INTO THE FRAY: Incentivized Emigration: An idea whose time has come?

By Martin Sherman

Of all the policy paradigms for the resolution of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian-Arabs, incentivized Arab emigration is the most humane if it succeeds and least inhumane if it does not

“Past attempts to encourage Palestinians to voluntary emigrate have always failed, so time and effort would be better invested in reaching an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.” – Yossi Beilin, former Israeli government minister, and a principal architect of the Oslo Accords, Al Monitor, August 26, 2019

The above quote is from an article by Beilin, still an unchastened champion of the fatally flawed process he helped initiate in the early 1990s,  in response to a spate of recent reports indicating that Israeli officialdom is considering—albeit with some hesitancy—the idea of offering the residents of Gaza material assistance to facilitate their emigration to third party countries—see for example here, here, here, and here.

Disingenuous dismissal?

Of course, Beilin’s dismissal of the notion of Israel encouraging Arab emigration is more than a little disingenuous. For if past failure is his criterion for disqualifying a policy proposal, the first to incur such rejection should surely be his own preferred Oslowian land-for-peace, two-state formula.

After all, from Beilin’s critique, the uninformed reader would never guess that far more “time and effort” has been invested in an almost three-decade long endeavor to “reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement” than in any attempt at inducing Arab emigration.

Indeed, no other policy prescription has been backed with such massive and sustained outlays of treasure, political and diplomatic capital and…blood, as that embraced by Beilin and his like-mined pro-Oslowian ideologues—in their foolhardy gamble of trying to reach a resolution to the conflict with their overtly Judeophobic Palestinian interlocutors, by means of political appeasement and territorial withdrawal.

But setting aside for a moment Beilin’s disingenuous invocation of the lack of success of previous efforts to induce Arab emigration, there are substantive reasons why the past may well not be a reliable indicator of the future.

The first is that the Arab population—particularly in Gaza—have already experienced the onerous travails of life under a duly elected Palestinian-Arab government.

Documented desire to leave

This of course is particularly true for Gaza, although there is also considerable dissatisfaction in Judea-Samaria, where after over a quarter-century of government by Fatah, all that has been achieved is a dysfunctional polity and an emaciated economy, crippled by corruption and cronyism, with a minuscule private sector and a bloated public one, patently unsustainable without the largesse of its alleged “oppressor,” Israel.

But, it is Gaza, where the misguided experiment in two-statism was first initiated back in 1994, sparking a surge of deluded optimism fanned by the likes of Beilin, that has now become its gravest indictment—for both Jew and Arab alike.

The gross misgovernment of Gaza has left the general population awash in untreated sewage flows, with well over 90% of the water supply unfit for drinking, electrical power available for only a few hours a day, and unemployment rates soaring to anything between 40-60%–depending on the source cited or the sector involved.

Unsurprisingly, this has led to a wide spread desire to leave Gaza and seek a better future elsewhere—which is reflected in both numerous media reports and in statistical polling, which regularly shows that between 40-50% of respondents are willing to openly declare their desire to leave.

Significantly, according to some sources, since May last year, between 35-40,000 have  left—despite heavy restrictions at the border, ominous disapproval of the regime and the lack of any purposeful policy of Israel to incentivize their departure.

Enhanced scale & scope

Another reason why past failures to induce emigration may not necessarily indicate that future attempts are futile is that any envisaged future endeavor must be qualitatively different in nature, in size and in scope to those previously undertaken.

In the past, the emigration initiatives have been timid, hesitant and surreptitious, while the material inducements offered were decidedly miserly.

In prior attempts, Israeli authorities attempted to conceal the initiative to encourage emigration. Thus, one internal Foreign Ministry memo (1968) stipulated: “This must be done discreetly and ‘spontaneously’ and under no circumstances should this be declared as official policy or appear to be organized by us.”

By contrast, what is called for today is an overt, publically declared strategic initiative, including an assertive public diplomacy offensive and accompanied by a comprehensive set of highly tempting incentives to leave and commensurately daunting disincentives for continued residency in Gaza.

The point of departure for any successful incentivized emigration policy is to identify the Palestinian-Arab collective for what it is—and for what it identifies itself to be: An implacable enemy and not a prospective peace partner—and to differentiate between the inimical collective and non-belligerent individuals, which it may include.

Disincentives for staying; incentives for leaving

Approximating the Cost

It is not an easy task to determine the optimum compensation for prospective recipients, but for the sake of argument let us assume that 100 times the current Gazan GDP per capita per family is not an unreasonable point of departure. This would amount to about $250-300,000 per family. With the estimated number of families in Gaza around 400,000, the total cost would amount to about $100 billion or about one third of Israel’s total annual GDP.

At first glance this might appear daunting, but if the implementation of the initiative were spread over a period of a decade and half—far less than the efforts to effect a two-state outcome have been tried—this would come to only 2-3% of GDP—something Israel could probably shoulder on its own. If other OECD countries could be harnessed to participate, it could be implemented at a fraction of a percentage of their GDPs—showing that political legitimacy rather than economic cost is the principal obstacle to be overcome.

To give a sense of proportion, the US spent several trillion dollars on its military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, which dwarfs the size of the budget required to resettle all the Gazans, together with all their kinfolk in the “West Bank”, safely and comfortably in some third party country.

Who will host them?

One of the questions inevitably raised regarding the incentivized emigration idea is that of who the host countries are likely to be—especially given the migration crisis in Europe following the chaos in the wake of the “Arab Spring” and the Syrian civil war.

Indeed, according to the previously cited reports regarding renewed Israeli interest in encouraging Gazans to emigrate, it was noted that there was some difficulty in locating countries willing to accept them.

Clearly, however, within the parameters of the initiative set out previously, the situation would be very different. After all, within these parameters, the Gazan emigrants will not be arriving at the gates of their prospective host countries as destitute—or at least desperate—refugees but, as mentioned above, as relatively affluent emigrants by the standards of many such potential host countries.

Indeed, by absorbing Gazan emigrants, the host countries will generate significant capital inflows into their economies. For example, a country that accepts 3000 Gazan families can expect a capital injection of almost a billion dollars!

If additional international aid can be extended to the host countries, absorbing the Gazan emigrants could be an act that is both profitable and humane.

The moral high ground

Israeli officials have erred badly in being reticent as to the intention of encouraging Arab emigration. Indeed, there is no reason for any sense of moral unease. To the contrary, incentivized emigration is clearly morally superior to any other policy paradigm addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and certainly to that touted by Beilin calling for a two-state outcome. After all, any prospective Palestinian state will almost certainly be yet another homophobic, misogynistic Muslim majority tyranny—whose hallmarks would be: gender discrimination, gay persecution, religious intolerance, and political oppression of dissidents. Indeed, no two-stater, however fervent, has ever produced any persuasive argument why it would not be.

Here of course, a trenchant question must be forced into the public discourse on the legitimacy of incentivized emigration in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general, and of Gaza in particular. This is the question of “Who has the moral high ground?”

Is it those who advocate the establishment of said homophobic, misogynistic Muslim majority tyranny which would comprise the very antithesis of liberal values usually invoked for its establishment?

Or is it those who advocate incentivized emigration and providing non-belligerent Palestinian individuals with the opportunity of building a better life for themselves elsewhere, out of harm’s way, free from the recurring cycles of death, destruction and destitution that have been brought down on them by the cruel corrupt cliques that have led them astray for decades.

The most humane; the least inhumane

Indeed, there is another, even more pertinent question to be asked of the proponents of Palestinian statehood:
Why is it morally acceptable to offer financial inducements to Jews to evacuate their homes to facilitate the establishment of said homophobic, misogynistic tyranny, which, almost certainly, will become a bastion for Islamist terror; while it is considered morally reprehensible to offer financial inducements to Arabs to evacuate their homes to prevent the establishment of such an entity?

The proponents of incentivized emigration need not feel any sense of moral discomfort as to their policy prescription—especially when compared to that of the proponents of Palestinian statehood.

Indeed, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, the incentivized emigration paradigm is in fact the most humane of all policy proposals if its implementation is successful; and the least inhumane, if it is not.

This is the message they should be propounding vigorously, openly and unabashedly–as the harbingers of an idea, whose time has come.

Martin Sherman is the founder & executive director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies