On: Israeli minister unveils plan to remove Gaza's population over seven years

4 September 2026

A minister stood before cameras and announced, in the manner of a man presenting a housing policy, that two million people are to be removed from their land over seven years. Two hundred and fifty thousand the first year. The rest, phased, scheduled, administrated. What struck me was not the cruelty - cruelty is old - but the calendar. Removal as a seven-year plan, with targets, as though human beings were a quota to be met and the difficulty lay only in logistics.

One must keep distinctions intact here, because the whole apparatus of excuse depends on blurring them. Emigration is not expulsion. A person who leaves because he cannot live where he is has not chosen; he has been chosen against. And legality - the courts will be invoked, the lawyers will earn their fees - legality is not legitimacy. A statute can authorize what no political community has the right to do, and the signature on the order does not convert the act into politics. It converts it into administration applied to people who have been reclassified as a problem.

Who was thinking? That is the question I would put to everyone involved, from the minister down to the clerk drafting the departure schedules. Not: were they wicked - wickedness explains nothing and therefore predicts nothing - but: at what precise moment did each of them stop asking what they were doing? The plan is presented in the language of electioneering, a platform plank among others, and this is what should frighten us. It has become possible to speak of the emptying of a people the way one speaks of pension reform. The vocabulary does the work before the tanks do.

But I refuse the comfort of inevitability. This plan is not fate; it is a proposal, and proposals can be fought. The elections are close. That closeness is the proof that the beginning still lies open - that enough people could still refuse to become the ones who sign.