Israeli minister repeats call for Palestinians to leave Gaza, making way for settlers
- Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is in favour of Israeli resettlement of the Gaza Strip after the war
- Israel withdrew the last of its troops and settlers in 2005, ending a presence inside Gaza that began in 1967
One of the senior figures in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition called for Palestinian residents of Gaza to leave the besieged enclave, making way for Israelis who could “make the desert bloom”.
The comments by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has been excluded from the war cabinet and discussions of day-after arrangements in Gaza, appear to underscore fears in much of the Arab world that Israel wants to drive Palestinians out of land where they want to build a future state, repeating the mass dispossession of Palestinians when Israel was created in 1948.
“What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration,” Smotrich told Army Radio on Sunday. “If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after will be totally different.”
He said if the 2.3 million population were no longer there “growing up on the aspiration to destroy the state of Israel”, Gaza would be seen differently in Israel.
“Most of Israeli society will say ‘why not, it’s a nice place, let’s make the desert bloom, it doesn’t come at anyone’s expense’.”