October 7 was many things for Israel, but above all it was a confirmation that the ambitions of the country’s present leadership are at an impasse. Hamas’s attack against Israeli towns and military bases showed that the idea of circumventing the Palestinians to make deals with Arab countries was an illusion. The problem in and around Israel remains the same: Without a political horizon for Palestinians, Israel will remain a state build on a foundation of structural oppression, in which Palestinians are permanently subjugated, disregarded, and humiliated. As Israelis come to realize that this situation is unsustainable, they will be left with one of two choices: either to conclude a durable peace agreement with the Palestinians, or to find a way of transferring by force Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza (and conceivably, those inside the 1948 borders) to neighboring Arab countries.
While peace is the better route, Israelis are more likely to prefer its alternative: ethnic cleansing. What we are seeing today across the Israeli political spectrum is an apparent consensus that October 7 showed that coexistence between Jews and Palestinians was an impossibility. Therefore, the only solution left is to get rid of as many Palestinians in Israel’s vicinity as possible.
The notion of an Arab “transfer” out of Palestine has always been present in the Israeli discussion, and was a centerpiece of Zionist thinking, as the historian Nur Masalha showed in his groundbreaking book Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948. The demographics today only make Israeli deliberation along these lines more acute. We have lately seen Israeli leaders, as well as present and former policymakers, discussing openly the idea of transferring Palestinians out of Gaza, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asking European leaders to put pressure on Egypt to accept Gaza’s Palestinians, who would be pushed into the Sinai by Israel.
Since the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is, according to its own description, one of the organizations most involved in “humanitarian protection and assistance for victims of war and armed violence,” and “takes action in response to emergencies [promoting] respect for international humanitarian law and its implementation in national law,” it would be useful to begin with its definition of ethnic cleansing. The ICRC defines it as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”
Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence has prepared what the authorities have downplayed as a “concept paper,” providing options for what to do with the Palestinians in Gaza. It proposes that Israel “evacuate the Gazan population to Sinai” and “create a sterile zone of several kilometers inside Egypt and not allow the population to return to activity or residence near the Israeli border.” Under the ICRC definition, the ministry’s proposals, and evidently Netanyahu’s actions, are unequivocally steps in what is a project to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians living in Gaza.
When there was pushback against the Ministry of Intelligence’s paper, some Israelis tried another approach. Two Israeli politicians, Danny Danon of the Likud party and Ram Ben-Barak of the more centrist Yesh Atid Party, published an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal in which they called on countries around the world to take in what they called “limited numbers of Gazan families who have expressed a desire to relocate.” On the face of it, this appeared to be a humane gesture favoring Palestinians, but the reality was quite different. Given that Israel has destroyed large swathes of Gaza, making them uninhabitable, we can assume that quite a few Gazans would probably choose to leave the territory if given the opportunity to do so. In other words, what the authors disingenuously chose to portray as a plan affecting limited numbers of Palestinians is one that would more likely end up appealing to a far larger number of people whose lives have been ruined.
Not surprisingly, this softcore ethnic cleansing tactic was endorsed by more extremist elements of Israel’s political establishment, with Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the far-right National Religious Party—Religious Zionism, approving of the proposal. Smotrich had himself presented a so-called “Decisive Plan” in 2017 in which he called for a massive expansion of settlements in the occupied territories, so that “the Arab dream of a state in Judea and Samaria is no longer viable.” This would leave Palestinians with two possibilities: “Those who wish to forego their national aspirations can stay here and live as individuals in the Jewish State,” or “those who choose not to let go of their national ambitions will receive aid to emigrate to one of the many countries where Arabs realize their national ambitions, or to any other destination in the world.” One can hear echoes of Smotrich in Danon’s and Ben-Barak’s article,which appears to reflect mainstream views.
Let’s examine one possibility. Assuming Palestinians surrender their national aspirations and choose to live in a Jewish state, what actually awaits them? If the past is prologue, then Palestinians who remain in Israel and the occupied territories would very probably be fated to accept a permanent secondary status under a legal system that treats Jews and Palestinians unequally, the legal definition of apartheid.
Saying such a thing apparently constitutes an example of antisemitism, according to the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, adopting the controversial definition of the term by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The only problem, however, is that an increasing number of Israelis appear to agree with the term. This includes the Israeli Law Professors’ Forum for Democracy, an ad hoc and voluntary group of Israeli legal experts, in a report it published in March 2023. The report examines how the civil administration in the occupied West Bank, through a government power-sharing agreement, has been subordinated to the additional minister in Israel’s Ministry Defense, meaning Belazel Smotrich. This represents a break with the past, when the occupied West Bank was ruled by the Israeli military under belligerent occupation, not by Israel’s government.
According to the law professors, the agreement, by placing management of the West Bank in the hands of a cabinet minister, “deepens the differences that already exist between Israelis residing in the West Bank and Palestinians residing there, insofar as concerns the legal frameworks and applicable law governing them, and intensifies the discrimination between these populations. The agreement is an overt and formal measure that validates claims that Israel practices apartheid, which is prohibited under international law.” Others have concluded the same thing, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967.
Gaza has taught the Israelis several lessons when it comes to dealing with the Palestinian population in its midst. The first is that when Israel is perceived as a victim, the international community has no hesitation in allowing it to violate international law, in this case the perpetration of war crimes, including collective punishment. Second, humanitarian actions can easily act as camouflage for more sinister objectives. Had Egypt acquiesced to a humanitarian corridor to allow Palestinians to seek refuge in Sinai, this would have potentially given Israel an opportunity to close the door and bar their return to the territory. That is why the Egyptians, from the beginning, rejected the idea of a humanitarian corridor.
And third, October 7 was perceived by many Israelis as posing an existential threat to their state (which its enemies never denied), making them more determined to deal with the presence of the Palestinians through radical, violent measures. The fact that there has been little outcry against five weeks of bombing in Gaza in which perhaps as many as 15,000–20,000 people have been killed, many of them children, shows just how far fear can push people to approve of the reprehensible.
It is only natural that Israel should think in these terms. The rightward shift of the Israeli electorate, the extremism of the Netanyahu government, and the United States’ facilitation of Israel’s most contentious policies, have led Israelis into a wall. In refusing to consider a Palestinian state, in undermining the Palestinian Authority, in backing the illegal activities of Jewish settlers in the occupied territories, in suffocating Gaza, in pushing Palestinians into ever smaller enclaves in the West Bank, and now Gaza, Israel has become a state whose primary aim, it seems, is to deny rights to the millions of Palestinians under its control.
In other words, Israelis, as they contemplate whether to embrace the path of ethnic cleansing or simply retain an apartheid system, must consider whether they want to consolidate what more and more people around the world view as a pariah state. The answer may be yes, but what security lies in this, and for how long? In recent decades, Israel’s enemies have improved their weapons and strategies, while the United States, Israel’s strongest ally, has found itself more isolated. The refusal of Israeli leaders to give Palestinians a state—even one that is mangled and garrisoned by an abusive military, where Israel controls all access points, all resources, all lives—is no longer tolerable to a generation of young people worldwide.
Israelis must feel besieged and many are facing a rising tide of antisemitism. Given the significant numbers of Jews in Israel and outside who reject the pitiless logic of Israel’s occupation, antisemitism is not only an odious reaction to what Israel is doing, it is also an especially stupid one. As Israelis stand before the two alternatives of a just peace with the Palestinians or ethnic cleansing, they have to be persuaded to select the first. There are those in Israel, many of them in power, who reject peace, which is precisely why those in the Arab world and elsewhere who want a settlement must find common cause with Jews all over who seek the same thing.
When the reactions to October 7 finally die down, many will realize what should be obvious by now. Jews and Arabs have no choice but to coexist since neither people will ever manage to get rid of the other, even as striving to do so diminishes each.
