TEL AVIV, Israel – President Donald Trump’s plan to seek U.S. ownership of the Gaza Strip and move out its population infuriated the Arab world. It stunned American allies and other global powers and even flummoxed members of Trump’s own party. The reaction in Israel was starkly different.

The idea of removing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza has found fertile ground in an Israeli public traumatized by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks and grasping for ways to feel secure again after the deadliest assault in their country’s history.

Jewish Israeli politicians across the spectrum either embraced the idea wholeheartedly or expressed openness to it. Newspaper columns praised its audacity and TV commentators debated how the idea could practically be set in motion. The country’s defense minister ordered the military to plan for its eventual implementation.

Whether or not the plan becomes reality — it is saddled with obstacles, not to mention moral, legal and practical implications — its mere pronouncement by the world’s most powerful leader has sparked enthusiasm about an idea once considered to be beyond the pale in the Israeli mainstream.

“The fact that it has been laid on the table,” said Israeli historian Tom Segev, “opens the door for such a clear crime to become legitimate.”

To be sure, many of those who expressed openness to the plan said it seemed unfeasible for a multitude of legal and logistical reasons. And they say the departures should be voluntary, perhaps an acknowledgment of claims by critics, among them the U.N. secretary-general, that forced expulsions could amount to “ethnic cleansing.”

And many others, including liberal Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel, voiced opposition to it. The liberal daily Haaretz, in an editorial Thursday, urged Israelis to “oppose transfer.”

In a joint Washington news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, Trump envisioned the U.S. taking control of the Gaza Strip, having its people relocate to other places and rebuilding the war-battered coastal enclave into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

The proposal sparked outrage in the Middle East, including in Egypt and Jordan, two close U.S. allies at peace with Israel that Trump has suggested take in the Palestinians.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, called Trump’s plan “remarkable” and the “first good idea” that he had heard.

“The actual idea of allowing first Gazans who want to leave, to leave. I mean, what’s wrong with that?” Netanyahu told Fox News. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz took it a step further, asking the military to craft a plan for a potential exodus. Katz has given few details on how such a plan would work.

For Palestinians, Trump’s proclamation triggered painful memories of the expulsion or flight from their homes in what is now Israel in the 1948 war that led to its creation. It also resurfaced the trauma of further displacement wrought by the 1967 Mideast war, when Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.