Every Israeli official who has said it out loud has been denounced, sanctioned, and threatened with international prosecution. The UN condemns it. European governments issue stern statements. The American State Department clears its throat disapprovingly.
They’re all wrong. And they know it.
The expulsion of Gaza’s population is not a war crime waiting to happen. It is the only serious, honest, permanent solution to a problem that October 7 made impossible to ignore, and that another October 7 will make impossible to forgive.
Gaza has told the world exactly what it is. Its schools teach children that Jews are subhuman. It’s television programs, such as “Pioneers of Tomorrow,” aimed at preschoolers, that instruct toddlers to stab and shoot Jews, and promise them that an Islamic caliphate will one day rule the earth. Its founding charter calls for the extermination of every Jew. It also calls Gazans “the Great Ones” (Master Race), and thus differs little from the Hitler Youth; an entity that the postwar training movie “Your Job in Germany” called “the worst educational crime in the entire history of the world.” On October 7, 2023, it acted on all of it: torture, slaughter, kidnapping, and then street celebrations with candy while Jewish families burned. And then Gaza promised to do it again.
At some point, you stop calling this a political conflict and start calling it what it is.
The word “expulsion” triggers an immediate reflex. Ethnic cleansing. Genocide. The rhetorical grenades land before the argument can be heard. So let’s be precise.
Ethnic cleansing is a crime defined by its unlawful motive; you remove people because of their race, religion, or ethnicity. That’s what makes it monstrous. But violent, genocidal ideology, whether that of Nazi Germany or Hamas, is not an ethnicity. When Hamas slaughters Jews for being Jewish, that’s a hate crime. When Israel removes a population that has repeatedly proven it cannot live alongside Jews without murdering them, that is reasonable, necessary, and lawful self-preservation.
There are historical precedents for the displacement of populations that have proven their inability to live in peace with their neighbors. When the Iroquois Nations allied with the British during the American Revolution and launched massacres against American settlements, George Washington sent General Sullivan with orders to destroy their villages and food supplies so thoroughly that they could never threaten Americans again. Washington didn’t enjoy giving those orders, but he gave them anyway, because the alternative was to keep burying his people. Few if any people here apologize for that. Route 92 along the Susquehanna River in Northeast Pennsylvania is called Sullivan’s Trail. Sullivan County in New York is named for him, as is Sullivan County in Pennsylvania. Sullivan was an American hero who defended innocent people.
Nor was the Sullivan Expedition the only example of the justifiable displacement of a society. The Proceedings of the US Naval Institute reports that Cilician pirates preyed on Roman commerce, including vital food supplies. Gnaeus Pompey defeated the pirates, and then resettled the survivors far from their original homes.
Israel has a more humane option available than Washington did. Not destruction. Relocation — with free transportation, financial assistance, and one-way passage to any of the countries that have spent two years loudly proclaiming their love for the Palestinian cause. Spain has recognized a Palestinian state. Ireland,. Norway, Belgium, Turkey, and Australia also seem to like the Palestinians. That is exactly where Israel should send them.
What about innocent Gazans who don’t support Hamas? It’s a real question — and the evidence makes it very hard to answer optimistically. The celebrations on October 7 were not limited to Hamas fighters. Polls taken after the massacre showed majority support among Gazans for what was done. The mothers who cheer their sons’ “martyrdom” on camera are not a fringe. The father caught on film goading his young boy to throw rocks at Israeli soldiers — hoping one would shoot his child and produce a propaganda image — is not an aberration. Gaza has spent a generation turning child-raising into an ideology, and that ideology is murder. The ideology is so depraved that, while it bleats about Israel’s likely possession of nuclear weapons, it fails to acknowledge that, were it to even begin to succeed in a second Holocaust, those weapons would be used. This underscores Hamas’ mindless and rabid contempt not only for Jewish life, but Arab life as well.
The same goes for Hamas’ current use of Arab civilians as human shields, with the intention of getting them killed so Hamas can use their bodies for propaganda. This is simply large-scale contempt for human life, as exhibited on a smaller scale by the Gazan father who tried to get his own boy killed or injured in front of a camera.
To truly fix this would require what Germany required after 1945: tearing out every institution, rewriting every curriculum, and in some cases separating children from the adults poisoning them. The world would never allow Israel to attempt it. This is precisely why relocation is not an extreme option. It’s the moderate one, and the only one available.
Gaza’s population must go, peacefully, with assistance, but permanently, somewhere that is not next to the Jewish state or the United States. We don’t want them coming across our border to do in Central Park what they did at the Nova music festival, or fire rockets into American cities. We don’t hate them any more than we hate rabid animals for the disease that makes them dangerous to everything around them. They have proven, beyond any reasonable argument, that they cannot live next to us without trying to destroy us, so they must live somewhere else.
That’s not a controversial conclusion. It’s just an honest one.
