Why does Trump’s Gaza plan sound so familiar? Because the Nazis tried it first
The Madagascar Plan was the Nazis’ last effort to solve the ‘Jewish Problem’ before the Final Solution
A man holds a crying child as displaced Palestinians check the destruction following an Israeli strike that hit a UN-run school, in the central Gaza Strip on Nov. 20, 2024. Photo by Eyad Baba / AFP
Imagine the leader of a global superpower announcing a plan for removing an entire ethnic group from a territory they’ve long inhabited. Neighboring states would have to make land available to that superpower to resettle the displaced peoples. The refugees would “have their own administration in this territory” but they would “not acquire … citizenship” since any “sense of responsibility towards the world” would forbid making “the gift of a sovereign state” to a people “which has had no independent state for thousands of years.”
No, the plan described in brief here is not President Donald Trump’s Gaza plan, proposing a United States takeover of Gaza and mass relocation of its Palestinian population. It is the so-called “Madagascar Plan,” devised by the Third Reich in 1940 to “resettle” European Jews.
That plan was the Third Reich’s final major proposal for removing the Jews from the Greater Germanic Reich Adolf Hitler envisioned in Mein Kampf prior to the “Final Solution”— the indiscriminate shootings of Jewish men, women, and children on the Eastern Front, leading to mass killings in death camps and gas chambers in late 1941. In that history lies a warning: Plans for the mass relocation of a population seen as troublesome or dangerous can rapidly devolve into the loss of sovereignty, of human and civil rights, and, eventually, ethnic cleansing.
The idea of creating a “colony for Jews” in Madagascar, first proposed by the antisemite Paul de Lagarde in the 1880s, had long featured prominently in plans for a territorial solution to the “Jewish Question,” namely the question of whether Jews could assimilate into society at large and, if not, what ought to be done with them.
But despite the idea’s origins in bigotry, the prospect of mass Jewish resettlement to Madagascar, or another African colonial territory, was one that attracted people with a broad range of ideologies — including, in addition to rightwing antisemites and liberal imperialists, some Jewish “territorialists” who believed Zionism was impracticable, and that any Jewish state must be established outside the land of Israel.
Then came the Third Reich.
In 1939, Adolf Eichmann, resident “Jewish expert” in Heinrich Himmler’s SS, developed the more modest “Nisko Plan” to create a “Jewish reservation” in German-occupied Poland, near Lublin, where Polish, Czech and Austrian Jews might live in a kind of permanent, stateless precarity — not dissimilar from the reservations created for Native Americans in the late-19th century United States, a frequent point of reference for Hitler, or the current situation in Gaza.
When the Nisko Plan proved unworkable, Eichmann and Franz Rademacher, head of the so-called “Jewish Desk” in the Foreign Office, seized on the long-gestating idea of resettling European Jewry in the French colony of Madagascar. Their plan was meticulously conceived, involving detailed climate and demographic studies, a precise accounting for the number of ships and resources required, and a comprehensive review of the various financial necessities and administrative logistics.
Many historians argue that the Madagascar Plan was, at best, totally fanciful, and at worst a thinly veiled attempt to murder all European Jewry by deporting them to a harsh climate where they would undoubtedly die of attrition. The evidence we have is more complicated, indicating that the Madagascar Plan was the last serious, if highly problematic, effort to solve the Jewish Question in non-genocidal fashion.
Similarly, Trump’s utopian designs to turn war-torn Gaza into a “riviera” while deporting Palestinians elsewhere may not invariably constitute a veiled effort to commit genocide. But the potential for mass violence and ethnic cleansing is endemic to any such efforts. Parallel “resettlement” plans pursued by colonial powers between 1850 and 1950 resulted in the mass murder of indigenous peoples across Nazi-occupied Europe, the U.S. frontier, Africa, and Asia.
Trump initially issued almost no details about his proposal for a U.S. takeover in Gaza. “We’ll own it,” he said. “We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal.” On Monday, he took things further, saying that under his plan, the nearly 2 million Palestinians relocated from Gaza “to other countries of interest” would not be given the right to return to the strip.
What Trump is ignoring: In large part in response to the mass deportations carried out by the Nazis, the 1949 Geneva Convention defines “forced or coerced displacement of a population under military occupation” as a war crime. The United Nations has likewise pointed out that “any forced displacement of people would be tantamount to ethnic cleansing.”
Speaking at a news conference in Copenhagen last week, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, called Trump’s proposal “unlawful, immoral and completely irresponsible.”
“It’s incitement to commit forced displacement, which is an international crime,” she said.
What makes Trump’s plan more concerning is that it echoes calls long made by many far-right Israeli politicians and appears to enjoy broad support from the Israeli public. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly celebrated Trump’s resettlement plans, and his defense minister, Israel Katz, swiftly told the Israel Defense Forces to begin preparations to implement the plan.
Insofar as the effort to deprive Gazans of their land and sovereignty by “resettling” them elsewhere was conceived as a kind of 21st century solution to the “Palestinian Question,” it emerges from the same historical lineage as the Madagascar Plan. Acknowledging this historical lineage might encourage all parties, including the Trump administration, to abandon such ruminations and recommit to creating a sovereign Palestinian State, inclusive of Gaza and the West Bank.
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