Deadlocks · defusion · extreme

Remove the other population

'Defuse' the demographic deadlock by making the other people leave: 'voluntary emigration' of Gazans, or 'go back to Europe' for Israeli Jews.

When a solution needs a people to disappear

Rwanda, 1994: Hutu Power propaganda cast the Tutsi as foreign invaders who didn't belong — a colonial-era myth made them "Hamitic" newcomers — and radio called them inyenzi, cockroaches. In about 100 days an estimated 500,000–800,000 people were killed, most of them Tutsi.

The pattern is old and simple: a people is declared not to belong, it has nowhere else to go, and the language about it dehumanises. What follows is expulsion or mass killing. In this conflict the pattern runs both ways — "the Palestinians are really Arab immigrants; they can go to Jordan" and "the Zionists are colonisers; they can go back to Europe".

If the solution you favour only works when millions of people are gone, ask how they would go. And if you accuse the other side of genocide while favouring such a solution, look at what you are supporting.

Proposed in both directions. In October 2023 Israel's Intelligence Ministry drafted a ten-page policy paper recommending to 'evacuate the civilian population to Sinai' and prevent its return; the ministry confirmed it was authentic and 'distributed to the defense establishment', and such papers are 'not binding' on the government (as reported by +972 Magazine and Local Call). In 2024 a group of retired senior officers put forward what became known as the 'Generals' Plan' for northern Gaza. B'Tselem, which argues Israel's war is genocide, writes that 'Though never officially adopted by the Israeli military, the plan did inform its conduct on the ground', with 'some 100,000 people' displaced from northern Gaza by November 2024; the plan's own text is not yet read here ⚠, and 'informed' is B'Tselem's inference, not an admission. On the Israeli far right, ministers attended a January 2024 conference calling for resettling Gaza and encouraging Gazans to leave, and on 4 February 2025, beside Israel's prime minister, the US president said the United States would 'take over' Gaza and rebuild it as the 'Riviera of the Middle East', with its people moved elsewhere ⚠ (wording via secondary summaries; the White House transcript not yet read). On the other side, the slogans and charters that envisage Israel's end leave Israeli Jews nowhere to go (see 'One Arab (or Islamic) state from the river to the sea'). Advocates present it as humane ('voluntary') or as justice ('return to where they came from'). Arab states answered with a plan of their own: the League of Arab States' Cairo summit (March 2025) reaffirmed 'categorical rejection of any form of displacement of the Palestinian people from or within their land, under any pretext', calling it 'a crime against humanity, and a form of ethnic cleansing', and adopted a reconstruction plan meant to be carried out with Gazans staying in place.

The deadlocks it addresses

Where it has been tried

The Nakba (1948) and the exodus of Jews from Arab countries (1948–1970s) — failed. Both 'solved' a demographic question for one side and created refugee problems that still drive the conflict three generations later.
The Greek–Turkish population exchange (1923) — partly. It ended a conflict at the cost of more than a million people uprooted, by treaty between states, not by pressure on a population under bombardment.

What you have to believe for it to work

A people can be made to leave 'voluntarily' under war conditions
The rest of the world will accept it

These are the assumptions the future solution builder will let you set yourself.

How it can fail

It is ethnic cleansing under international law, whatever it's called
It creates the next generation of refugees and the next war