Trump fuels the Israeli far right’s historic dream of Gaza ‘transfer’
The US president’s proposal to expel Gazans is backed from the political center to the euphoric ultra-nationalists: 82% of the Jewish population supports it while only 3% consider it ‘immoral’
Menachem Begin, the historic Israeli prime minister at the head of the same party that Benjamin Netanyahu now leads, Likud, signed — against his conscience — an arrest warrant for Meir Kahane, the ultra-nationalist rabbi who advocated expelling millions of Palestinians from Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank and outlawing sexual relations between Jews and Arabs. “He could have caused a disaster, not for our [Jewish] people, but for the Arabs. He is a dangerous man,” Begin said. The Likud deputies left Parliament when Kahane gave his first speech, in 1984, and his party, Kaj, ended up being outlawed and designated a terrorist organization. Even when Rehavam Zeevi, another leader who advocated expelling the Palestinians, entered the government in 1991, the then-prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, also a Likud politician, made clear his opposition to what is known in Hebrew as “transfer” (the forcible displacement of Palestinians from their land), which U.S. President Donald Trump turned into a formal proposal on Tuesday — with a humanitarian wrapping and delivered in the language of a real estate developer — while Netanyahu looked on, enraptured. The dream harbored by the most marginal and extremist sectors on Wednesday received, after a quarter of a century of the dehumanization of Palestinians and a right-wing drift in Israeli society, the applause of politicians and commentators from the so-called political center to the now euphoric far right.
