Levi Eshkol and Yitzhak Rabin, both of the Labor Party, were on board decades ago to offer freedom for Palestinian Arabs – to emigrate elsewhere.
By Moshe Phillips, JNS
Critics of the U.S. plan for rebuilding Gaza say that the idea of residents relocating to other countries is part of a plot by the Israeli right to carry out “ethnic cleansing.” But it turns out that it was the Israeli left, and not the Israeli right, which was the first to organize emigration from Gaza.
A leading Israeli daily newspaper, Israel Hayom, recently revealed that between 1968 and 1969, the Israeli government quietly assisted Arabs in the Gaza Strip who wanted to emigrate abroad. Who was in charge of the Israeli government then? The left-wing Labor Party, headed by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.
Eshkol appointed Ada Sereni to head the program. Sereni was born in Rome and made aliyah with her husband, Italian Socialist Zionist Enzo Sereni, and their baby daughter in 1927 (he was later executed in 1944 in Dachau while on a mission in northern Italy during World War II).
She was an official of the kibbutz movement and a legendary organizer of the smuggling of Holocaust survivors from Europe to Israel before the creation of the modern-day State of Israel. Later, she was awarded the Israel Prize for her heroism.
Under her direction, some 50,000 Gaza residents relocated to various other countries. That was about one-eighth of the coastal enclave’s population at the time.
Ultimately, the program was suspended because of a conflict between Sereni and the prime minister: She wanted the government to offer would-be emigrants financial assistance to leave, but Eshkol declined to authorize the funding.
In the years to follow, Labor Zionist leaders continued to believe that emigration from Gaza would facilitate Middle East peace. Yitzhak Rabin, an ambassador at that time, told the newspaper Maariv on Feb. 16, 1973: “The problem of the refugees of the Gaza Strip should not be solved in Gaza or el-Arish [in the Sinai] but mainly in the East Bank”—meaning Jordan.
“I want to create conditions such that during the next 10 or 20 years there will be a natural movement of population to the East Bank. We can achieve that, in my opinion, with [King] Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat.”
In more recent years—before the terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023—significant numbers of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continued to leave because of economic conditions there.
According to Israel’s Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center and other sources, some 300,000 Gazans emigrated between 2007 (the year Hamas took power) and 2023. Greece, Germany and Canada were among the most popular destinations.
A poll taken by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in 2023 (but before Oct. 7) found that 44% of Gazans between the ages of 18 and 29—that is, 31% of the overall population—were considering emigrating. “Economic reasons” were the most common explanation given for wanting to leave.
Despite the chaos and destruction of the war, the Biden administration frowned on the right of Palestinians in Gaza to freedom of choice. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said after a Jan. 8, 2024 meeting with Israel’s prime minister: “I told Netanyahu today that the U.S. opposes any proposal to resettle Palestinians outside Gaza.” Nevertheless, according to the Israel Hayom report, more than 1,000 Gazans immigrated to Canada that same month.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations last month in Jerusalem: “Over the last two years, 150,000 Gazans left. You know how they left? Because they bribed their way out. … Give them a choice, not forcible eviction, not ethnic cleansing. In a war zone, people leave.”
News media reports confirm this trend. The New York Times reported on Feb. 5 that while “a number of Gazans” have said they will not leave, “others said conditions were so unlivable after 15 months of Israeli bombardment that they would consider relocating.”
Meanwhile, Israeli forces in Gaza recently uncovered an internal Hamas document that warns that “even if Trump’s plan does not materialize, the opening of the Rafah Crossing and additional border crossings could trigger a significant wave of emigration from the Gaza Strip, given the extensive destruction and uncertainty about the future.”
So even Hamas acknowledges this reality: Many Gazans want to leave. It’s only Hamas and its cheerleaders, including its fellow travelers in the United States, who are trying to stop them.
American Jewish left-wing pundits are constantly saying the population of Gaza is “just like everybody else” and that “Palestinian moms and dads just want a better life for their families.”
Well, life amid the rubble of a war zone is not a better life. Settling elsewhere—as millions of Syrians did during that country’s recent civil war—would surely be preferable to life in what U.S. President Donald Trump has described as “a demolition site.”
Levi Eshkol and Yitzhak Rabin understood that. Why don’t J Street and Americans for Peace Now?
Moshe Phillips is national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel, a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.
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