Rabbi Eitan Cahn has a long, untrimmed red beard and a very precise vision for the future of Gaza City. He wants to make the Palestinian territory’s largest city, now a battleground of concrete rubble, into a high-tech, green city renamed “New Gaza,” and bar Palestinians from the city — and the rest of Gaza.
“The only way to have peace is if the Arabs are not there,” the 49-year-old rabbi said during an event called “Settlements Bring Security,” held in Jerusalem on Sunday evening, The Wall Street Journal reports. “It will be an Israeli city.”
While Israel has yet to formulate a vision for Gaza after its war with Hamas ends, the far-right religious nationalist movement has a clear plan for the future, one that was laid out in detail on Sunday, when thousands of people — many of them religious Israeli settlers living in the occupied West Bank — joined government ministers at a raucous event in a packed Jerusalem auditorium.
To get there, many attendees spoke of encouraging “voluntary migration” by Palestinians out of Gaza, even as Israel is facing accusations from South Africa in the International Court of Justice that it is conducting a genocide of Palestinians living in Gaza in order to empty the territory of Palestinians.
Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, gave his definition of “voluntary” migration.
In war, Karhi said, "'voluntary' is at times a state you impose until they give their consent.'"
Opposition leader Yair Lapid called the conference "a disgrace on the head of Netanyahu," and he warned that no good could come of advocating for resettling Gaza and expelling its 2.2 million Palestinian residents.
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"This will cause international damage, undermines potential negotiations, endangers IDF soldiers, and reflects a grave lack of responsibility," Lapid said.
Organizers presented maps featuring plans for new Israeli settlements in Gaza, and men danced to religious and patriotic songs as video played showing Israeli soldiers in Gaza brandishing signs saying they were back in Gaza for good, the Journal reported.
Members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet, and at least one member of his Likud party, explained to the crowd that Palestinians would be “encouraged” to leave the strip.
"If we don't want another October 7, we need to go back home and control [Gaza]. We need to find a legal way to voluntarily emigrate [Palestinians] and impose death sentences on terrorists," National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Otzma Yehudit party said in a speech to the conference.
"We are rising, we have a nation of lions [and many children] are returning there as combat fighters. We must make sure they return there as settlers to protect the people of Israel,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionist party, said in his speech.
Netanyahu himself has stopped short of endorsing the plan, and opposition and military leaders warn that talk of ethnic cleansing in Gaza is antithetic to Israel's values, its war aims, and any hope of peace.
A huge map of Gaza loomed over attendees, with the locations of possible future Israeli settlements marked clearly. Organizers clustered behind six booths, one for each of the aspirational Israeli settlements, from beachfront villages in the north to an ultraorthodox community on the Egyptian border, and urged attendees to register as potential residents.
Cahn, the rabbi, presented a color-coded map of Gaza City, with neighborhoods carrying Hebrew names. The area of Shujaiya was renamed “Heroes of Gaza,” after the Israeli soldiers who recently died there. The formerly upscale area of Rimal, home to the site of an ancient synagogue, was labeled “King David neighborhood.”
Bat-Hen Sarig, 36, who grew up in an Israeli settlement in Gaza said she has been dreaming of returning ever since she was forced to leave in 2005.
“Six months ago, we couldn’t have imagined that this moment would’ve come so soon,” Sarig, who lives in a West Bank settlement, told The Journal. “If we go back it’s not just to the north of the strip. All of the Gaza Strip belongs to the people of Israel.”
Ronit Bonomo, 66, said that Israeli settlements are the only way to ensure a lasting peace.
“We tried for 17 years to live in peace with the Arabs. After what happened on October 7, we can’t live in peace. People had enough of war,” said Bonomo.