Let their people go!
One man surveyed in Gaza said: “In the end, people will accept reality. They want to live in a country that protects and supports them.”
By Moshe Phillips
JNS
Feb 18, 2025
So it turns out that quite a few Gazans really do want to leave Gaza. Will Israel’s critics continue to demand that they be held prisoner there?
A front-page article in The New York Times on Feb. 5 reported that while “a number of Gazans” say they won’t leave, “others said conditions were so unlivable after 15 months of Israeli bombardment that they would consider relocating.”
A Gazan named Mukhlis al-Masri, a resident of the town of Beit Hanoun, at first told the Times that U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan was “unacceptable.” But then the Times reporter added: “If he were able to move outside Gaza, Mr. al-Masri said, he would.”
Al-Masri was quoted as saying: “Do I want to live through a tragedy for another 20 or 30 years? Do I want to continue to live through hell? I can’t.”
Two days later, The Jerusalem Post reported on a remarkable document that was recently captured by Israeli forces in Gaza and revealed by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center. It’s an internal Hamas document warning that “even if Trump’s plan does not materialize, the opening of the Rafah Crossing and additional border crossings could trigger a significant wave of emigration from the Gaza Strip, given the extensive destruction and uncertainty about the future.”
If Hamas is convinced that a “significant” number of Gazans will leave if given the opportunity, you can bet there’s a basis for that expectation.
Meanwhile, the New York-based Center for Peace Communications, a nonprofit that makes on-the-ground videos in Middle East hot spots, has released a series of short interviews it conducted with Gaza residents in the days following Trump’s announcement.
One of the men interviewed says he wants to leave “because there’s no life left here; life here is gone.” He adds: “I’m asking Trump himself to relocate us as he suggested, and I’ll be the first one to go. I mean, just look around you—we simply can’t live here.”
Other Gazans in the video appeal to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan to open their borders so that Gaza’s residents can enter. One says he expects that most Gazans would leave if permitted because “in the end, people will accept reality. They’ll emigrate because they want to live. They want to live in a country that protects and supports them, meaning a country where you can hold your head up high.”
All of this dovetails with what a poll of Gazans found shortly before the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The survey was taken by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. It found that 44% of Gazans between the ages of 18 and 29—and 31% of the overall population—were considering emigrating. Their “most preferred destination for immigration is Turkey, followed by Germany, Canada, the United States and Qatar,” the poll reported.
“Economic reasons” were the explanation most often given for wanting to leave. That was when Gaza was still intact. Today, much of the territory resembles “a demolition site,” as Trump put it. If 44% of them wanted to leave even before the war, then you can be sure that a much larger number want to leave today. Only Hamas and its fellow travelers and cheerleaders want to keep them imprisoned there.
That seems ironic because for years Israel’s left-wing critics, including groups like J Street, were calling Gaza “an open-air prison.” Now those same critics want to keep the Gazans in that prison.
Do you suppose any of those “peace” activists would be willing to give up their comfortable homes in Manhattan or San Francisco to live in Gaza? Of course not. Yet they have the chutzpah to demand that other people stay in such horrid conditions. These supposed champions of “choice” want to deny others the right to choose a better life for themselves and their families.
What makes the Jewish left’s position especially ironic is that the idea of relocating Gazans to Jordan was once advocated by one of the left’s most iconic figures, Yitzhak Rabin. He told the newspaper Maariv on Feb. 16, 1973: “The problem of the refugees of the Gaza Strip should not be solved in Gaza or el-Arish [in the Sinai] but mainly in the East Bank,” that is, Jordan. “I want to create conditions such that during the next 10 or 20 years there will be a natural movement of population to the East Bank. We can achieve that, in my opinion, with [King] Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat.”
It’s time for everybody who sincerely cares about the welfare of Gazans to organize protest rallies outside the offices of J Street, Americans for Peace Now and all the other groups demanding that the residents of Gaza be kept there. The protesters should carry signs bearing the slogan of the newest worldwide protest movement: “Let Their People Go!”
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