Israel's far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has unveiled a ten-year plan to bring one million Jewish immigrants from North America and Europe, a demographic project that advances hand in hand with his openly declared goal of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their land.
In an interview, Smotrich said he had presented the outline to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about six weeks earlier, arguing that Jewish immigration had been neglected while the government pursued what he called revolutions in security and settlement. He said Israel now needed to treat immigration with the same scale, investment, and intensity it had devoted to those two fronts. The plan's central element is a return to large-scale state construction on the model of the programs run under Ariel Sharon in the 1990s, which built tens of thousands of housing units for immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
Smotrich acknowledged that the professional staff of his own Finance Ministry oppose the plan, and that Israel's existing land-allocation rules, built on equal access through public tenders, make the kind of preferential allocation he envisions impossible under current law, an obstacle he signaled he intends to override. The scheme fits a wider far-right project to alter the demographic balance across historic Palestine by flooding it with Jewish settlers while driving out its Palestinian population.
That second half of the equation is one Smotrich has made explicit. In the same period, he has intensified his demands to seize Gaza and empty it of Palestinians, calling for the enclave to be turned into Jewish settlements. Smotrich has said Israel should complete its conquest of Gaza and establish a belt of Jewish settlements there, declaring that where there is no settlement there is no security. He has announced that plans for three settlements in the northern Gaza Strip are ready and awaiting Netanyahu's approval, and has repeatedly called for what he frames as the voluntary emigration of Gaza's more than two million Palestinians, telling settlement conferences that Gaza would be totally destroyed and its population left with nothing to look for there.
His vision leaves no ambiguity about its aim. Smotrich has spoken of concentrating Gaza's population in a narrow strip of land, stripped of hope and pushed toward leaving, language that describes the crime of ethnic cleansing and forced displacement in plain terms. The plan to import a million settlers from the West is the demographic mirror of that project: as Palestinians are to be expelled from Gaza and squeezed across the occupied West Bank, their land is to be filled with Jewish immigrants brought in at state expense.
