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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suggested Wednesday that he would support the "mass removal of Palestinians" from Gaza if Israel's leaders decide "they need to do that."
“We gotta support Israel. In word and in deed, in public and in private, and they need to be able to finish the job," DeSantis said at a CNN debate with Nikki Haley. "I think to be a good ally, you back them in the decisions that they’re making with respect to Gaza."
When pressed about his stance on the mass removal of civilians from Gaza, he replied: "As president, I am not going to tell them to do that. I think there’s a lot of issues with that. 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." (Ask the Palestinians who fled to neighboring countries after the 1948 Nakba how that went.)
Mass displacement and forced removals are often tactics used in ethnic cleansing, which a U.N. commission of experts has characterized as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”
As my colleague Zeeshan Aleem has pointed out, the official Israeli position is that Gazans will be able to return to their homes after the war, and that any emigration is “voluntary,” not coerced. But, he wrote, “If Gaza has been rendered uninhabitable, then how can migration out of the territory be characterized as voluntary?”
DeSantis himself might be aware that such mass removals could be tantamount to ethnic cleansing when he concedes that "there’s a lot of issues with that."
Yet as his campaign falters, DeSantis has sought out extreme positions to distinguish himself as the most unquestioning champion of Israel among his GOP rivals. He declared a state of emergency in Florida after Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people. He boasted about expelling a pro-Palestinian student group at a state university (and is now being sued for violating its free speech rights). His claim that he helped send weapons and ammunition to Israel turned out to be a gross exaggeration at best and an outright lie at worst.
And DeSantis has displayed little to no humanity when talking about Palestinians. He has said that Israel should continue to deprive the 2 million people in Gaza of water as a tactic to force Hamas to release Israeli hostages, and that the U.S. should not accept people from Gaza as refugees, claiming “they are all antisemitic.”
“The U.S. should not be absorbing any of those,” he told CBS' "Face the Nation." “I think the culture — so they elected Hamas, let’s just be clear about that. Not everyone’s a member of Hamas, most probably aren’t. But they did elect Hamas.” (The last time elections were held in Gaza was in 2006, when nearly half of its current population wasn't old enough — or even alive — to vote.)
And now DeSantis' bid to be the most pro-Israel of the bunch has apparently led him to endorse tactics aligned with ethnic cleansing.
Israeli ministers who have called for the annihilation of Gaza and the Palestinian people have faced intense international criticism. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ahead of the start of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice on Thursday, publicly stated that Israel has no intention of displacing civilians in Gaza, despite having obliterated a vast majority of the infrastructure and homes there and, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, having killed more than 23,000 people, slightly less than half of whom were children.