The Ghosts of 1923

Trump's Gaza proposal and the logic of ethnic cleansing

Good day dear readers! I’ve promised some thoughts on the Trump administration’s proposal to transform Gaza into Atlantic City on the Mediterranean, featuring gleaming skyscrapers, Trump idols, and few if any Palestinians. Like much of the world, I was outraged but not surprised by the audacity and immorality of this vision, which reflects a different attitude toward the “rules-based international order” than we’ve seen over the past fifty years. It’s not just that the United States will selectively appeal to said order when it suits, all while—as with the invasion of Iraq—ignoring it whenever it stands in the way. Rather, the new administration recognizes the rules-based international order as a legal fiction — not an “impediment” to its plans, but utterly irrelevant.

While they wrap their rejection of its norms in the philosophical language of national sovereignty, the Trump team regards politics as the realm of pure power. And here’s the thing: they are not wrong. The world we inhabit, even at the peak of liberal internationalism, still hewed quite close to Thucydides’s characterization from ~2500 years ago: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”¹ This does not mean that we should abandon any hope that an international order bound by law, and guided by a commitment to human freedom, might one day exist in practice, or that we should disregard certain milestones like the Geneva Accords that have tried to enact such a vision. But the rules-based international order was on life support before Donald Trump assumed the presidency whether we look at Ukraine, Gaza, or the sad state of climate politics. Trump merely pulled the plug.

At times like this, it’s important to remember that ours is not the first rules-based international order to come and go. Perhaps one of the more uncanny aspects of Trump’s Gaza plan is that, a century ago, it would have been wholly within the realm of acceptable suggestions. Compulsory population transfer (which we would now call ethnic cleansing) did not strike interwar policy makers as a war crime. On the contrary, the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923 was lauded as a success story by that generation’s statesmen and paved the way for transfer as a workable idea in international politics.

Greeks being evacuated from Samsun, Turkey, as part of the 1923 population exchange. Source: Near East Relief via Wikimedia Commons.

The Greece-Turkey exchange lurked behind the 1937 Peel Commission report that first recommended the partition of Palestine, and also informed the partition plan for India following the Second World War (which, according to Yasmine Khan, resulted in the death of between 500,000 and 2 million people and uprooted another 12-14 million). The Trump administration's Gaza plan needs to be understood as the revitalization of these grand experiments in social engineering, long discredited by the horrific violence that accompanied them. We need to understand how the principle of population transfer gained credibility in the first place in order to grasp its salience in our own day.

We begin with a long diary entry from the summer of 1937 by David Ben Gurion, the leader of the Zionist community in Palestine and Israel’s first prime minister. The immediate context was the publication of the Peel Commission report, and which was published amidst the Great Revolt, a mass Palestinian uprising against British rule and Zionist colonization. Most importantly for present purposes, the Peel Commission was the first to recommend the partition of Palestine into two, untidy parts, using the pen-stroke to solve a festering political crisis.

1937 Palestine partition plan - the proposed Jewish state is the section in red

The Peel Commission report argued that the British Mandate for Palestine was untenable, and that only the creation of two distinct states for the two national groups now vying for control of the territory could put an end to the crisis (this is the same logic that continues to inform calls for a two-state solution, which has its admitted appeals). The Peel Commission recommendations were rejected out of hand by the Arab leadership of Palestine, but also by the Zionist Congress because the proposed Jewish state was too small for their liking. Most important for the present discussion, however, was the commission’s recommendation to enact the compulsory transfer of up to 225,000 Arabs and 1,250 Jews from the newly demarcated territory in order to homogenize the ethnic makeup of the new states.

The Peel Commission cited the 1923 Greece-Turkey exchange as precedent and indeed, success story:

A precedent is afforded by the exchange effected between the Greek and Turkish populations on the morrow of the Greco-Turkish War of 1922. A convention was signed by the Greek and Turkish Governments, providing that, under the supervision of the League of Nations, Greek nationals of the Orthodox religion living in Turkey should be compulsorily removed to Greece, and Turkish nationals of the Moslem religion living in Greece to Turkey. The numbers involved were high--no less than some 1,300,000 Greeks and some 400,000 Turks. But so vigorously and effectively was the task accomplished that within about eighteen months from the spring of 1923 the whole exchange was completed. The courage of the Greek and Turkish statesmen concerned has been justified by the result. Before the operation the Greek and Turkish minorities had been a constant irritant. Now Greco-Turkish relations are friendlier than they have ever been before.

Note how the Peel Commission’s glowing description of the Greece-Turkey exchange is devoid of any human texture: people are units to be moved to their proper place on the map, even if that meant to a “homeland” they had never even visited. For a better sense of the violence inherent in such a project, we can look to the wonderful book by Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger, which restores agency and humanity to those who were uprooted. I still recall the haunted feeling I got while visiting (in 2007) the Turkish region of Cappadocia, and seeing all these abandoned churches and monasteries carved into the rock — traces of the thousands of Christians forcibly sent “home” to Greece a century ago. Of course, one can find parallel traces of Muslim life in Greece, the shadows of a people who were suddenly found to be in the wrong spot.

An abandoned mosque in Pyksari, Greece. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

This was the high era of nationalism. The disintegration of the Ottoman, Russian, and Hapsburg empires after WWI fueled a belief in the nation-state—the alignment of ethnicity and government—as natural. Thus despite being an anomaly throughout most of human history, the nation-state emerged in the post-war period as the normative political unit, as the very name League of Nations attests. Past and present, nationalists hold that the institution of the state exists to serve the needs of a singular nation, which is why they cannot stomach the thought of a truly multi-racial democracy held together by something other than blood. This understanding of the state almost necessarily renders heterogeneity a political liability - a ‘problem’ to use the language applied to European Jews (who as Aamir Mufti has argued, were the paradigmatic “minority” population), one that could only be ‘solved’ by sorting nations into their corresponding territorial states. Far from rejecting the logic of ethno-nationalism that endangered European Jews, political Zionism swallowed it hook, line, and sinker and thereby created a new problem population: the Palestinians who happened to reside in the Promised Land.

This is the necessary background to understand the Peel Commission’s report, and David Ben Gurion’s reaction. Even while rejecting the truncated borders of the proposed Jewish state, he saw great potential in the commission’s recommendations:

In my comment on the report immediately after the first reading (from July 10, 1937) I ignored a central point whose importance outweighs all the other positive [points] and counterbalances all the report's deficiencies and drawbacks, and if it does not remain a dead letter, it could give us something that we never had before, even when we were independent, including during the First Commonwealth and also during the Second Commonwealth: The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys proposed for the Jewish state.

I ignored this fundamental point out of a prejudice that this [i.e., transfer] is not possible, and that it is not practicable. But the more I look at the commission's conclusions and the more the gigantic importance of this proposal becomes clear -[the more] I reach the conclusion that the first obstacle to implementing this proposal is - our own failure to come to grips with it and our being prisoners to prejudices and intellectual habits that flourished in our midst in other circumstances.

With the evacuation of the Arab community from the valleys we achieve, for the first time in our history, a real Jewish state - an agricultural body of one or more million people, continuous, heavily populated, at one with its land which is completely its own. We achieve the possibility of a giant national settlement, on a large area that is all in the hands of the state . . . As with a magic wand, all the difficulties and defects that preoccupied us until now in our settlement enterprise [will vanish] - the question of Hebrew labor, defense, an organized economy, rational and predetermined exploitation of the land and water. We are given an opportunity that we never dreamed of and could not dare dream of in our most daring imaginings. This is more than a state, more than [self-] government, [more than] sovereignty - this is a national consolidation in a homeland free of handcuffs and external restraints creating power and solidity and rootedness that are more important than any mere political control…

And we must first of all cast off the weakness of thought and will and prejudice that [says that] this transfer is impracticable.

As before, I am aware of the terrible difficulty posed by a foreign force uprooting some 100,000 [sic.] Arabs from the villages they lived in for hundreds of years - will Britain dare carry this out?

Certainly it will not do it - if we do not want it, and if we do not push it to do it with our force and with the force of our faith. Even if a maximum amount of pressure is applied - it is possible she may still be deterred . . . It is certainly possible - and [nothing] greater than this has been done for our cause in our time [than Peel proposing transfer].

And we did not propose this- the Royal Commission . . . did . . . and we must grab hold of this conclusion [i.e., recommendation] as we grabbed hold of the Balfour Declaration, even more than that - as we grabbed hold of Zionism itself we must cleave to this conclusion, with all our strength and will and faith….²

It’s an extraordinary passage about which much can be said. I will draw your attention only to two things that strike me as particularly meaningful in the present. The first is Ben Gurion’s claim that he and his contemporaries were laboring within a constrained imaginative framework (“the weakness of thought and will”), one that made a big, radical idea like population transfer seem impossible. Cut to Trump’s supporters praising the man for overcoming the prevailing moral imagination of his time. “President Trump came with a completely different, much better vision for Israel – a revolutionary, creative approach that we are currently discussing,” as Benjamin Netanyahu stated.

In this way, the Geneva Conventions—which outlaw the forcible transfer of populations—become another innovation-stifling regulatory framework that must give way before the entrepreneurial president, as if he is an Apple commercial (“think different”) unleashed on a sclerotic world order. If the End-of-History was supposedly characterized by boredom—with politics reduced to little tweaks to maintain the status quo—Trump is back to shooting for the moon. Yet then as now, all this talk about the Big Idea by the Great Man of History distracts from the morally abhorrent nature of the actual proposal, which is even worse than a mutual exchange between two states because it entails permanent exile for over two million Palestinians.

The second noteworthy point about Ben Gurion’s response is his delight that the transfer recommendation came from outside the Zionist community. Even if transfer thinking was well-established by this point in political Zionist thought, its supporters were smart enough to not say so out loud. But once introduced by a third party—the Mandate power no less—the Zionist leadership could seize the recommendation and push their imperial patron to implement it (if you need a primer on the Mandate period and British-Zionist relations, check out this post). And indeed, it’s impossible to understand the later Nakba without noting how transfer proposals like the Peel report primed the pump for expulsion. Viewed in this light, Trump has done Netanyahu and his allies an immense favor by being the one to formally introduce the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians—long an aspiration of the Israeli right—into formal diplomacy. And now that Trump has done so, make no mistake that Bibi and co. will “cleave to this conclusion, with all our strength and will and faith.”

This little jaunt through the past century is a useful reminder that—like many other now-discredited ideas—ethnic cleansing appeared wholly reasonable to the rules-based international order as overseen by the League of Nations. If such ideas have gained champions again at the beginning of the 21st century, this owes no little part to the resurgence of nationalism and its reactionary fantasies of homogeneity. But this evergreen impulse is now joined to Silicon Valley’s vision of politics as engineering - a world in which moral conventions (like not uprooting people against their will) are tired rules that can and should be broken by this century’s disruptors-in-chief.

On this one point, I remain a stubborn Arendtian: no one asked to be born, and thus no one should be forcibly uprooted from their home - not even if they are told that their true home is elsewhere, and still less when they have only exile to expect on the other side.

1. History of the Peloponnesian War, Book. 5, ch. 89.

2. As cited and translated by Benny Morris, “Revisiting the Palestinian exodus of 1948,” in The War for Palestine. Edited by Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim. Cambridge University Press, 2001. 41-42.