This past week Ministers Betzalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir suggested that Gazans could voluntarily transfer out of the strip allowing Israel to apply full sovereignty over the area. This would end the decades long conflict in a peaceful manner.

The reaction from the USA was swift and completely negative. The administration lambasted the two ministers as being extremists, but why is this extreme? Encouraging a particular population to move somewhere else has been the hallmark of American urban policy for decades if not longer. Through real estate purchases and financial incentives whole neighborhoods in NYC changed hands and were gentrified in the 1990s.

In Jerusalem we have facilitated the purchasing of hundreds of buildings and property allowing Arab owners who were living in near poverty and in crime ridden areas to find a better more productive life elsewhere. This is legal, moral, and necessary for peace to take hold.

Views expressed by the author are solely his and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of Ateret Cohanim or American Friends of Ateret Cohanim