‘We give them 48 hours to leave’: Israel’s plans to transfer Gazans go back 60 years
Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan in 1969
Ofer Aderet writes in Haaretz on 5 December 2024:
“Diluting the population,” “evacuating homes,” “expulsion,” “exile,” “emptying” and even “transfer.” A broad array of words was used by Israeli government ministers during the historic deliberations in the 1960s and 1970s about the future of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
A perusal of the minutes in the Israel State Archives indicates that the present aspiration of the far right to “encourage emigration” of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip only echoes ideas and proposals that came up for discussion in the past – by prime ministers, ministers and leaders in left-wing governments, who were among the country’s founding fathers.
The ministers had no shortage of ideas for solving the problem that was laid on their doorstep with the occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in the Six-Day War. At the time there were about one million Palestinians in the territories, about 400,000 of them in the Gaza Strip. There were proposals to send them out of the Gaza Strip to the West Bank, Jordan, Sinai, Arab countries or any other place in the world that could receive them – by force, by consent, by subterfuge and with all kinds of incentives.
“If we can evict 300,000 refugees from Gaza to other places … we can annex Gaza without a problem,” said Defense Minister Moshe Dayan on June 25, 1967. He mentioned an idea that was acceptable at the time to the government, but in the end wasn’t fully implemented – to annex the Gaza Strip to Israel, to empty it of the Palestinian refugees and then to settle it with Jews.
Mosh Dayan: ‘You take out the furniture. Those who want to go – go. Someone doesn’t come to take care of his things, you bring a bulldozer to destroy the home. If there are people inside, you remove them. Until now there was no case where people wouldn’t leave.’
His ministers mobilized to help and offered ideas. Interior Minister Moshe Shapiro spoke about “how can we organize the issue of the refugees in the Gaza Strip.” “If it were possible to transfer 200,000 of the refugees to El Arish or to settle some of them in the West Bank,” he proposed, referring to the Egyptian city in the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel occupied in the Six-Day War. Police Minister Eliyahu Sasson suggested “transferring them to the East Bank” – namely Jordan. “We should take them to the East Bank by the scruff of their necks and throw them there, and I don’t know who will accept them, especially the Gaza refugees,” said his colleague Minister Yosef Sapir.
Minister Yigal Allon said that he was “in favor of encouraging emigration overseas,” adding that “we have to handle it as seriously as possible.” He also concluded that the preferred destination was Sinai, but proposed expanding the options: “The entire area of Sinai, and not only El Arish, allows for the settlement of all the Gaza refugees, and in my opinion we shouldn’t wait. We have to begin to settle them.” Afterwards he also proposed that some of the Palestinians “go to Canada, to Australia.” Eshkol summed up: “I said that even when the problem wasn’t as yet so acute that the refugees have to manage outside our Israel.”
Coming out by force now, starting to drag refugees onto trucks – that’s a matter that would draw attention of sorts and a spotlight of sorts to the Land of Israel that I don’t think we need that now.
Quietly, calmly and secretly
On October 1, 1967 Justice Minister Yaakov Shimshon Shapira wondered “When will we get any information about the plan to settle the refugees from the Gaza Strip in the West Bank?” and explained: “I’ve heard rumors.” At the time there was a professional committee called the committee for the development of the occupied territories, whose members were security personnel and academics. Its job, as Eshkol defined it, was to examine the “economic and social aspect of this entire empire or part of the empire,” including “also raising thoughts about emigration.”
The committee members understood the political sensitivity of their work and therefore suggested to the government “to recruit the refugees for projects whose political purpose ‘isn’t emphasized’ and to present them as ‘humanitarian campaigns’ and not as ‘part of a global solution of the refugee problem.'”
The ministers’ deliberations continued right through to the end of the year. “The entire issue of emigration requires more serious and energetic handling, then it will be possible to encourage it and to enable many people to leave,” said Dayan in November 1967. Eshkol added that “Meanwhile 2,000 people leave for Jordan every week and the majority are people from the Strip. There are various ideas about their emigration to more distant countries.”
In late December, Dayan spoke about a peace agreement including “the settlement of the refugees, their removal from Gaza and their settlement on the East Bank of Jordan.” He promised that in such a case “In Gaza there won’t be 400,000 Arabs but 70,000 or 100,000.” The following day Eshkol said: “We’re interested in emptying Gaza first. Therefore we’ll first let the Arabs of Gaza leave.” Minister Yigal Allon was already thinking about more ambitious schemes. “It wouldn’t be at all bad to decrease the number of Arabs in the Galilee,” he said.
Minister Sasson explained how it would by possible to advance the goal by encouraging the Palestinians to leave in order to work. “Let’s help them to find work. And then they’ll move the entire family there. We’re likely to gain from all this by reducing the number of Arabs in those areas.” Dayan agreed and added: “By granting those Arabs the option of seeking and finding work for themselves in other countries, there’s a greater chance that they’ll want to emigrate later to those countries.” Minister Allon tried once again to add Israeli Arabs to the plan. “Why can’t we expand that to the Arabs of old Israel,” he asked.
On the last day of 1967 Eshkol had news. “I’m involved in establishing a unit or a squad to deal with encouraging the emigration of Arabs from here,” he revealed to the ministers. He added that “We have to handle this issue quietly, calmly and secretly, and we have to look for a way for them to emigrate to other countries and not only to Transjordan.”
And in fact, at the time there were several active initiatives to “encourage the emigration of Palestinians from Gaza.” One of them was led by Ada Sereni, the widow of paratrooper Enzo Sereni (who was captured parachuting behind enemy lines into Nazi-occupied Italy) and one of the heads of the secret effort to bring Jews from Europe to Mandatory Palestine. A document from May 1968 records a request for a monthly budget for “encouraging emigration from the Gaza Strip to be implemented according to the instructions of Mrs. Ada Sereni.”
The idea was to create a “quiet emigration, in such a way that Israel wouldn’t be seen as being involved in it. Toward that end, Israelis with a security background, who were familiar with Arab society, were sent directly to the population centers in Gaza in order to persuade their leaders to encourage voluntary departure.
“Because of these suffocating conditions and the enclosure there, maybe the Arabs will move from the Strip, but even afterward about 400,000 Arabs will remain here [in Israel] and another 150,000 will remain in Gaza,” added Eshkol at the end of the year. The new solution he proposed was harsh. “It’s possible that if we don’t give them enough water they won’t have any choice, because the orchards will turn yellow and wither. But we can’t know all that ahead of time. Who knows, maybe we can expect another war and then this problem will be solved, but that’s a kind of luxury, an unexpected solution,” he said.
As along as they leave for Brazil
In February 1968 Eshkol was afraid that someone was likely to think that “We’re pressuring Arabs to leave the country.” However, with his typical humor he said: “We won’t sit shivah if they leave.” Afterwards he started to talk in numbers. “Eighty five percent have all the money necessary for emigration. I think that every Jew who has any sense will say, first take the 80 percent so you’ll be certain that they’ll leave.”
Religious Affairs Minister Zerach Warhaftig joined the discussion and made suggestions of his own. “Our main issue should be that we’ll give them an option of leaving the Gaza Strip with some kind of sum of money,” he advised. “We have to enable them to realize their assets which aren’t worth much, but to invest our own money in them. If we pay $1,000 for a kiosk as long as they leave with their families for Brazil or Argentina, I see great value in that. In that way we can motivate 10,000 families to leave Gaza.”
But he also urged caution regarding the terms used in the offer: “Instead of telling them that we’ll pay money for their emigration, which isn’t nice and just … we’ll buy their portable assets and pay them good money for them, and that will spur them to leave the Strip, with a sum of money in hand to begin their life in another country.” He added that a family that goes to South America without a penny in its pocket doesn’t rush to put down roots in a new country, and a family that leaves with means of survival in its possession, immediately upon arriving in a new country will have it easier to become adjusted to that country and to stay there.”
In 1969 Eshkol pointed out a problem. On the one hand, Israel wants to encourage emigration, and on the other it’s investing in the development of the Strip and in doing so is “likely” to encourage its residents to remain. “If we arrange things there so they’ll be in order, that there will be work and industry there and we build factories there and employ the Arabs there – they’ll remain in the Gaza Strip,” he warned.
Agriculture Minister Haim Gvati discussed that at another session, and said: “Of course we’d like to do everything possible to reduce the population of Gaza … There’s a fear that if we rehabilitate the Gaza camps too, the refugees will see that the situation is similar in both places … and then there won’t be any point in leaving the Strip.” Minister Allon said that he was “In favor of continuing the gap in the standard of living between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” He said that they shouldn’t “provide a standard in the Gaza Strip that’s similar to that of the West Bank, because then the attraction of the West Bank will be reduced.”
‘Give them 48 hours to leave’
Eshkol died in 1969, and the deliberations were continued by Prime Minister Golda Meir. In 1970 Defense Minister Moshe Dayan warned not to act overtly in encouraging the emigration of Gazans. “If we’re going for a plan of 20,000, it means we’re announcing a transfer,” he said. “In doing so we’ll spoil everything from the beginning … If they ask for help from us – fine … It will be a slow and natural process. . Anything bombastic that we do will trigger its own failure.”
Development Minister Haim Landau proposed a new idea. “First-class vocational education should be given and should be massive, because that’s the opening for the possibility of their emigration from there.” He explained that “there’s a greater chance that people with a vocation will be able to be absorbed and to integrate into other countries.”
In 1971 Golda Meir also took an interest in the issue. “There’s a matter of thinning out the camps. There’s no argument about the principle,” she said. Dayan described how the residents would be evicted from their homes – some of them suspected of terror against Jews or local Arabs, and some owners of homes that have to be demolished for a different reason: “We give them 48 hours to leave. We tell them, for example, you’re moving to El Arish or to another place, we’ll drive you … first you give them an option of moving voluntarily. You remove the furniture from the house. If the person doesn’t come to arrange his affairs – we bring a bulldozer to demolish the house. If there are people in the house, we evict them from the house. Since we give him 48 hours …There’s no critical moment here when they come and say we’ll load you and your furniture on the truck, but you give him an opportunity to do so voluntarily.”
Chief of Staff Haim Bar Lev introduced a hot potato to the discussion, saying that Palestinians must not be moved to places designated for the settlement of Jews later on. “I’m definitely sure that it will be possible to find places – and we have found such places – that won’t block our options for Jewish settlement.” He added a reassuring message: “I’m convinced that it won’t prevent us from building a few more Jewish settlements in the Strip.”
Dayan noted that “It didn’t and doesn’t occur to us to settle them in a place that in some way will interfere with Jewish settlement.” Tourism Minister Moshe Kol also said that “If we want to see the Gaza Strip as part of the State of Israel, we have to get rid of part of the population there, no matter what the cost. We’ll pay greater compensation to people who want to move.”
Unlike others, Minister Yisrael Galili also addressed the problematic aspect of the operation. “I’m not deluding myself that this is a humanitarian act and that we are doing charity work with them,” he said in 1971. “I don’t want to sugarcoat this cruel operation but it’s the least worst option under the given conditions.”
Minister Shlomo Hillel spoke about the morality of the proposal. “The moral plain isn’t gauged by whether you remove people from their homes against their will, whether they like it or don’t like it,” he said. “The moral plain is gauged by the fact that we are the government in Gaza and we haven’t been managing to comply with what is required of us [as] the government, which is first and foremost to protect innocent people, to protect the lives of those who are prepared to come work for us.”
Meir asserted that what was being proposed did not involve cruelty. “It’s clear that we won’t manage to thin out the Jabalya camp voluntarily,” she explained. “It would have been a lot more pleasant if we would do this voluntarily [on the Palestinians’ part]. There’s no alternative. … This really is terrible ‘cruelty’,” she said sarcastically, “Moving them to an apartment, … giving them compensation … If that’s cruelty, I don’t know how you do something comfortably. And nevertheless, there’s no doubt that they don’t want to be moved.
The term “force” also began to be used later in the discussion. Religious Affairs Minister Warhaftig told Meir: “It would be better to use force if there’s a need for force, but only in the midst of a major commotion.” He explained that there was a need to wait for a deterioration or a war to forcibly expel people from their homes.
“Coming out by force now, starting to drag refugees onto trucks – that’s a matter that would draw attention of sorts and a spotlight of sorts to the Land of Israel that I don’t think we need that now,” he said.
Ultimately only several tens of thousands of Palestinians left the Gaza Strip during those years. The first settlement in Gaza was established in 1970, but most of the Palestinian population in the Strip remained in place. In 2005, the settlers were evacuated from the Gaza Strip in the framework of the disengagement. Nearly 20 years later, populist cabinet ministers from Itamar Ben-Gvir’s political camp have been demanding their return.
In the 1970s, Allon sounded like one of them. “I agree to expulsions,” he said. “We’ve done that in the past and we need to continue it in the future as well.” Allon spoke of “creating space and thinning out the existing camps” for security reasons and “to begin to move refugees to places where, with the passage of time, it will be possible to view them as permanent solutions.”
He didn’t mince words: “Through coercion too,” he said, arguing that there would be no alternative. “This involves one-time pain and you can also explain it as necessary for security and health requirements.”
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