Since President Trump’s announcement in February of a plan to remove the population of Gaza, little has been done to implement it. Israel’s renewed offensive, however, again raises the question of the fate of the Gaza Strip, and its people, after the fighting ends—and the question of population transfer may again return to the fore. Brian Horowitz examines the career and work of Joseph Schechtman, a disciple and biographer of the great Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky and a serious student of the organized mass migrations of the first half of the 20th century. While today caricatured by his detractors as an unquestioning supporter of such policies, Schechtman was in fact a subtle and humane historian, acutely aware of both their terrible effects and of the stability they brought to much of Europe:

In 1941, Schechtman somehow managed to escape Europe for America, where good fortune befell him. Jacob Robinson, the director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs, commissioned him to write a three-volume study on the history of population transfers, emphasizing the years 1939–42. According to Gil Rubin, a scholar of population transfers, Robinson was leading the discussions about the postwar future—what would minority rights and especially the Jewish question look like? Rubin notes that . . . “Schechtman’s study was the first and most detailed on the topic.”

Schechtman was recruited to participate in FDR’s “M” (Migration) project, an effort to shape the postwar map through resettlement programs, which included resettling both the surviving Jews of Europe and American Jews across the globe to avoid their future concentration in any one nation-state. This effort was run by the Department of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, with the participation of leading American academics at Columbia University and the University of Chicago.

When the question of Israel and Palestine came into focus, Schechtman remained consistent. His position largely paralleled the Israeli government that said that the Jews had been attacked, had won the war, and would not return to the status quo ante that had fostered a threat of annihilation. The Palestinians had to be assimilated by their brethren Arabs in those places they now found themselves. . . . However, Schechtman went on, writing in his 1961 book On the Wings of Eagles: The Plight, Exodus, and Homecoming of Oriental Jewry that the Jews of the Arab countries had themselves been victims of forcible eviction, so that the roughly 350,000 Jews from Arab lands that came to Israel in the early 1950s represented a standard form of population exchange.

With the IDF engaged in ground maneuvers in both northern and southern Gaza, and a plan about to go into effect next week that would separate more than 100,000 civilians from Hamas’s control, an end to the war may at last be in sight. Yet there seems to be no agreement within Israel, or without, about what should become of the territory. Efraim Inbar assesses the various proposals, from Donald Trump’s plan to remove the population entirely, to the Israeli far-right’s desire to settle the Strip with Jews, to the internationally supported proposal to place Gaza under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA)—and exposes the fatal flaws of each. He therefore tries to reframe the problem:

[M]any Arab states have failed to establish a monopoly on the use of force within their borders. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Sudan all suffer from civil wars or armed militias that do not obey the central government.

Perhaps Israel needs to get used to the idea that in the absence of an entity willing to take Gaza under its wing, chaos will prevail there. This is less terrible than people may think. Chaos would allow Israel to establish buffer zones along the Gaza border without interference. Any entity controlling Gaza would oppose such measures and would resist necessary Israeli measures to reduce terrorism. Chaos may also encourage emigration.

Israel is doomed to live with bad neighbors for the foreseeable future. There is no way to ensure zero terrorism. Israel should avoid adopting a policy of containment and should constantly “mow the grass” to minimize the chances of a major threat emerging across the border. Periodic conflicts may be necessary. If the Jews want a state in their homeland, they need to internalize that Israel will have to live by the sword for many more years.