Israel is pitching to US Congress a plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza in a second Nakba

[Vosem]

Conditioning aid on never permitting refugee status to be passed down through generations and on permitting certain kinds of immigration is a perfectly reasonable policy which will help lots of people escape a war-zone, and also receive much better economic conditions. As long as nobody is forcibly expelled and the decisions are all taken by individuals and families, this is obviously good. (But I guess it would be a second Nakba in a certain sense, since the first one was also people voluntarily leaving a government they didn't want to live under. The difference would hopefully be that this time the countries that they are migrating to treat them better, though unfortunately the history of the region suggests this won't actually be the case).

I also wonder how much -- if any -- pressure from Central European countries is contributing to making this happen. Inconvenient though it is for the pro-Palestinian narrative in the United States, the US has allies who are actually very interested in incentivizing Middle Eastern countries to take and keep Middle Eastern migrants.

[Vosem]

But I guess it would be a second Nakba in a certain sense, since the first one was also people voluntarily leaving a government they didn't want to live under.

This is like saying the Trail of Tears was voluntary. Jesus Christ.

No, there is a difference between being forced out by a government and leaving because you don't want to live under a particular regime. Plenty of Israeli Arabs stayed, precisely because there were not expulsions by force. (They were, incidentally, economically and politically better off afterwards.) Leaving because you fear that the new regime will commit reprisals is sad, but it isn't forced expulsion, especially because the new regime didn't commit those reprisals. It is more analogous to something like Loyalists fleeing after the American Revolution; it was unfortunate but it was not, actually, caused by deliberate policy on the part of the United States, and those that stayed were ultimately fine. The reason for it was political conviction.

This is an interesting dispute because in discussions with Palestinian-Americans in the real world -- as mentioned before I went to high school in a decently heavily Arab-American community -- I've never heard pushback on the point that their ancestors left because of fear of the new regime (or literally for the purpose of joining political movements which opposed it), rather than being forced out, but on the Internet I invariably get linked to various small-r revisionist post-Cold War historians and told that this is the most offensive opinion it is possible to hold.

But I guess it would be a second Nakba in a certain sense, since the first one was also people voluntarily leaving a government they didn't want to live under.

This is like saying the Trail of Tears was voluntary. Jesus Christ.

I mean, yeah. He hides his pro-apartheid, pro-ethnic cleansing views behind those laboriously long screeds he wastes his time on...as though a five paragraph dissertation will justify it.

Oh my God, literally when in 14 years of posting here have I hidden a single opinion

as I believe I said in IRC, Vosem appears so absurd because he explicitly states what are meant only to be the implicit tenets of neoliberal ideology.

So many people are unprepared to hear disagreement with their opinions. Since 2012 the problem has gotten much worse, too.

[Vosem]

But I guess it would be a second Nakba in a certain sense, since the first one was also people voluntarily leaving a government they didn't want to live under.

This is like saying the Trail of Tears was voluntary. Jesus Christ.

No, there is a difference between being forced out by a government and leaving because you don't want to live under a particular regime. Plenty of Israeli Arabs stayed, precisely because there were not expulsions by force. (They were, incidentally, economically and politically better off afterwards.) Leaving because you fear that the new regime will commit reprisals is sad, but it isn't forced expulsion, especially because the new regime didn't commit those reprisals. It is more analogous to something like Loyalists fleeing after the American Revolution; it was unfortunate but it was not, actually, caused by deliberate policy on the part of the United States, and those that stayed were ultimately fine. The reason for it was political conviction.

This is an interesting dispute because in discussions with Palestinian-Americans in the real world -- as mentioned before I went to high school in a decently heavily Arab-American community -- I've never heard pushback on the point that their ancestors left because of fear of the new regime (or literally for the purpose of joining political movements which opposed it), rather than being forced out, but on the Internet I invariably get linked to various small-r revisionist post-Cold War historians and told that this is the most offensive opinion it is possible to hold.

Saying the Palestinians left during the Nakba because "they didn't want to live under a particular regime" is a nauseating whitewash of the destruction of villages, the poisoning of Arab wells, mass rape, unlawful imprisonment, and the massacre of villagers. Yeah, the reprisals didn't continue afterwards... because Israel got what it wanted. If the Palestinians had stayed, there is little doubt in my mind that Zionist militias would have continued to harass and torment them. If you think it vindicates your argument to say that the Israeli military didn't literally march them out of the land at gunpoint, then good for you I guess. But that is hardly the point.

It's becoming increasingly clear that Israel defenders cannot possibly justify their positions without engaging in absurd historical revisionism or erasure. You are not helping your cause with these posts. Every time I read something like this, I become more pro-Palestine.

The counterfactual here isn’t necessary because the counterfactual exists: many stayed behind and were not, in any way, harassed to emigrate. The argument that they were deliberately expelled is a conspiracy-theory one because no evidence for such a conspiracy has ever been found.

That those who fled were prevented from returning during and after the war, for essentially political reasons, is simply true. Your opinion of the fact pattern “people of an ethnicity known to be hostile to another flee a government led by the second and are then not permitted to return” can inform your opinion of numerous modern countries — it should imply enormous hostility to Algeria, Pakistan, India, Rwanda, and much of Eastern Europe — and it is virtually never depicted in the way the Israeli case is. I don’t think you would argue that Rwanda must take the hundreds of thousands of Hutus who fled the Kagame government, most of whom are not individually guilty of any crime but are politically opposed to the current regime in Kigali. (I think there is an important difference, incidentally, between countries like Israel, India, or Rwanda — where those who stay are treated with respect, even if those who leave are uniformly not allowed back — and countries like Pakistan or Myanmar, where those of the minority who remain actually are variously harassed and pressured to emigrate. By observing this you can learn something important about the character of a society.)

I don’t think I have much more to say here. The argument is reminiscent of arguments about the ceasefire, which start from the premises that peace is good and international norms must be followed. Both of these points are true. Yet peace is only possible when both sides forswear continued attacks, and the real international norms in existence are in existence to preserve sovereign states. You cannot support peace without supporting an end to those who would make war, and you cannot support international norms and conquest by force, the main thing that they exist to prevent.

[Vosem]

The counterfactual here isn’t necessary because the counterfactual exists: many stayed behind and were not, in any way, harassed to emigrate. The argument that they were deliberately expelled is a conspiracy-theory one because no evidence for such a conspiracy has ever been found.

This only makes sense if you believe that Israel's goal was to expel every last Arab from its land. Israel wanted to seize land and ensure a Jewish majority in that new territory, and they had no problem with treating the Arab minority well so long as that was the case. Again, all this means is that the Nakba accomplished its essential goal of expelling the vast majority of Palestinians.

The eviction of Arab civilians was a goal of the Ben-Gurion government and it devoted substantial resources to achieving that end, even if it was not explicitly stated outright. This is the definition of ethnic cleansing. There is no "conspiracy" involved. All one must do is look at the public historical record (not even factoring in the elements that Israel has tried to conceal). I'm not sure what possible counterargument one could make to this.

We can look at the public historical record, see that there was not a plan to evict and that the evictions were largely not forced. Indeed the plan was to take only enough land that a Jewish majority could be guaranteed, which is why in spite of the substantial military advantage at the end they did not press their advantage into the West Bank, and left religious sites and their own water supply in the hands of other governments. If the goal was to kick everyone out, then what happened in Jerusalem? (This contrasts strongly with forced population movements of the same period in eastern Europe, or the Trail of Tears, which were indeed done largely under the threat of imminent genocidal violence and were ordered and planned on high by governments. The other analogy, I guess, is to Rwanda, where you see a similar case of the international community refraining from pressuring a country to take back refugees, and instead accepting that they be resettled elsewhere. One can even draw something like an equivalence between M23 and the Lebanese Forces, though the Congolese case is both in a much poorer country and on a far larger scale.)

Their plan is literally trying to reduce as many civilian casualties as possible by trying to convince neighbors countries to accept residents of Gaza into their nation . Literally all this plan does is condition US aid to Egypt , Jordan , Iraq on them accepting refugees from Gaza which isn’t ethnic cleansing by any definition. It is actually propaganda to call it that so please stop .

Do me a favor: Look at the numbers in the OP. Assuming those accurately reflect what's being proposed-- 1 million refugees to Egypt, 500k to Turkey, and 250k each to Iraq and Yemen-- then that accounts for the entire population of the Gaza strip. This is not Israel attempting to set up "refugee corridors" for people who might want to flee voluntarily. This is very obviously a first step towards expelling every single last resident of Gaza.

There is also no reason to believe that this report is inaccurate, as it comes from a conservative Israeli news outlet that is a staunch Netanyahu supporter.

Please explain to me how this is not ethnic cleansing in the making. I would love to hear your tortured logic stretch itself to its absolute breaking point.

This report is kind of obviously fantastical, just based on the specific countries and numbers listed (many of which would not be amenable to any kind of agreement with Israel or the US, much less one to absorb vast numbers of immigrants). On the other hand, the idea that a peace settlement will have to mandate that countries which have seen multiple generations of Palestinian refugees give them citizenship, and that a Palestinian government cannot try to impose controls on emigration as if it were the Eastern Bloc, is also self-evident, and the US government conditioning aid on "you cannot maltreat people" is something that should have been done from the very beginning, under Truman/Eisenhower.

Even more generally, trying to police which Middle Eastern countries take which migrants, and how they treat them, has obviously become a political goal of Central European countries over the past decade. I don't know how that'll pan out -- the rise of Kais Saied in Tunisia suggests to me that the Middle Eastern countries will flatly refuse no matter how much they are bribed, and most likely whenever Erdogan ultimately loses there will be a migrant crisis of enormous proportions. I have no idea what the solution is or how it will end. My guess is that it is plausible that there will be an opportunistic attempt to use this crisis to establish norms that the Central European countries like better than the existing ones.

[Vosem]

It clearly states it won’t be forced though.

I have a question for you and that is if Likud was a genocidal as you claim then why have they even bothered with doing a ground invasion rather than just completely carpet bomb Gaza beginning on 10/8.

Doesn’t the fact they are doing a ground invasion and not conducting a bombing campaign even as extensive as our bombing campaign against ISIS show that they aren’t genocidal

Look at how world opinion has turned against Israel in the past two months, and then ask yourself how much worse the situation would be if Israel were to simply level Gaza. I doubt if even the bowtied neocons you worship would continue to support Likud if it wiped out two million people in one fell swoop. Honestly, could you bring yourself to justify such an action? If Israel were to lose the support of even people like you, it would become a pariah state overnight. It is ultimately still completely dependent upon support from the United States, and while it has jeopardized that support, it cannot take any action that would eliminate it.

Now answer my question: What possible motive could Israel have for suggesting refugee allocations equivalent to the entire population of Gaza aside from depopulating Gaza? And if that were to happen, why would that not be ethnic cleansing?

Has it really? We've seen two elections in large countries both be won by ludicrously pro-Israel candidates, one of whom (Wilders) pretty obviously used the issue as a wedge very successfully. (Milei, at the very least, it did not seem to hurt; while he didn't emphasize the stance much it was an unusual one for Argentina.) The reverse we have not seen, though I guess there haven't been many elections since the start of the war. Besides the United States, countries in both the Arab world and in Europe have given Israel substantial diplomatic cover, in ways that they distinctly didn't in 2009-2010 or 2014, to say nothing of earlier conflicts. Polling in the vast majority of democracies, including polling conducted during the war, suggests that the state is viewed more favorably than it was a decade ago. I just don't think this is true. (In the US, the pattern is that those paying more attention are overwhelmingly likelier to support Israel, and those paying less overwhelmingly likelier to support Palestine, which really suggests it is Israel which stands to gain from a change in the media environment).

I don't think the argument from protest size is very convincing; one of the largest protests in the US was orchestrated by the Nation of Islam, which everyone treats as a nonsense radical organization. Turnout in the George Floyd protests in 2020 was enormous, but I think it's generally accepted today that they backfired and caused support for police forces to rise among the median voter. I'm not entirely sold yet on "protest is usually counterproductive", but I think at the very least it is counterproductive a shocking fraction of the time, and it says little about the opinions of the broader electorate. (There are some countries where it still seems effective -- the Philippines and, oddly enough, Israel come to mind -- and my observation is that these are mature democracies with unusually young median voters. It may be that protests tell you less about society as the median voter gets older, but that's just a guess, and it might also be the same thing where solicitations in particular formats decline in effectiveness over time as a rule; like how your parents always answered the phone and you probably don't for spam calls.)

[Vosem]

Whitewashing the Nakba is a new low for Vosem. Jesus Christ.

It’s entirely unsurprising though.

Definitely unsurprising (and not a 'new' anything), because we had this conversation on AAD in 2021 and also on this forum in 2014. Is it "whitewashing" to say someone who didn't do something is not guilty for it? There's no denying that it happened or that it was bad.

You don't have to be a rose twitter leftist to think this is horrendous and a disaster waiting to happen. Also, maybe a uhh...war crime.

Yeah, if Syria wasn't bad enough, this would be even more destabilizing.

And does no one think that actions like this wouldn't radicalize at least some of those forcefully expelled? The terrorist propaganda writes itself. If your goal is to prevent more Hamas type groups... this likely would lead to the opposite.

Compromise plan for Israel - we settle the entire population of Palestine in US swing states and see how that goes for them.

This is exactly why Nakba II doesn’t work. The right would freak out more than the left. I find it really hard to believe there are Central European countries pushing for this- the refugees would end up in Europe, just like all refugees from MENA and Africa do. And the Arab world knows whichever country takes them will be destabilized.

The plan in this thread is insane nonsense, but that Central European countries want to establish a relationship with Middle Eastern countries where the Middle Eastern countries agree to host migrants in exchange for economic aid has been an established part of post-2015 geopolitics, and you've seen reports suggesting that at least Austria/Czechia see the current crisis as an opportune moment to try to establish one.

I really don't think it would work; the history of 2020s Tunisia kind of stands as a warning against even attempting this. But I don't think Central Europe has gotten the memo.