Ron DeSantis Gives a Green Light to Ethnic Cleansing

Andrew Harnik/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.For the past two weeks, Israeli officials have been embroiled in an appalling debate. A group of far-right extremists within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition have been calling on the government to encourage the “voluntary migration” of large numbers of Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip.
These thinly veiled calls for ethnic cleansing have been widely condemned—both within Israel and by the Biden administration. Some Republicans have also gone on record rejecting the idea. “I don’t think you have to remove Palestinians from Gaza,” GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley told CNN last week. “I think you have to remove Hamas from Gaza.”
Ron DeSantis apparently has a different view. During Wednesday night’s Republican debate, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked the Florida governor whether he would support “the mass-removal of Palestinians from Gaza.” DeSantis’ response was less than clear, but he seemed to suggest that if the Israeli government did decide to remove millions of Palestinians from Gaza, he wouldn’t stand in the way of that egregious human rights violation.
“We’ve got to support Israel in word and in deed, in public and in private, and they’ve got to be able to finish the job,” DeSantis said. “I think to be a good ally, you back them in the decisions that they’re making with respect to Gaza. Look, there’s a lot of pluses and minuses with how you’re doing this. But for us to be sitting in Washington second-guessing them, I don’t think that’s the right way.”
Tapper pressed for clarity. “Do you support the mass-removal of Palestinians from Gaza?” he asked again.
“As president, I am not going to tell them to do that. I think there’s a lot of issues with that,” DeSantis answered. “But if they make the calculation that to avert a second Holocaust, they need to do that—I think some of these Palestinian Arabs, Saudi Arabia should take some. Egypt should take some.”
DeSantis’ claim that he isn’t “going to tell” Israel to commit war crimes is less than reassuring. Many Israeli officials—even officials within Netanyahu’s government—oppose ethnic cleansing for moral reasons, and they would presumably reject such a suggestion from a US president. But other Israeli politicians have criticized calls for “voluntary migration” precisely because they don’t think the United States would ever permit it. “It’s not realistic, and it’s clear that the international community will not accept it…we see the repercussions, we see what happened with the Americans,” one Likud lawmaker told Israel’s Ynet news outlet. 
And that’s what makes DeSantis’ comments so dangerous. He’s giving a green light to ethnic cleansing.