{"id":60274,"date":"2025-09-12T20:50:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T20:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/60274\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T20:50:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T20:50:07","slug":"where-will-the-2-million-displaced-palestinians-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/60274\/","title":{"rendered":"Where will the 2 million displaced Palestinians go?"},"content":{"rendered":"

There seems to be little doubt now but that the current conflict in Gaza is going to end in the occupation of the territory and the destruction of Hamas.<\/strong> Once that is accomplished then Donald Trump\u2019s plan to turn the place into a middle eastern Las Vegas like some latter-day Moe Green will be on the table.<\/p>\n

Even if the unfortunate people of Gaza are not replaced by roulette wheels and all else that goes with the high culture of gambling and glitz they are almost certainly going to be displaced.\u00a0 As part of their effective ground invasion the IDF has intensified its \u201cadvice\u201d to Gazans that they might be better off moving.<\/p>\n

The question is, where will they all go? Not only have the Arab and other Islamic countries made it clear that they do not want them \u2013 Egypt has even built a border wall that out-Trumps anything he ever envisaged along the Rio Grande. It is apparent that some close to Netanyahu would prefer that they not still be around like the refugees who ended up in neighbouring states and founded the PLO.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They would much prefer that they come to Europe. Almost immediately after Trump\u2019s bizarre reference to Gaza as Atlantic City, the Israeli cabinet established a \u2018Voluntary Emigration Directorate\u2019 in March. The Times of Israel<\/a> described this as a plan for the \u201cexodus of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.\u201d<\/p>\n

The key figure in this is the Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose family were Ukrainian, and who grew up in a West Bank settlement. Smotrich and his supporters have made it clear that they would like to see the expansion of the West Bank settlements as well as taking Gaza.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He helpfully expanded on this in Israel\u2019s Decisive Plan<\/a> a lengthy document that describes the \u201cexistential\u201d struggle between the Jews and the Palestinians, and rules out any compromise. Rather than tinker about with \u2018two state\u2019 agreements, \u201cThe alternative to this is a new readiness of Israeli society to win the conflict, rather than merely managing it\u2014a victory founded on the understanding that there is no room in the Land of Israel for two conflicting national movements.\u201d<\/p>\n

The choice facing the Palestinians, then, is stay and fight and be defeated \u2013 or to emigrate. That would include the assisted migration in search of a \u201cbetter life in Europe.\u201d\u00a0 Smotrich sounds alarmingly like one of our own migration NGOs when he expands on this to assure us that this would not mean nasty expulsion but \u201cthe very modern phenomenon of organized relocation to countries which provide an opportunity for a better future, and absorption in an environment which usually contains a community of immigrants with similar backgrounds.\u201d<\/p>\n

And the NGO trope goes beyond that. There are Israeli migration NGOs such as IsraAID which has facilitated asylum seekers including the mass influx to the Greek island of Lesbos, and HIAS whose European headquarters are in Brussels.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Neither IsraAID nor HIAS are directly involved in facilitating Palestinian refugees but these have to date made up a relatively tiny number of the more recent waves of immigrants. They will hardly turn them away when they come looking for help. This is certain to increase \u2013 possibly to levels that might require another activation of the EU Directive 2001\/55 that was applied to Ukraine \u2013 if the Israelis accomplish the evacuation of Gaza.\u00a0<\/p>\n

TO EUROPE\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

And to Europe they will come, as a poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research<\/a> in May 2025 found that half of Gaza residents wished to leave regardless of being forced to and that they would like to be taken away through airports and seaports, in other words outside of the surrounding Arab states. That implies that Europe is a favoured destination \u2013 and potentially that could mean over one million refugees.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It ought also be borne in mind that, while some supporters of emptying Gaza of its people imply that the Palestinians there are somehow squatters, they are only there because after 1948 that was where a quarter of the Palestinian population of the former Palestinian Mandate were forced to go \u2013 a strip of desert basically that they are now being effectively forced out of.<\/p>\n

None of this by the way is to justify Islamism. Quite the opposite. I have no problem recognising that Hamas and the Iranians \u2013 and indeed the Saudis and others who the Israelis and Americans have no problem with \u2013 are vile regimes. Just as were Assad\u2019s Syria, Ghaddafi\u2019s Libya and Saddam\u2019s Iraq.<\/p>\n

And let\u2019s not confine ourselves to that general part of the world. The Chinese state is the most perfect totalitarian state in human history. North Korea is like a comic opera pastiche but still stuck in the cruder and more overtly brutal socialism that blighted the Soviet Union and much of Europe up to the 1960s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Do any of the devotees of \u201cregime change\u201d and \u201cdemocratisation\u201d in weaker Islamic countries ever seriously propose removing the Chinese or Korean Communists from power? They do not. So, here\u2019s an idea: extend the same courtesy to the vile regimes of the \u201cglobal south.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

If the people of those countries rise up then by all means support them. If not, stay the hell away because it only makes things worse. Ask a Hungarian or a former East German or Czech or a Tibetan what the \u201cwest\u201d did for them when they heroically rose up against the Communists. Nothing is what.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Israel and its allies claim that it is an outpost of \u201cwestern values\u201d is a busted flush for me in any event. Dispatching millions more unwanted refugees from alien cultures to Europe would confirm that. This is the inevitable consequence and indeed objective of the displacement of two million people who Israel do not want anywhere near them, and nowhere near them wants them either.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The rationale for the mass migration of European Jews to Palestine in the 1940s does not still hold for allowing thousands more European and American Jews to come and take land that belongs to someone else, as is happening in the West Bank.\u00a0 And there is no excuse for the largest forced displacement of an entire population in generations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is a mess entirely of Israel\u2019s own creation. It is not one that Europe needs to be landed with through the arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who are incompatible with the existing communities and who in any event have their own homeland where they would prefer to remain. Leave them be.<\/p>\n

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