Where do settlers go?
Rehousing settlers and restoring Palestine
A few conversations I had recently made it clear that a number of people approach the idea that Israeli-Jewish settlers should leave Palestine as inherently problematic.
On one hand, I feel it useful to point out that when Palestinians scream, for a year and a half, that a fully genocidal society, committing genocide, should get out of Palestine, it is indicative of warped priorities and maybe even some level of brainwashing that an instinctive response is to ask “but where will the genocidaires go?” But such is the nature of western biases so deep we don’t even see them.
It is often suggested, even at high levels of power, that Palestinians be relocated from their homes; that they go to Egypt, to Jordan, to countries that are willing (or willing to be bribed) in order to take them. This expectation, that Palestinians just leave, despite having nowhere else to go, is the story of 77 years in Palestine, yet the suggestion that Jewish settlers — with far less lineage in Palestine, with their legitimacy to be there at all plummeting by the day, and often with citizenship elsewhere— leave the land between Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, is treated as wrong and insensitive.
While the double standard is unhelpful, and also presumes in Jewish settler society a helplessness and indeed innocence it has done little to earn, it is still clear that many of those asking the question “but where will they go?” do so with good intentions and innocently. Consequently, it seems helpful to address this question of how, truly and constructively, do we get settlers to leave Palestine?
It should be noted, too, that with the exception of a very small minority, and not only the religious fanatics in the West Bank that are habitually given the label, the Jewish population of Palestine is— overwhelmingly— a settler population.
Jewish people who moved to Palestine from Europe in the 1940s, displacing Palestinians as they did so, or who moved to Palestine from Iraq and Morocco after Zionist provocations in their home countries, are still settlers. They are second-generation settlers, perhaps, but settlers nonetheless, and to regard their claim on Palestine as anything like equal to Palestinians who have never been anywhere but Palestine, and who were displaced to make way for Jewish arrivals, is a racism at the heart of what is now very clearly the humanitarian disaster, and crime, of our times.
Projection
A first thing to deal with in opposing those with the idea that Jewish people not be asked to leave Palestine is the risk that people are—without justification—projecting Jewish-Zionist violence and brutality on to Palestinians. Willingness to believe in this brutality is key to the propaganda—the “40 beheaded babies”— that began the current genocide.
The projection formula is familiar; Anglophones were for a year treated to the lie that “From The River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free” was not a call for freedom but to drive Jewish settlers into the sea. Having alleged this forcefully, Jewish settler forces have since proceeded to drive Palestinians in Gaza into the sea or murder them on the beach.
Even if the current genocide has (legitimately) altered the Palestinian view of Jewish settlers in Palestine, the Palestinian insistence was always that Jews could live in Palestine but they must do so as equals and under the law. It is precisely equality that (like all supremacists) Jewish settlers to Palestine have been most offended by the idea of; the Israeli project in Palestine rests on, and demands, a supremacism that is at-odds with all natural and human values.
Even today, the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, to a highly problematic extent even, is still far more likely to attack, arrest or humiliate Palestinian resistance fighters than go against Jewish forces, or settlers, invading towns in the West Bank. The idea that there is some desire kill Jewish people, rather than the simple end of Jewish violence, just doesn't stack up. Meanwhile, the Israeli-Jewish dehumanisation of Palestinians, and the desire to see Palestinians, even Palestinian children, dead, is now abundantly obvious to everybody around the world. It should be clear that the project of Jewish settlement in Palestine cannot for a second longer (and never should have been) be entrusted with the monopoly of legitimate that statehood typically carries.
At root, the Israeli project in Palestine is violently maximalist in action, and so to not even oppose it with maximalist demands of a departure of Jewish settlers is ineffective. It must be remembered, too, that the Jewish project in Palestine rests on an Israeli “Law of Return” which confers a “right” on Jewish people from Brooklyn to Bratislava to relocate to Palestine, often taking a house or land as they go, and based on what Zionists claim to be a 4000-year history resting on their religious book, the Torah.
Contrastingly, the Jewish project in Palestine rests on a denial of the Palestinian Right to Return; a legal right, lodged in all international law, and which gives Palestinian refugees from the first major Jewish settler invasion of 1948 the right to return to their homes, and the right to their homes themselves.
A failure to discuss the best means of departure of Jewish settlers from Palestine is to leave in place this absurdly wrong, and absurdly unjust, imbalance of religious supremacy.
Psychological Pressure
It is unfortunately necessary to concede that—in the short term — Zionist elites of Europe and North America will not stop the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in firstly Gaza, secondly the West Bank, and thirdly ‘48 Palestine (the Israeli part) out of concern for either basic humanity or, failing that, international law and stability. This escalation—to expel Palestinians sector-by-sector—is precisely what the Jewish settler authorities have in mind.
In the face of such horror, and notwithstanding the direct impact of proven strategies such as boycott and direct action, a further and entirely non-violent strategy for the dismantling of the Israeli project is the application of psychological pressure.
Central to imposing psychological pressure upon the genocidal Israeli enterprise is asserting its fundamentally illegitimate dynamic (ethnic apartheid and land theft) and as a consequence of these obvious ills, rejecting it. As a young Saudi Arabian student once said to me, when I diplomatically called it Palestine & Israel, “it’s all Palestine”.
Central to imposing legitimacy upon the Israeli enterprise in Palestine is approaching it as a real and legitimate country; a rescuable enterprise, or a project in which religious fanaticism and even genocide can just be put down to early growing pains.
If Israeli advocates are made to deal with the fact that the world rejects their project in Palestine, this implicitly shrinks the space in which they are able to operate. It shrinks it psychologically back to an understanding that the world is rejecting them, and it shrinks it also in communication terms; the starting point for settler advocacy becomes asserting why they should be accepted at all, and not (as is currently the case), why genocide in Palestine should be accepted. This in turn shrinks the Israeli ability to legitimise genocide, and so is an essential bare minimum in stopping genocide, or in rejecting the moral-political toxin, abroad throughout Europe and North America, and insists that genocide can be normalised.
Even for those unmoved to act exclusively for Palestine, good luck to anyone ever hoping to get constructive or humanitarian changes through a political system that regards genocide as normalised or justifiable.
Practicalities
Migration from a country, even one’s home country, is not unprecedented. The Financial Times recently reported a 26% increase in UK citizenship applications from the US in 2024; up by over 6000 after the election for the second time of Donald Trump. More fair-minded US citizens can no longer put Trumpism down to a one-term aberration, can see an ever-declining public space and ever-increasing supremacy and violence as an inevitability, and are acting accordingly. This is entirely logical behaviour among fair-minded people.
Whether it was Europhiles disgusted by the UK’s Brexit xenophobia, or those who saw its democratic corruption on show during the Corbyn years and decided they no more wanted to live in such a state of affairs, many British people — especially younger people—also decided to start lives elsewhere.
Leaving countries is hardly the most radical act. If Jewish-Israelis are not going to object to genocide and religious violence by throwing their lives into stopping the wheels of their death machine (in the same way that European patriots set up resistance groups to 1940s Nazism) then suggesting they leave the colony in Palestine becomes the bare minimum to ask of them.
It must always be remembered that the Jewish colony in Palestine sees Jewish housing needs subsidised by stolen Palestinian homes, coerced Palestinian labour, and the murder of Palestinians. Jewish people in Palestine are implicated in both Jewish apartheid, a Jewish fascist voting system, and now a Jewish-enacted genocide. Asking why fair-minded Jewish people do not leave what is — by any normal terms — such an entirely rotten state of affairs, that has them living as de facto supremacists, is not entirely insane, unreasonable or illogical.
Further to this, the insistence that Jewish people should be incubated from this basic question— while USians under Trump ask it of themselves with no such controversy— is not only infantilising, it denigrates the clearsightedness of Jewish-Israelis who have done precisely this and left the colony in Palestine. People who want — for obvious moral reasons — no more to do with it.
Renunciation of Israeli citizenship is a thing, 82000 Israelis left the colony in Palestine in 2024. People have documented their renunciation of Israeli citizenship in order to encourage others to do the same. The granddaughter of the assassinated former Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzak Rabin, recently moved to the United States saying that she would never again live in the Jewish colony in Palestine.
The project of Jewish statehood in Palestine has only ever been brutal, and has only ever been supremacist. Presuming that Jewish people would desire such a thing, and desire to be part of it, is a bigotry all of its own; a bigotry of low-expectations. Many Jewish people, an increasing number even, already perceive this clearly, and the best way to assist them is by furthering the discussion of how best to facilitate Jewish people leaving thir supremacist project in Palestine. No less crucial, having this discourse stigmatises the act of more Jewish people relocating to Palestine; an act which implicitly supports the violent colonial structure, and implicitly dispossesses Palestinians.
Institutional assistance to repatriation
Fortunately, aside from the heartening individual examples, there also exist institutional examples of programmes aimed to support Jewish settler relocation out of Palestine. It is this institutional response to Jewish settlement in Palestine that we must most encourage, because it has the greatest ability to relocate people calmly and in greatest number.
Most recently, in atonement for the Alhambra Decreee of 1492, which purged Jews and Muslims from Christian Spain, the last decade saw a citizenship project from Spanish and Portuguese authorities, granting citizenship to those Jewish Israelis who could prove their Spanish origin and their having been purged from Iberia. (Notice, though we put it aside for now, the Islamophobia by which the same right was not bestowed upon Iberian-heritage Muslims, known as Moriscos, who were also expelled to the Maghreb.)
More schemes of this nature are to be encouraged. This should also come alongside honesty about the fact that some countries, most notably Germany, always made it incredibly difficult for Jewish people to regain citizenship having once fled. Europe as a whole must do more to atone for its outsourced holocaust guilt by allowing Jewish settlers in Palestine to return from where they are committing genocide, back to their actual homes and their own indigenous societies.
This genuine European moral reckoning with its own immoral history has always been anathema to Zionism. In the 1940s and 1950s, Zionist authorities in Palestine made it very difficult for homesick European Jews to return home; their desire to do so undermined their core claim of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and dented the force of settler numbers required by the project. This Zionist cruelty of course aligned with the European wish to remove Jewish people from Europe, an inclination that was never truly removed. The last year and a half of full EU support to genocide in Palestine shows clearly that Europe never truly undertook even the first steps of denazification. It is notable, too, that Germany (unlike the recent Iberian precedent) has historically made it very hard for Jewish descendants of German Nazi victims to reclaim their stolen citizenship.
Further to the examples specifically concerning Jewish settlers in Palestine, the war in Ukraine, and the ensuing mobilisation for its refugees, showed European and North American societies are very capable of taking-in significant numbers of people where they so choose, and where the country in question has been deemed sufficiently “like us” (aka white). A repeats of the Ukraine resettlement scheme can and should be set up for those Jewish people who don’t want to live in a genocidal apartheid in Palestine; a colony which is certain to see both rising brutality and indeed threats of conflict under what is now clearly a project of Jewish expansionism into Syria and Lebanon. Moreover, and though precise numbers are unknown, significant numbers of Jewish-Israelis already hold dual citizenships and already have every opportunity to restart (or resume) a life elsewhere.
Palestinians in Palestine invariably have no such second option, and so everything should be done to encourage and help Jewish settlers leaving the colony; doing so alleviates pressures on Palestinians, Palestinian resources, and weakens the Zionist endeavour by denying it capital, numbers, and human resources.
Make Palestine Palestinian Again
The imperative of a free Palestine is to free Palestinians from Jewish violence, and to restore autonomy and self-determination to the native population of Palestine. There is a western tendency to see this imperative from a Jewish-centric perspective, one that foregrounds the moral and spiritual sickness, or more popularly the trauma, inevitably arising in Jewish settlers living as violent colonisers in Palestine.
It is clear that living in a violent and supremacist Jewish colony creates a state of human health that is unnatural, unstable and unjust. Given the wider rewiring of the world Jewish community by Zionists to serve their colonial project, this creates a further risk to anyone living in a political system where Jewish-Zionist groups work against democracy and human rights to advance Jewish supremacy in Palestine. Furthermore—most abstract but not fully insignificant— these are conditions with the power to politicise a religion with an organised force sufficient to fully deracinate it of any spiritual component.
Whichever of these three strands people take a hold of in order to resist this project of religiously motivated violence in Palestine, the more important thing is simply to take hold of one of at least one of them.
Palestine will be free, and for all the pain of it, it is in fact ahistorical to suggest that a project so vicious and unjust as the Jewish supremacist one in Palestine has in it the necessary ingredients to win through and successfully implant itself in history. The expectation that Jewish people might have no desire to live in such a reality, and still less to enjoin their lives to it, is not a great one.
To know history, to be brave, and to stay human are the three fundamental things that any project born of injustice most fears. They are also the three things that will —for all the pain—ultimately free Palestine.