It’s not that complicated, Israel kills Palestinians. Over the last three years, and the 75 before that, we have seen Israel target families, journalists, and healthcare workers, alongside the near total decimation of the infrastructure that makes life happen in communities, from hospitals to farms to schools and bakeries. Recently, we have seen Israel snipe a seven-month-old boy in the head, and we have seen Israel shoot fishermen in the sea as they tried to pull food from it. No matter the circumstance, Israel targets Palestinians for the sake of their Palestinianness, murdering them in the most brutal ways or destroying the systems that make their lives possible.

Yet we, the public, the watchers of mass media, are fed the proposition that amid all of this death and destruction, Palestinians in Gaza are simply being offered a choice, something called “voluntary emigration.” As if anything voluntary comes at the end of missile strikes, sniper bullets, or aid lines where you become target practice.

Late last month, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that “the voluntary emigration plan from Gaza will be implemented,” everything, he promised, “at the right timing and in the right manner.” The same week, Benjamin Netanyahu stood before a settler conference and told the audience his directive was to seize 70 percent of Gaza’s territory. The crowd screamed “100!” back at him, over and over, and he promised them 70 was only the beginning. Israel established a government office for all of this last year, a bureau for voluntary emigration, with eased travel rules for any Palestinian willing to make the journey one way.

The concept of this voluntary adoption of refugee status predates the state itself and is one of the oldest entries in Zionism’s dictionary. In 1895, Theodor Herzl confided to his diary that the movement would “try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country.” Expulsion, drafted as a jobs program.

In 1930, Chaim Weizmann formally proposed to the British that Palestinians be moved to Transjordan and Iraq, and Ben-Gurion skipped the euphemism altogether, announcing that he supported forced deportation and saw nothing immoral in it.

In 1969, Israel struck a deal with Paraguay’s dictatorship, logistics handled by the Mossad, to pay thousands of Gazans $100 dollars each to emigrate. One hundred dollars to renounce a homeland.

And in October 2023, while the bombs were already falling, the Intelligence Ministry circulated a concept paper proposing the expulsion of Gaza’s entire population to the Sinai in three orderly phases, complete with a messaging campaign to convince Palestinians that leaving was for their own good. A hundred and thirty years of the same idea, that Palestinians are only a problem to be erased “voluntarily” or not.

The law is not confused about any of this, even if the headlines are. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the forcible transfer of an occupied people regardless of motive, the Rome Statute names deportation by “expulsion or other coercive acts” a crime against humanity, and the tribunals that judged Bosnia and Rwanda long ago settled what Israel pretends is still open, holding that displacement is forced whenever the decision to leave is made under coercive circumstances, that a person fleeing the systematic creation of unlivable conditions has chosen nothing at all. No soldier needs to march you out at gunpoint. The destruction of your hospitals, universities, and homes does the marching. Subjecting civilians to conditions that do not allow for survival, freedom, and dignity until they say they want to leave is a plan for expulsion, whatever its authors print on the letterhead.

So consider the conditions under which Palestinians are now invited to exercise their free will. Ninety-two percent of Gaza’s homes have been destroyed or damaged. None of its 37 hospitals is fully functional. Aid trucks cut from 4,200 a week to 590 when Israel sealed the crossings in February, families burning trash to cook whatever arrives, children frozen to death last winter for lack of shelter materials Israel would not allow in. The Yellow Line, the boundary of Israeli control drawn by the ceasefire, keeps moving west, swallowing water points and clinics, with Palestinians killed for approaching a line that approaches them. More than 900 Palestinians have been killed since the “ceasefire” was signed in October.

What, exactly, are Palestinians volunteering for? Death or displacement.

Which is why the only honest answer to “voluntary emigration” has always been return. More than half of Gaza’s people are refugees or the children of refugees from 1948, so the population now being invited to leave is being expelled for the second and third time, by a state whose Law of Return grants citizenship to any Jew anywhere on earth while its Absentees’ Property Law, passed the same year, handed the homes of the expelled to a government custodian so they could never be reclaimed. Israel understands return perfectly, for Israelis. It wrote the right into its founding code and reserved it for everyone except the people it displaced.

Return matters because it is the only remedy that undoes the initial crime, going back to the Nakba. For 78 years, the world has treated Palestinian displacement as a condition to be managed, a tent count, a ration card, an annual pledging conference, while the wrong itself hardened into what diplomats politely call ‘facts on the ground’. Resolution 194 promised return “at the earliest practicable date” in 1948, and this resolution has been reaffirmed almost every year since. The International Court of Justice, in 2024, stated for the first time that self-determination is a peremptory norm of international law, the kind that no treaty, no negotiation, and no passage of time can override. The two cannot be separated. A people barred from their land cannot determine anything upon it, which means every peace plan that omits return, including the twenty-point plan governing this ceasefire, whose only nod to the question is an assurance that “no one will be forced to leave,” is offering Palestinians a future built on the crime it refuses to name. Compensation does not cure it. Resettlement in Sinai or Somaliland does not cure it. All across Gaza this year, families have walked back to the cracked walls of barely standing homes only for the next order to push them out again, under the watch of the world. Unremedied displacement simply repeats, displacement after displacement, generation after generation, until someone walks home. Return is how it ends.

What has never been understood by colonizers, in 1895 or 1969 or now, is that Palestinians are the land. The grandmother buried beneath the olive tree she planted, the names of erased villages passed down to children born thousands of miles away, the farmer who walks toward death because the harvest is on the other side. You cannot offer a people an exit from themselves. This is why families in Gaza pitch tents on the rubble of their own homes rather than accept a ticket out, why the elderly ask to be buried at home even when home is a coordinate under debris, why for seventy-eight years, given the choice between dying on their land and living anywhere else, Palestinians have chosen the land, and chosen it again, and chosen it under fire. Israel has heard this answer clearly. That is why it offers death and calls it a choice. The land is soaked in the blood of Palestinians – that is why anything but return is a betrayal, why Palestinians will never leave “voluntarily”, and why Palestinians will rebuild.

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