raised in the religious Zionist pro-settler movement, reflected mainstream right-wing sentiment with a post to his 838,000 followers on X. In it, he described the U.S. president’s call for transferring Palestinians out of Gaza as “a dream.” In Makor Rishon, the veteran right-wing newspaper that represents the intellectual wing of the settler movement, Gidon Dokow expanded the scope beyond Gaza, arguing that “all minorities in the land of Israel will have to choose between alliance with the Jews and expulsion.” Other right-wing activists quickly translated this theoretical framework into action, organizing meetings to demand the resumption of fighting in Gaza to implement what they now openly called “the long-term solution of expulsion.”
Writing for Yedioth Ahronoth, one of Israel’s oldest and most widely read centrist newspapers, right-wing pundit Akiva Lamm asserted that “maximum territory and minimum Arabs has always been a prime Zionist principle.” He added: “History teaches us that directed demographic changes were a central tool in reducing prolonged conflicts.” Perhaps most telling was the way Lamm used Trump’s ideas to legitimize not only future explosions of violence, but also past ones.
In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, talk of ethnic cleansing is not an abstract theory. To fully appreciate the idea’s impact, one has to go back to 1948, when the establishment of Israel was accompanied by the mass uprooting of Palestinians from their homes in what Palestinians call the Nakba (“Catastrophe”). While a handful of Jewish communities were also destroyed in the war, it was the scale of Palestinian displacement — from the southwest near Gaza, to the coastal cities, along the land corridor leading to Jerusalem and in the northeast — that shaped the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as we know it. This foundational event created not only the physical reality of Palestinian refugees but also a complex psychological dynamic within Israeli society: the official denial that the army committed systematic expulsion alongside a persistent undercurrent of amorphous support for population transfer as a solution to demographic challenges.
For decades, Israeli institutional barriers maintained a careful line between these underlying sentiments and legitimate political discourse. The most notable example came in the 1980s from Rabbi Meir Kahane, a Brooklyn-born Israeli politician. Convicted of domestic terrorism in the U.S. before moving to Israel, Kahane founded the far-right Kach party, which explicitly advocated transfer of the Palestinian population from the territory controlled by Israel. His espousal of ethnic cleansing drew widespread condemnation across Israel’s political spectrum. The government, then headed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of the Likud party, together with the parties of the right-wing bloc, supported measures to block Kahane’s participation in the political system. Shamir called Kahane a “dangerous character,” while members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, would walk out of the chamber en masse when he rose to speak. The Supreme Court later ruled that advocating ethnic cleansing was grounds for disqualification from participating in electoral politics, effectively establishing that forced transfer was beyond the bounds of acceptable political discourse. Forty years later, Benjamin Netanyahu, Shamir’s successor as Likud leader and prime minister of Israel — after recovering from his initial astonishment at Trump’s suggestion that the Palestinian population of Gaza be transferred — has embraced the once-taboo idea.
Yet beneath the institutional consensus, polling consistently revealed the persistence of transfer-oriented thinking among segments of the Israeli public. In 2004, during the Second Intifada and amid a wave of militant attacks, 64% of Jewish Israelis supported “encouraging Arab emigration” — notably using careful language that avoided direct advocacy of forced transfer. By 2015, half of religious Zionist voters believed transfer should be “part of the discussion,” while a 2019 poll by the Israeli Democracy Institute regarding West Bank annexation showed significant support for “encouraging” Palestinian relocation from areas under full Israeli control. These numbers revealed not only the endurance of transfer as a concept but also the careful euphemisms used to discuss it without crossing established red lines.
The tension between institutional barriers and popular sentiment on the right created a peculiar dynamic in Israeli politics. While transfer remained officially taboo, it continued to simmer beneath the surface, contained but never fully eliminated. Yet the careful phrasings in polls and public discourse — “encouraging emigration,” “part of a discussion” — reflected not just political correctness but a deeper understanding that certain ideas, however popular, remained officially beyond the pale. Trump’s recent statement has shattered these long-maintained barriers, transforming what was once carefully couched in euphemism into an explicit policy discussion.
The seeming impracticality of Trump’s Gaza proposal — its lack of policy details, institutional framework or regional groundwork — has led some observers to interpret it more charitably as strategic posturing. According to this view, the president’s dramatic intervention serves as a negotiating tactic, throwing a provocative gambit into the diplomatic arena to force regional actors into action. Proponents of this interpretation might even point to the resilience of the prisoner exchange negotiations as evidence that Trump’s disruption compels Israel, the Palestinians and regional powers to take greater ownership of the situation rather than rely on American mediation.
Yet this benign reading fundamentally misses how political ideas, once legitimized, take on a life of their own. A recent precedent demonstrates this: During the final year of his previous administration, Trump put forward a framework for a Palestinian-Israeli agreement that could have included the annexation of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. While the deal itself never materialized, annexation quickly became the organizing principle for Israel’s right wing. Today, it remains a primary justification for radical right-wing factions to maintain their support for Netanyahu’s government, perpetually pursuing the “historic opportunity” they believe this administration represents.
With the idea of transfer having become normalized as a solution for Gaza, it is already shaping the Israeli establishment’s approaches to Palestinian presence throughout Israel and the occupied territories by legitimizing a mindset that denies Palestinians their rights on their own land. Often, the theorizing about transfer is coupled with pseudo-history that presents Arab-Palestinian existence in the land as alien, with the claim that Palestinians are in fact migrants who settled here after early 20th-century Zionist settlers made it an attractive place to live.
Normalizing the idea of transfer has many practical implications. Palestinian communities already under pressure to leave now face an increased threat of expulsion — from Area C of the West Bank, from Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan in occupied East Jerusalem and from Bedouin communities in the Negev (Naqab) desert in southern Israel. The template for mass urban demolition and population removal, developed in Gaza, could be replicated elsewhere; we are already seeing the Israeli military engage in unprecedented destruction of Palestinian homes in the northern West Bank. Stripping Israeli citizenship from Palestinians born in the state and deporting Palestinian citizens accused of committing crimes could also become common practice. The idea of transfer makes Palestinian presence anywhere in the territories controlled by Israel seem negotiable.
The immediate paradox of Trump’s Gaza proposal lies in its combination of disruption and dark fantasy. Its detachment from reality, lack of institutional backing and disregard for regional dynamics might actually impel local powers toward greater involvement. Yet the deeper damage caused by legitimizing transfer as a solution — particularly in the Israeli political discourse — creates challenging new obstacles. A troubling new status quo appears increasingly likely, with Palestinians remaining indefinitely in temporary camps while Israel continues to engage in low-intensity military operations, justified by the dual pretexts of Hamas’ continued presence and rejection of Trump’s so-called peace plan. Such an outcome would combine the worst aspects of the current arrangements with a new moral abdication — treating Palestinians not even as a security challenge but as objects to be rid of at will.
The built-in operational mode of the Trump administration — skilled at disruption but incapable of constructive policy implementation — offers little hope for positive developments. Yet this should not inspire nostalgia for the Biden era’s failed policies. By first ignoring Palestinians in the years leading up to Oct. 7 and the war in Gaza and later backing Israeli actions it claimed to oppose, the Biden team helped to create the political vacuum that Trump’s transfer proposal now fills. The dehumanization of Palestinians didn’t begin with Trump’s real estate developer’s approach to Gaza; it was embedded in a pattern of seeing them as a problem to be managed rather than a people with legitimate rights and aspirations. This attitude resulted in disaster not just for Palestinians, but for Israelis as well.
For outside observers, it would be too easy to simply condemn the emergence of dark impulses in a moment of national trauma and crisis. The Oct. 7 attacks left deep wounds in Israeli society, but both peoples have shown throughout history that they are capable of rising above their worst instincts. It is precisely in such moments that leadership becomes crucial, but Trump’s intervention serves to validate rather than transcend these destructive tendencies.
Moving forward requires more than opposition to Trump’s vision or a return to failed paradigms. It demands new thinking that affirms Palestinian rights while recognizing Israeli concerns, and it requires, above all, restoring humanity to both sides. This means confronting not just Trump’s explicit transfer proposal, but the broader pattern that made it possible. Regional and global actors must now step forward with proposals that go beyond managing the conflict to fundamentally transforming it, backed by the willingness to confront Washington when necessary. The challenge is not to defend the past but to chart a new course that makes such fantasies of population transfer not just politically taboo but simply unthinkable.
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