Israeli expulsion plans are not new: The Madagascar Plan

Last week, the Israeli cabinet approved the establishment of “a body to manage voluntary migration [of Palestinians] from Gaza”.

This “body” consists of personnel from Israel’s ministries of justice, foreign affairs, interior, finance, transportation, and strategic affairs, alongside “representatives from the IDF [Israeli military], the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), the National Security Council, and the Israel Police”.

The body will also be able to coordinate its activities with international organisations and other parties”. Its task will be to “facilitate the controlled movement of Palestinians through Israel for their departure to third countries”.

This “voluntary” expulsion of the Palestinian people from their homeland will purportedly be carried out in accordance with “international law”.

Offer Cassif, a member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, compared the new Israeli expulsion committee to the Nazi “Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration”, established in August 1938 to encourage Jewish “voluntary” emigration from Nazi Germany and Nazi-annexed Austria.

Expelling Palestinians

In view of Egypt and Jordan’s refusal to take in expelled Palestinians, Israel announced the new “body” shortly after leaks revealed that the US and Israel had approached Sudan, Somalia, and the breakaway Somaliland as alternative destinations.

These are hardly the only options.

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As early as January 2024, Israel had entered talks with Rwanda and Chad to explore their willingness to receive Palestinians it plans to expel from Gaza.

In fact, the earliest expulsion plan was hatched just a week after the war broke out. A document from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence, dated 13 October 2023, proposed expelling Gaza’s Palestinians to Sinai, as well as to Spain, Greece, and Canada.

So far, there have been no takers.

It is surprising that this new Israeli ‘body’ to expel Palestinians has stirred such an outcry, considering the Zionist movement had already established three expulsion committees since the 1930s

It is surprising that the creation of this new Israeli “body” to expel Palestinians has stirred such an outcry, considering the Zionist movement had already established three expulsion committees since the 1930s.

The first Zionist “Population Transfer Committee” was formed in November 1937 following the British government’s Peel Commission Report, which recommended the expulsion of nearly a quarter of a million Palestinians from the area it designated as a future Jewish state in Palestine.

Notably, this committee was pioneering in this regard, as it preceded the Nazi “Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration” by 10 months.

The Jewish Agency established a second “Population Transfer Committee” in 1941 and a third during the Zionist conquest of Palestine in May 1948.

The Zionists and the Israelis expelled more than three-quarters of a million Palestinians between December 1947 and January 1949 based on these plans.

Historical precedent

Others have likened the new Israeli and US plan to the Nazi “Madagascar Plan”, which the Nazis initiated before deciding on exterminating European Jews.

The Madagascar Plan, however, was not a Nazi innovation.

The Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation, a Zionist organisation founded in London by anti-Soviet exile Isaac Steinberg in 1935, was the first to propose it.

The League pursued several possible sites for Jewish colonisation, exploring regions in Africa, Oceania, and South America.

One of its first proposals, devised in 1936, was for Jewish settler-colonisation in Madagascar, then a French colony.

The Madagascar Plan thus presents a relevant historical precedent for the joint Israeli and American scheme to expel Palestinians to Egypt’s Sinai or other African countries – especially as Zionists and antisemites once planned it together.

In 1936, the Freeland League worked with the French Societé d’émigration et de Colonisation Juive, which would later become its Paris branch, and with French colonial minister Marius Moutet, who served in the cabinet of France’s first Jewish Prime Minister, Leon Blum.

Together, they explored New Caledonia, French Guiana, and, most crucially, Madagascar as potential sites for Jewish settler-colonisation.

They also collaborated with the Polish government, especially its antisemitic foreign minister, Colonel Jozef Beck, who consulted with Blum on the Madagascar Plan.

Jewish colonisation

Indeed, US representatives of the World Jewish Congress, along with the Jewish relief organisation, the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), coordinated with Moutet about the feasibility of the plan.

German antisemite Paul de Lagarde had, in fact, suggested Madagascar in 1885 as a deportation site for Europe’s Jews.

At the instigation of the Jewish leaders of the Freeland League in 1937, the antisemitic Beck and his foreign ministry coordinated with the philosemitic Moutet (whose wife was herself an east European Jewish refugee) to send an expedition to Madagascar.

The delegation included two Polish Jews – Solomon Dyk, who was already a gun-toting colonial-settler in Palestine, and Leon Alter – and a Polish Catholic military officer named Mieczyslaw Lepecki.

Their task was to investigate the island’s suitability for Jewish colonisation. They departed in the spring of 1937 and spent more than three months on the island, returning to Paris in September of that year.

Upon their return, Lepecki briefed Beck on their optimistic findings. The Freeland League expected backlash for working with antisemites, but saw the expedition as an opportunity to “publicise” the League’s “political influence”.

While less sanguine about the island’s colonial potential, the JDC report cited the Polish Jews’ positive assessment, noting that Madagascar “could well serve as a colony for Europeans”.

Dyk even wrote his own personal report and submitted it to the World Zionist Organisation’s colonial official Arthur Ruppin.

In 1938, the antisemitic Polish government encouraged the formation of colonisation organisations by Polish Zionist Revisionists. To that end, it supported, among others, the “Committee for the Advancement of Jewish Colonisation of Madagascar and Kenya”.

Nazi collaboration

Alter, the other Polish Jewish member of the Madagascar delegation, worried about native resistance to Jewish colonisation in Madagascar and the difficulty of convincing Polish shtetl Jews to move there.

The Nazis became seriously interested in Madagascar only after they invaded France in May 1940. By the summer, they had developed a proposal to deport Jews to the island

He surmised that indigenous opposition in Madagascar would be “greater than that of the Arabs against the Jews in Palestine.”

In fact, newspapers in Madagascar ran articles opposing Jewish colonisation during this period, fearing a “Semitic invasion”.

Still, the French government continued to support the project, and was later joined by the British Foreign Office, which also lent its voice of support for Madagascar as a Jewish settler-colony.

The Nazis became seriously interested in Madagascar only after they invaded France in May 1940. By the summer, they had developed a proposal, endorsed by Heinrich Himmler and Hitler himself, to deport Jews to the island.

Under the plan, deported Jews would have “autonomy under the [German] police governor” and operate their own administration, including mayors, police, postal service, and railway.

Adolf Eichmann was brought in as its lead planner and submitted a proposal to dispatch four million Jews to the “Jewish State” in Madagascar, funded by confiscated European Jewish property.

The Nazis pursued the plan until the winter of 1941-42.

The Zionist Revisionist terrorist group in Palestine, the Stern Gang, even proposed cooperating with the Nazis on the Madagascar Plan. The Sternists’ contacts with the Nazis continued until December 1941, when British police discovered and arrested their agents.

The Nazi plan was ultimately shelved after British forces invaded and occupied Vichy-controlled Madagascar in mid-1942 – by which time the genocidal Nazis had already shifted to a policy of extermination.

Source: Middle East Eye – Israeli expulsion plans are not new