Great article, but you've only hinted at the conclusion - I noticed you said
'Palestinians are not Syrians and they are not Egyptians, and they are not Lebanese, and the proof is in the pudding'
But - you left out 'Palestinians are not Jordanians' - and then went back to the old 'Palestine is Jordan' model - fine, if that's the conclusion. Palestinians are Jordanians! This has the added validity that WestBank/Judea&Samaria Arabs WERE Jordanian citizens until 1988.
I would further argue that you could say 'Gazans are Egyptians'.
The Iraq is not the same nation as Morocco point is very good - but of course that is true - the Arabic of these two countries is not even mutually intelligible.
On the other hand --
Gazan Palestinian Arabic is very close to Egyptian Arabic, and in particular to the Egyptian dialect spoken in the Sinai Peninsula, due to geographic proximity and historical interactions. Shared features include phonological traits, like the pronunciation of the letter qāf as a glottal stop (similar to Cairene Arabic) and shared vocabulary influenced by Egypt's cultural and media presence.
West Bank Palestinian Arabic, on the other hand, is closer to Jordanian Arabic, especially the dialects of northern and central Jordan.
Yes, 'the only history that actually matters is the one that happened.' - well said, but has Palestinian nationhood actually happened? Not just talking about statehood, but has nationhood even happened? It seems so far we have 'Palestinian' as a great branding exercise - you know, ranking somewhere between Coca-Cola and Walmart right now as far as global franchise value..
Where can I find reliable information about Palestinian dialects of Arabic? I don't chap how it can be so similar to Egyptian Arabic when most of the population are descendants of refugees from other places in EY.
Love your articles, they are always so challenging.
When you talk about pan Arab solidarity and say it doesn't exist, Morocco/Iraq are different countries then reference to Europe (diff country, diff languages). You imply a similarity, I contest this. Poland alone took in 1m from Ukraine, Europe extended their hands to Ukraine precisely because they see in them a sort of "pan european" people.
The Arabs are tribal. Tribe is above both nationalism and pan Arab solidarity. Europeans are more national than tribal, and within that Europeans can see the nations as amorphous. Therefore Ukraines can easily be seen as "one of us".
Islam is the all conquering best thing in the universe. It directs them to take over everything. Yet there are the Jews, hanging in, unbeatable. This hurts the Muslim conception of reality.
Put these 2 things together and you get "Let the Palestinians fight it out with the Jews" as standard Arab foreign policy. Win/win or you lose / I don't lose.
Look at the Jewish explusion from the late 1800s from Russia to Palestine. They were ushered in by the Ottomans. The Arabs of that region have a beef with other Arabs (Ottomans) for this act. They have a beef with the Jews from coming and they have a beef with the Jews because Islam.
As far as I know, all the Ukrainians in Poland are supposed to go back, and I think probably about 90% will. But you are correct that Arab nationalism is so fake that, in fact, Arabs are less unified as a nation than Europeans are.
Why would they be allowed to go back when the point of this war is very clearly to depopulate the Pale of Slavs and plant there a breeding population of Hasids?
Several EU countries took in 1%-2% of their population in refugee Ukrainians in 2022. There was negligible social impact of this. I know because I live in one of these countries. Cultural proximity matters a lot both for refugee and host alike.
I am no anthropologist but I would imagine on any scale of cultural proximity Algeria is about 10x more familiar to a Gazan than Taiwan is.
My father has a very moderate opinion on migration. Even so, when Ukrainian refugees come up he has strongly suggested that they should return immediately when the war rmds,and that it's about time they do. His view is by no means unusual on this matter.
But the comparison is Palestinian Arabs to other Arab countries vs European countries to other European countries. Arabs are more tribal than national, Europeans more national than tribal. If you accept this the difference then the friction for Palestinian Arabs to other ME countries is higher.
Further friction coms from the religious aspects where Shia vs Sunni vs various other Islamic sects fight and kill each other all the time. This is an outcome of tribal mindset. In Europe there is zero discussion of Protestants killing Catholics, there is nothing more than hearty debate.
The friction for other Arab countries to accept Palestinian Arabs (plus the upside of not accepting them ie. sticking it to Israel and USA) is just too much inertia to overcome.
The author says "ethnic explusion" is the only path to settle these conflicts. The Arab counntries won't take them, Taiwan won't, and Europe better not.
I say "Big beautiful new home for them", how about Puntland?
Palestinian Arabs are Jordanian or Egyptian, like Yasser right? Palestinians who stayed in Israel are now Israeli. "Palestinians" of Gaza, Judea, Samaria should be relocated out. Then you get the peace of Golan Heights. Puntland, here we come.
1) Ottomans aren’t Arab. They also actively opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine, which the new Yishuv partially circumvented through a mixture of pressure from the European powers who liked to use minorities as a cat’s paw, abuse of extraterritoriality, bribery (already endemic before their arrival by all accounts), and cooperation with sympathetic Ottoman Jews who would act as nominal owners at times when landholding by noncitizens was restricted.
2) Islam makes the situation worse by making the conflict a cause célèbre with other Muslims & by making it harder to accept right of conquest while taking the the religion seriously, but the origin of the conflict isn’t Islam. Nobody reacts except with extreme hostility to people setting out to displace them, even if the replacement is done through laws, politics, and money. This same situation played out as nauseam in 19th-early 20th century Europe as well, and for the same reasons - it mostly only broke out into open, mass violence when the central and eastern empires collapsed, leaving paramilitaries to pick up the pieces.
3) The Poland Ukraine example is pretty funny - there’s an extreme amount of heavily justified bad blood on both sides. The Poles just hate Russians a lot more than Ukrainians for obvious reasons. Their traditional nationalism also sought to forcibly assimilate Ukrainians rather than keep them separate and subordinate, so incorporating some Ukrainian chicks isn’t really a loss from that perspective.
You are overplaying (2) a bit. Birmingham and Detroit, to name but two examples, have undergone ethnic replacement in recent memory and no-one did anything basically. For resistance to happen you need (a) elites who want to coordinate it and (b) a plausible ideology to justify it. (Arguably (a) means you get (b) more or less automatically).
Can’t speak to Birmingham, but Detroit was standard economic migration involving co-citizens within the same state, similar to what happened to the Intermarium cities with the wrong ethnicity in their hinterlands. The Yishuv case is IMO more like Kulturkampf in Posen or interwar Poland’s colonial/assimilatory approach to the Kresy - a public, coordinated attempt to remake ethnic composition to the detriment of the current majority.
I think that is anachronistic. Blacks were not traditionally considered co-citizens, spoke a substantially different dialect, came to Detroit from as far away as Poland is to Palestine, and their presence was in most cases substantially more detrimental to the natives than Jewish immigration was to Palestinians.
And indeed, there were spontaneous acts of resistance by the citizens of Detroit to their replacement by Blacks. But there was a central government willing and able to repress that, and no local elites who saw it in their interest to channel that violence.
I don’t agree that it is - free blacks have been citizens since the 14th amendment. I’m sure the white inhabitants were unhappy about it, partially for very legitimate reasons, but so were German townsmen in Bohemia and Upper Silesia, Italian-speakers in the Dalmatian cities, etc.
AAVE is IMO more intelligible to the underexposed than Indian (south Asian) English, and even Indian English isn’t much of a barrier to communication. It’s not like they were speaking Scots.
I don’t think black immigration turned out worse for local whites than Jewish immigration to Palestine (Whites mostly moved to the suburbs or left because of the decline in manufacturing. I worked there downtown for 4 years - it’s a minor inconvenience). If you only count Arab citizens of Israel, sure. But their pretty good position is downstream of political stability due to a solid Jewish majority due to withholding citizenship (for good pragmatic reasons) from most of Israel’s Arab subjects.
Moving from to the suburbs is actually not so different from the distance the median Palestinian refugee had to travel, but that's not the point. If whites had stayed in their old neighbourhoods, then it would have been really bad for them because they would have been subject to constant extreme violence from crackheads. The reason why it wasn't extremely traumatic is because instead of fighting they just went somewhere else, which is the whole point.
I'm not saying this in vindication of Zionism, since all the conditions for Palestinians resisting were there, and the Zionists should have been aware of this. I'm just trying to understand how and why thinks shake out as they do. Often people are willing to accept their ethnic displacement, and perhaps it's usually better for them when they do.
Ottoman's included Arabs into their ruling hierarchy, so Arabs got involved. In the 1880s (yet) another Russian pogrom forced Jews to flee to present day Turkey. Russia and the Ottomans were waring at that time, so this was an old destabilizing tactic. The Ottoman strength was waning at the time, they did not resist, and let the Jews go to Palestine. Arabs who opposed this had no power to and local Ottoman Arab elites got their marching orders from the head office in Istanbul.
Russia and the Ottomans weren’t at war and wouldn’t be again until WWI. It’s been a long time since I’ve read about the process in detail, but IIRC the Ottomans were pretty consistent about trying to prevent concentrated Jewish settlement so as not to acquire yet another ethnic “question,” but were prevented by interference from western powers via the capitulations.
Estimates of 1881-1903 30K. I don't know if that's "not that many". It's about 10% of the total population of the Palestine region. These are all estimate figures right? But should be in the ballpark.
True true. Wars are never truly "binary" events, when the history books record the "start and finish" dates there is a lot of posturing, mayhem, and "all sorts o' shite" around those dates, both before and after.
Though I’ve read your articles for a bit, and I’ve liked them I never really understood what ‘nonzionism’ meant. You talk about Jews and Arabs differently than anyone I’ve heard before. I don’t think my American Ashkenazi mind could see your unique and foreign perspective.
But now I get it. And I appreciate it, especially the realpolitik. Zionism is for dummies. Who the hell thought kicking out generations of Arabs would be a good idea?
So in the end, because this group of Arabs are without a doubt Palestinian and not Syrian, then Zionism must change (to nonzionism, maybe).
I appreciate this greatly because I’m constantly surrounded by radicals, grifters, and ignorant morons. Maybe I’m one of them - I am a dumb American at heart - but at least i can be my own type of dummy. Lot of food for thought
It's hyperbolic to refer to Israel's actions in 1948 as "ethnic cleansing". After all, Israel is still 20% Arab. Overall it's a good article. With the Golan it's a stronger case, there 95% was displaced rather than somewhere in the rage 80-85%. Anyway the term "ethnic cleansing" was invented in the 1990s, doesn't have any meaning in international law, and Wikipedia says you need to have an intent to make the are ethnically homogenous so even what Israel did in the Golan would not count. After all the Golan is still almost half Arab.
Unfortunately when the truth is a wobbly bowl of jelly to be sliced and diced by all manner of ideologues for political gain, you have to be a lot more careful when you talk about the details if you want to be properly objective. And that tends to get boring and heavy and people tune that out.
One thing though: what happened in 1948 during that war was: the set of events that happened in 1948 during that war - all of them, with all their mix of intentions, actions and consequences. Dramatic, easily marketable conclusions that are actually responsible to the reality, are hard to draw. It’s its own animal, not the same as the 90’s former Yugoslavia animal - the one that caused the popularization of the term “ethnic cleansing” - or, say, the 1917 Turkish Armenia animal, and the similarities probably tell us less than the uniquenesses of the situations for workable solution-oriented approaches.
(Unless you’re playing gotcha. In which case just relax your brain and join those squawking “genocide” like an LLM parrot, it’s less effort.)
Substantial numbers (>100k?) of West Bank Palestinians also were expelled/fled to Jordan during the 1967 war and are not a problem -- they might make King Abdullah a bit nervous, but they're out there trying to invade and jihad Israel on a daily basis. Black September in 1970 was the PLO's fault, the majority of Jordanians are Palestinian and the country works just fine.
Tons of arabs/migrants move to other countries. Same here, they can move and spread around the world. The problem is Israel keeps the bandaid on and gives them hope of another state. Once they annex Judea and Samaria it’s game over.
That said kind of lazy. National identity is much more flexible than you give it credit to. For example, there exist a large amount of 100% converts from Africa who are convinced they’re Jewish, but because other Jews accept that they are Jewish, these Africans are in fact Jewish and Israeli! Another example is the Americanization of dozens of different European nationalities.
The concept of Syria is very ancient, but both Palestine and Jordan are very recent inventions. Palestinianism is younger than the Israeli state and is largely a byproduct of Arab and Soviet propoganda. Nations can be born and Palestine was recently born.
The problem with Palestinianism is that it is brain dead on multiple front as you illustrated in previous articles. Therefore, to deal with the Palestinians one must just deal with the underlying structures of their ideology and deradicalize/blend their identity. To start there is no difference between a Palestinian and a Jordanian. They are genetically and linguistically the same and most Jordanian citizens at this point are Palestinians. Both old school Jordanians and Palestinians have substantial Israelite ancestry. So all it takes to amend the national gap is to convince the Jordanians and Palestinians they are one nation (as they are) and get king Abdullah to exericise sovereignty over parts of the West Bank and give the palis citenizenship. It is insane pressure has not been exerted to do so.
Moreover, we can deconstruct Palestinian identity and convince the Palestinians they are Israelites and Palestine and Israel are two sides of the same coin. This can be done by converting Palestinians to Judaism. “God is punishing you from turning away from his covenant.”
Of course this takes a lot of propoganda, but it can be done. Lest we try!
Edit: I corrected some of the grammatical mistakes. I really should avoid commenting while at the gym.
Isn't that what I said. The only plausible country to dump the Palestinians onto is Jordan, but we need to figure out how to do it without crashing the Hashemite monarchy.
I agree with your points. I would also like to add that while the 'concept' of Syria might be ancient, in all history there was never an independent Syria before 1946 (unless you count a brief period in 1920)..so 'Syrian' is a pretty new concept. 'Jordanian' wasn't even a concept in history until I suppose 1949 when they hacked off the 'Trans' - and Transjordanian wasn't much of an ethnicity either.. These are all fairly new ideas of nationality.
Uri Avnery, worthy of his own article, "suggested that Israel aid Palestinians in overthrowing the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan (a "product of imperialism"); Israel would then form a federation with the new Palestinian Jordanian state." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Avnery#CITEREFShavit1987
Kinda seems like what you're saying is that the Palestinians need to be expelled and concentrated into their own Palestinian state. And given that no neighboring state is willing to take on the demographic, logistical, economic, and national security burden of taking in 5 million Palestinian refugees, the obvious candidate for location of said Palestinian state is the West Bank and Gaza. Interestingly, this is also the preferred solution of 99% of countries on Earth including Israel's allies and its neighbors. And the good news is Israel has already ethnically cleansed the Palestinians into those territories! So the ethnic cleansing part is already over.
The problem that needs to be solved for this to work is to figure out a way that Fatah or whoever is going to be in charge, with substantial international/Israeli assistance, can exercise sufficient control of the Palestinian state to prevent its terrorist population from firing projectiles into Israel. It's a big problem but not a theoretically impossible one, but everyone is a lot more interested in trying to come up with places to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians *from* the West Bank and Gaza into some magical new place, rather than focus on the actual problem at hand.
I'm explaining why sometimes ethnic cleansing sometimes stops conflicts and sometimes creates conflict. I thought it was clear that this was in general an argument against trying to solve the Palestinian problem through further acts of ethnic cleansing.
A lot of your problems with Israeli governance seem to arise from its elected officials and the preferences of voters, which are almost invariably demented and violent. This is not something that can be fixed without changing Israel's political system, perhaps wholly - not through minor reforms. What would you do?
I don’t understand how Jordan is different. Yes, there are tons of ethnic Palestinians there, but a population does not make a polity. Consider all the laborers in Gulf countries, including Palestinians until they get kicked out.
It’s like you repeated all the arguments you just critiqued: big red bad.
But what makes your argument fundamentally similar to your examples of ethnic cleansings that worked?
"Actually, we can simplify this: the charm of the Golan Heights is that it does not contain a lot of Israelis. Thus I can leave my door unlocked, bike around town without fear of getting hit by a car, not worry if my kids are wandering around unattended, and I don’t have some schizo neighbour playing Breslev trance music in the middle of the night when the mood takes him"
Wow your Ahavat Yisrael is unmatched. As long as we don't do lag it's all ok.
I lived in Israel, Jerusalem, and never had to worry about Israelis. In fact, I was able to leave my door unlocked there too as there weren't much Arabs.
It's insane how much you project on other Jews just because they're not like you.
Sometimes you has a negative emotional reaction to an article and you can't express it in words, but you try anyway, and this is what comes out. Next time I think you should just say 'blargh' or use a middle finger emoji.
So a Charedi neighborhood with a high Anglo population. It's true that I was very stupid when I moved to Israel in not taking this option. I will make a small emendation to the article.
There was zero ethnic cleansing of Lebanese, and yet Israel got decades of Hezbollah, including for more terrorism against Israel in the 23 years after Israel's UN certified full withdrawal from Lebanon. Maybe the problem isn't ethnic cleansing yes/no, but rather Jews existing in Israel surrounded by a broken Arab world with Islamist fantasies of glory "if only they prove themselves once again to Allah as victorious, genocidal maniacs".
I know you like shitting on Israel and Zionism, but to quote one of your favorite words, your pre-determined conclusions and the idea you present here that the solution is a full ethnic cleansing is "retarded".
'Maybe the problem isn't ethnic cleansing yes/no, but rather Jews existing in Israel surrounded by a broken Arab world with Islamist fantasies of glory "if only they prove themselves once again to Allah as victorious, genocidal maniacs".'
Yes! Correct! That is the problem. That is my whole point.
Why are you in Israel and not following our new Herzl FdB to the New Zion or New Jersey? That’s where retarded antizionists who come from the US, write for 972 Magazine (for example), return to when they’re done earning “cred” to talk shit about Zionism. You’re good now, right? You’ve lived in the Golan, eaten shawarma in a laffa at the Katzrin merkaz. לך לך
Because you have been in a war for a year and a half, you haven't won, the vast a majority of the world is horrified, and tens of thousands of people are dead?
“Haven’t won” is pretty big words - takes a long time for the impact of wars to sink in. Are you some strategic genius now? What was your military service exactly? Israel didn’t initiate the war, yet it stomped Hezbollah into the ground, so hard that the spineless Lebanese Armed Forces are daring to dismantle Hezbollah positions and weapons caches - never happened before, did it? You live across from a new Syria as a result of that collapse, and suddenly no more forward army bases for the Islamic Republic of Iran filled with Shia kooks just miles from your own home. That’s just naming a few. Yes, tens of thousands, half of them Islamist terrorists, have been killed. Are you trying to sell that as some major world war now?
There was ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian refugees who fled to southern Lebanon, from where the PLO operated, until Israel invaded Lebanon, which set off the whole chain of events that led to Hezbollah.
Why is it the Free Palestine cult is full of ignorant, stupid people? There was no warfare at all in the stretch of 1949-1970 between Israel and Lebanon. Why did it start in the 1970s? What happened in the Middle East around then that triggered it?
The Jordanians expelled the PLO from Jordan in 1970 after the PLO tried to overthrow the King of Jordan. The PLO relocated to South Lebanon, where they used the Palestinian refugee camps as support. They then proceeded to cause a civil war in Lebanon and continued their attacks into Israel which led to the collapse of the Lebanese state, and its invasion and long term occupation by Syria and, twice, Israel. Israel's second invasion of Lebanon, again in response to PLO activities, led to the creation of Hezbollah.
Close, but intentionally forgetting the main part. Those “Palestinians” ejected from Jordan were Jordanians. There was never a “Palestine” - the West Bank is called that was because it was always intended to be part of Transjordan - a Hashemite kingdom across both sides of the Jordan River. The West Bank was conquered by the Jordanian Arab legion, and was part of Jordan from 1948-1967, with all Jews living there historically forever ethnically cleansed. Every “Palestinian” there had a Jordanian citizenship, and Jordan never created a “Palestine” in those 19 years. The PLO was expelled because it was a Soviet created terrorist entity trying to take over Jordan by force, similar to Hamas taking Gaza over by force. They weren’t ethnically cleansed by Israel to Lebanon, they escaped being killed by Jordan for their coup attempt.
There was no ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank. They were already there, as part of Jordan, and they still are in their majority part of Jordan. There was very little ethnic cleansing of “Palestinians”, meaning local Arabs in British Mandate Palestine, and most of them traveled a tiny distance to Gaza or the West Bank. They had states to be part of - Jordan, Egypt. A far greater number of Jews were completely ethnically cleansed from the Arab World and mainly absorbed by Israel.
I have a question for you. Do you think that if you spend enough time on the internet arguing that Israel's actions were justifiable according to a given moral code then the Palestinians will dissolve into the ether and stop being a problem?
No, it’s just an alternative to punching people in the face, which would be far more gratifying, but their faces are far off.
You should consider that some things have no “solution”, beyond the fact that nobody needs you particularly to solve anything. Islamists aren’t going to be reformed, for example - they should be killed when they prepare to attack you, but otherwise the concept of “solution” is meaningless. One thing Zionists had figured out in the past is that you live your life like a Wolverine, build your country, and make sure the cost of attacking you is considerably unpleasant. Israel forgot how to do that for a while, because of too much American “influence” from administrations left and right insisting on “restraint” and too many retarded Jewish American progressives butting in with their Tikkun Olam idiocy.
As for “spend time on the internet” - what do you think is the amount of time I spend writing comments and some notes compared to some “deep thinker” writing articles. You think that was a ‘gotcha’?
Things are in fact doing great in northern Israel and Lebanon. The Palestinians of Jordan are still Jordanian. Seems like most of the Palestinians behind October 7 are dead due to their initiative. Most of the leadership of Iran’s Islamists proxy armies aren’t doing so well either. Seethe and cope.
Would it be possible for Israel to conquer a piece of Yemen or Somalia and put them there? Perhaps Trump would let you get away with it/assist, and they would be far away.
Or could the Dutch perhaps make some new island somewhere? Maybe in the red sea or so?
You could also think of some option giving asylum in Europe, some Arab country or even Israel, but only to young unmarried women. Would be more popular/less safety risk and have demographic benefit.
Just ideating here, do not endorse this, but curious as to your perspective
Great article, but you've only hinted at the conclusion - I noticed you said
'Palestinians are not Syrians and they are not Egyptians, and they are not Lebanese, and the proof is in the pudding'
But - you left out 'Palestinians are not Jordanians' - and then went back to the old 'Palestine is Jordan' model - fine, if that's the conclusion. Palestinians are Jordanians! This has the added validity that WestBank/Judea&Samaria Arabs WERE Jordanian citizens until 1988.
I would further argue that you could say 'Gazans are Egyptians'.
The Iraq is not the same nation as Morocco point is very good - but of course that is true - the Arabic of these two countries is not even mutually intelligible.
On the other hand --
Gazan Palestinian Arabic is very close to Egyptian Arabic, and in particular to the Egyptian dialect spoken in the Sinai Peninsula, due to geographic proximity and historical interactions. Shared features include phonological traits, like the pronunciation of the letter qāf as a glottal stop (similar to Cairene Arabic) and shared vocabulary influenced by Egypt's cultural and media presence.
West Bank Palestinian Arabic, on the other hand, is closer to Jordanian Arabic, especially the dialects of northern and central Jordan.
Yes, 'the only history that actually matters is the one that happened.' - well said, but has Palestinian nationhood actually happened? Not just talking about statehood, but has nationhood even happened? It seems so far we have 'Palestinian' as a great branding exercise - you know, ranking somewhere between Coca-Cola and Walmart right now as far as global franchise value..
Where can I find reliable information about Palestinian dialects of Arabic? I don't chap how it can be so similar to Egyptian Arabic when most of the population are descendants of refugees from other places in EY.
Love your articles, they are always so challenging.
When you talk about pan Arab solidarity and say it doesn't exist, Morocco/Iraq are different countries then reference to Europe (diff country, diff languages). You imply a similarity, I contest this. Poland alone took in 1m from Ukraine, Europe extended their hands to Ukraine precisely because they see in them a sort of "pan european" people.
The Arabs are tribal. Tribe is above both nationalism and pan Arab solidarity. Europeans are more national than tribal, and within that Europeans can see the nations as amorphous. Therefore Ukraines can easily be seen as "one of us".
Islam is the all conquering best thing in the universe. It directs them to take over everything. Yet there are the Jews, hanging in, unbeatable. This hurts the Muslim conception of reality.
Put these 2 things together and you get "Let the Palestinians fight it out with the Jews" as standard Arab foreign policy. Win/win or you lose / I don't lose.
Look at the Jewish explusion from the late 1800s from Russia to Palestine. They were ushered in by the Ottomans. The Arabs of that region have a beef with other Arabs (Ottomans) for this act. They have a beef with the Jews from coming and they have a beef with the Jews because Islam.
As far as I know, all the Ukrainians in Poland are supposed to go back, and I think probably about 90% will. But you are correct that Arab nationalism is so fake that, in fact, Arabs are less unified as a nation than Europeans are.
I doubt that 90% will. Poland is 3x richer than Ukraine and culturally/linguistically similar.
Why would they be allowed to go back when the point of this war is very clearly to depopulate the Pale of Slavs and plant there a breeding population of Hasids?
Several EU countries took in 1%-2% of their population in refugee Ukrainians in 2022. There was negligible social impact of this. I know because I live in one of these countries. Cultural proximity matters a lot both for refugee and host alike.
I am no anthropologist but I would imagine on any scale of cultural proximity Algeria is about 10x more familiar to a Gazan than Taiwan is.
My father has a very moderate opinion on migration. Even so, when Ukrainian refugees come up he has strongly suggested that they should return immediately when the war rmds,and that it's about time they do. His view is by no means unusual on this matter.
Agreed.
But the comparison is Palestinian Arabs to other Arab countries vs European countries to other European countries. Arabs are more tribal than national, Europeans more national than tribal. If you accept this the difference then the friction for Palestinian Arabs to other ME countries is higher.
Further friction coms from the religious aspects where Shia vs Sunni vs various other Islamic sects fight and kill each other all the time. This is an outcome of tribal mindset. In Europe there is zero discussion of Protestants killing Catholics, there is nothing more than hearty debate.
The friction for other Arab countries to accept Palestinian Arabs (plus the upside of not accepting them ie. sticking it to Israel and USA) is just too much inertia to overcome.
The author says "ethnic explusion" is the only path to settle these conflicts. The Arab counntries won't take them, Taiwan won't, and Europe better not.
I say "Big beautiful new home for them", how about Puntland?
"The author says "ethnic explusion" is the only path to settle these conflicts. "
The point of the article is that the Palestinian problem can't be solved via expulsion.
Palestinian Arabs are Jordanian or Egyptian, like Yasser right? Palestinians who stayed in Israel are now Israeli. "Palestinians" of Gaza, Judea, Samaria should be relocated out. Then you get the peace of Golan Heights. Puntland, here we come.
1) Ottomans aren’t Arab. They also actively opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine, which the new Yishuv partially circumvented through a mixture of pressure from the European powers who liked to use minorities as a cat’s paw, abuse of extraterritoriality, bribery (already endemic before their arrival by all accounts), and cooperation with sympathetic Ottoman Jews who would act as nominal owners at times when landholding by noncitizens was restricted.
2) Islam makes the situation worse by making the conflict a cause célèbre with other Muslims & by making it harder to accept right of conquest while taking the the religion seriously, but the origin of the conflict isn’t Islam. Nobody reacts except with extreme hostility to people setting out to displace them, even if the replacement is done through laws, politics, and money. This same situation played out as nauseam in 19th-early 20th century Europe as well, and for the same reasons - it mostly only broke out into open, mass violence when the central and eastern empires collapsed, leaving paramilitaries to pick up the pieces.
3) The Poland Ukraine example is pretty funny - there’s an extreme amount of heavily justified bad blood on both sides. The Poles just hate Russians a lot more than Ukrainians for obvious reasons. Their traditional nationalism also sought to forcibly assimilate Ukrainians rather than keep them separate and subordinate, so incorporating some Ukrainian chicks isn’t really a loss from that perspective.
You are overplaying (2) a bit. Birmingham and Detroit, to name but two examples, have undergone ethnic replacement in recent memory and no-one did anything basically. For resistance to happen you need (a) elites who want to coordinate it and (b) a plausible ideology to justify it. (Arguably (a) means you get (b) more or less automatically).
Can’t speak to Birmingham, but Detroit was standard economic migration involving co-citizens within the same state, similar to what happened to the Intermarium cities with the wrong ethnicity in their hinterlands. The Yishuv case is IMO more like Kulturkampf in Posen or interwar Poland’s colonial/assimilatory approach to the Kresy - a public, coordinated attempt to remake ethnic composition to the detriment of the current majority.
I think that is anachronistic. Blacks were not traditionally considered co-citizens, spoke a substantially different dialect, came to Detroit from as far away as Poland is to Palestine, and their presence was in most cases substantially more detrimental to the natives than Jewish immigration was to Palestinians.
And indeed, there were spontaneous acts of resistance by the citizens of Detroit to their replacement by Blacks. But there was a central government willing and able to repress that, and no local elites who saw it in their interest to channel that violence.
I don’t agree that it is - free blacks have been citizens since the 14th amendment. I’m sure the white inhabitants were unhappy about it, partially for very legitimate reasons, but so were German townsmen in Bohemia and Upper Silesia, Italian-speakers in the Dalmatian cities, etc.
AAVE is IMO more intelligible to the underexposed than Indian (south Asian) English, and even Indian English isn’t much of a barrier to communication. It’s not like they were speaking Scots.
I don’t think black immigration turned out worse for local whites than Jewish immigration to Palestine (Whites mostly moved to the suburbs or left because of the decline in manufacturing. I worked there downtown for 4 years - it’s a minor inconvenience). If you only count Arab citizens of Israel, sure. But their pretty good position is downstream of political stability due to a solid Jewish majority due to withholding citizenship (for good pragmatic reasons) from most of Israel’s Arab subjects.
Moving from to the suburbs is actually not so different from the distance the median Palestinian refugee had to travel, but that's not the point. If whites had stayed in their old neighbourhoods, then it would have been really bad for them because they would have been subject to constant extreme violence from crackheads. The reason why it wasn't extremely traumatic is because instead of fighting they just went somewhere else, which is the whole point.
I'm not saying this in vindication of Zionism, since all the conditions for Palestinians resisting were there, and the Zionists should have been aware of this. I'm just trying to understand how and why thinks shake out as they do. Often people are willing to accept their ethnic displacement, and perhaps it's usually better for them when they do.
Ottoman's included Arabs into their ruling hierarchy, so Arabs got involved. In the 1880s (yet) another Russian pogrom forced Jews to flee to present day Turkey. Russia and the Ottomans were waring at that time, so this was an old destabilizing tactic. The Ottoman strength was waning at the time, they did not resist, and let the Jews go to Palestine. Arabs who opposed this had no power to and local Ottoman Arab elites got their marching orders from the head office in Istanbul.
Russia and the Ottomans weren’t at war and wouldn’t be again until WWI. It’s been a long time since I’ve read about the process in detail, but IIRC the Ottomans were pretty consistent about trying to prevent concentrated Jewish settlement so as not to acquire yet another ethnic “question,” but were prevented by interference from western powers via the capitulations.
Not that many Jews actually came before the 1920s anyway.
Estimates of 1881-1903 30K. I don't know if that's "not that many". It's about 10% of the total population of the Palestine region. These are all estimate figures right? But should be in the ballpark.
It was less than the growth of the Arab population over the same period.
Russia/Turkey war: 1877-1878.
Right, you wrote 1880’s in the comment that said they were at war at the time.
True true. Wars are never truly "binary" events, when the history books record the "start and finish" dates there is a lot of posturing, mayhem, and "all sorts o' shite" around those dates, both before and after.
Most Ukranian refugees are women and children. Most of palestinian refugees would be women, children and militay aged males.
AKA Infiltration.
Though I’ve read your articles for a bit, and I’ve liked them I never really understood what ‘nonzionism’ meant. You talk about Jews and Arabs differently than anyone I’ve heard before. I don’t think my American Ashkenazi mind could see your unique and foreign perspective.
But now I get it. And I appreciate it, especially the realpolitik. Zionism is for dummies. Who the hell thought kicking out generations of Arabs would be a good idea?
So in the end, because this group of Arabs are without a doubt Palestinian and not Syrian, then Zionism must change (to nonzionism, maybe).
I appreciate this greatly because I’m constantly surrounded by radicals, grifters, and ignorant morons. Maybe I’m one of them - I am a dumb American at heart - but at least i can be my own type of dummy. Lot of food for thought
It's hyperbolic to refer to Israel's actions in 1948 as "ethnic cleansing". After all, Israel is still 20% Arab. Overall it's a good article. With the Golan it's a stronger case, there 95% was displaced rather than somewhere in the rage 80-85%. Anyway the term "ethnic cleansing" was invented in the 1990s, doesn't have any meaning in international law, and Wikipedia says you need to have an intent to make the are ethnically homogenous so even what Israel did in the Golan would not count. After all the Golan is still almost half Arab.
“Ethnic cleansing” is (like many concepts ) fuzzy around the edges.
It’s still a useful concept.
Useful for what and for whom?
Unfortunately when the truth is a wobbly bowl of jelly to be sliced and diced by all manner of ideologues for political gain, you have to be a lot more careful when you talk about the details if you want to be properly objective. And that tends to get boring and heavy and people tune that out.
One thing though: what happened in 1948 during that war was: the set of events that happened in 1948 during that war - all of them, with all their mix of intentions, actions and consequences. Dramatic, easily marketable conclusions that are actually responsible to the reality, are hard to draw. It’s its own animal, not the same as the 90’s former Yugoslavia animal - the one that caused the popularization of the term “ethnic cleansing” - or, say, the 1917 Turkish Armenia animal, and the similarities probably tell us less than the uniquenesses of the situations for workable solution-oriented approaches.
(Unless you’re playing gotcha. In which case just relax your brain and join those squawking “genocide” like an LLM parrot, it’s less effort.)
Substantial numbers (>100k?) of West Bank Palestinians also were expelled/fled to Jordan during the 1967 war and are not a problem -- they might make King Abdullah a bit nervous, but they're out there trying to invade and jihad Israel on a daily basis. Black September in 1970 was the PLO's fault, the majority of Jordanians are Palestinian and the country works just fine.
Maybe Sharon was onto something?
Sure, Sharon was on to something, but Palestinians and PLO weren't just two separate entities. The PLO recruited from exiled Palestinians.
Tons of arabs/migrants move to other countries. Same here, they can move and spread around the world. The problem is Israel keeps the bandaid on and gives them hope of another state. Once they annex Judea and Samaria it’s game over.
I'm not sure if this is a step down or a step up from just listing random countries you want to send them to.
Step to the side
Fun troll at the beginning.
That said kind of lazy. National identity is much more flexible than you give it credit to. For example, there exist a large amount of 100% converts from Africa who are convinced they’re Jewish, but because other Jews accept that they are Jewish, these Africans are in fact Jewish and Israeli! Another example is the Americanization of dozens of different European nationalities.
The concept of Syria is very ancient, but both Palestine and Jordan are very recent inventions. Palestinianism is younger than the Israeli state and is largely a byproduct of Arab and Soviet propoganda. Nations can be born and Palestine was recently born.
The problem with Palestinianism is that it is brain dead on multiple front as you illustrated in previous articles. Therefore, to deal with the Palestinians one must just deal with the underlying structures of their ideology and deradicalize/blend their identity. To start there is no difference between a Palestinian and a Jordanian. They are genetically and linguistically the same and most Jordanian citizens at this point are Palestinians. Both old school Jordanians and Palestinians have substantial Israelite ancestry. So all it takes to amend the national gap is to convince the Jordanians and Palestinians they are one nation (as they are) and get king Abdullah to exericise sovereignty over parts of the West Bank and give the palis citenizenship. It is insane pressure has not been exerted to do so.
Moreover, we can deconstruct Palestinian identity and convince the Palestinians they are Israelites and Palestine and Israel are two sides of the same coin. This can be done by converting Palestinians to Judaism. “God is punishing you from turning away from his covenant.”
Of course this takes a lot of propoganda, but it can be done. Lest we try!
Edit: I corrected some of the grammatical mistakes. I really should avoid commenting while at the gym.
Isn't that what I said. The only plausible country to dump the Palestinians onto is Jordan, but we need to figure out how to do it without crashing the Hashemite monarchy.
Simple. Political marriage with a Davidic monarchy...
I agree with your points. I would also like to add that while the 'concept' of Syria might be ancient, in all history there was never an independent Syria before 1946 (unless you count a brief period in 1920)..so 'Syrian' is a pretty new concept. 'Jordanian' wasn't even a concept in history until I suppose 1949 when they hacked off the 'Trans' - and Transjordanian wasn't much of an ethnicity either.. These are all fairly new ideas of nationality.
Not true on the African converts, the Ultra Orthodox don't accept them. And the UO influence on what constitutes a Jew is pretty absolute.
I am referring to Ethiopians
Uri Avnery, worthy of his own article, "suggested that Israel aid Palestinians in overthrowing the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan (a "product of imperialism"); Israel would then form a federation with the new Palestinian Jordanian state." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Avnery#CITEREFShavit1987
He really was a lunatic.
Kinda seems like what you're saying is that the Palestinians need to be expelled and concentrated into their own Palestinian state. And given that no neighboring state is willing to take on the demographic, logistical, economic, and national security burden of taking in 5 million Palestinian refugees, the obvious candidate for location of said Palestinian state is the West Bank and Gaza. Interestingly, this is also the preferred solution of 99% of countries on Earth including Israel's allies and its neighbors. And the good news is Israel has already ethnically cleansed the Palestinians into those territories! So the ethnic cleansing part is already over.
The problem that needs to be solved for this to work is to figure out a way that Fatah or whoever is going to be in charge, with substantial international/Israeli assistance, can exercise sufficient control of the Palestinian state to prevent its terrorist population from firing projectiles into Israel. It's a big problem but not a theoretically impossible one, but everyone is a lot more interested in trying to come up with places to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians *from* the West Bank and Gaza into some magical new place, rather than focus on the actual problem at hand.
I'm explaining why sometimes ethnic cleansing sometimes stops conflicts and sometimes creates conflict. I thought it was clear that this was in general an argument against trying to solve the Palestinian problem through further acts of ethnic cleansing.
I agree with you.
A lot of your problems with Israeli governance seem to arise from its elected officials and the preferences of voters, which are almost invariably demented and violent. This is not something that can be fixed without changing Israel's political system, perhaps wholly - not through minor reforms. What would you do?
There isn't really anything to do, so it's all hot air LARP, innit? Not sarc.
The biggest LARP is when someone with a Substack turns up on someone else's Substack and accuses them or LARPing for having a Substack.
I don’t understand how Jordan is different. Yes, there are tons of ethnic Palestinians there, but a population does not make a polity. Consider all the laborers in Gulf countries, including Palestinians until they get kicked out.
It’s like you repeated all the arguments you just critiqued: big red bad.
But what makes your argument fundamentally similar to your examples of ethnic cleansings that worked?
"Actually, we can simplify this: the charm of the Golan Heights is that it does not contain a lot of Israelis. Thus I can leave my door unlocked, bike around town without fear of getting hit by a car, not worry if my kids are wandering around unattended, and I don’t have some schizo neighbour playing Breslev trance music in the middle of the night when the mood takes him"
Wow your Ahavat Yisrael is unmatched. As long as we don't do lag it's all ok.
I lived in Israel, Jerusalem, and never had to worry about Israelis. In fact, I was able to leave my door unlocked there too as there weren't much Arabs.
It's insane how much you project on other Jews just because they're not like you.
Sometimes you has a negative emotional reaction to an article and you can't express it in words, but you try anyway, and this is what comes out. Next time I think you should just say 'blargh' or use a middle finger emoji.
Anyway, which neighbourhood did you live in?
Ramat Eshkol
So a Charedi neighborhood with a high Anglo population. It's true that I was very stupid when I moved to Israel in not taking this option. I will make a small emendation to the article.
Very nice like / comment ratio.
There was zero ethnic cleansing of Lebanese, and yet Israel got decades of Hezbollah, including for more terrorism against Israel in the 23 years after Israel's UN certified full withdrawal from Lebanon. Maybe the problem isn't ethnic cleansing yes/no, but rather Jews existing in Israel surrounded by a broken Arab world with Islamist fantasies of glory "if only they prove themselves once again to Allah as victorious, genocidal maniacs".
I know you like shitting on Israel and Zionism, but to quote one of your favorite words, your pre-determined conclusions and the idea you present here that the solution is a full ethnic cleansing is "retarded".
'Maybe the problem isn't ethnic cleansing yes/no, but rather Jews existing in Israel surrounded by a broken Arab world with Islamist fantasies of glory "if only they prove themselves once again to Allah as victorious, genocidal maniacs".'
Yes! Correct! That is the problem. That is my whole point.
Why are you in Israel and not following our new Herzl FdB to the New Zion or New Jersey? That’s where retarded antizionists who come from the US, write for 972 Magazine (for example), return to when they’re done earning “cred” to talk shit about Zionism. You’re good now, right? You’ve lived in the Golan, eaten shawarma in a laffa at the Katzrin merkaz. לך לך
If I go to live in New Jersey, will that solve the problem of the Palestinians?
Why do we need you to solve anything? Jews who are antizionist or nonzionist should fuck off to whatever diaspora they want to reside in.
Because you have been in a war for a year and a half, you haven't won, the vast a majority of the world is horrified, and tens of thousands of people are dead?
“Haven’t won” is pretty big words - takes a long time for the impact of wars to sink in. Are you some strategic genius now? What was your military service exactly? Israel didn’t initiate the war, yet it stomped Hezbollah into the ground, so hard that the spineless Lebanese Armed Forces are daring to dismantle Hezbollah positions and weapons caches - never happened before, did it? You live across from a new Syria as a result of that collapse, and suddenly no more forward army bases for the Islamic Republic of Iran filled with Shia kooks just miles from your own home. That’s just naming a few. Yes, tens of thousands, half of them Islamist terrorists, have been killed. Are you trying to sell that as some major world war now?
There was ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian refugees who fled to southern Lebanon, from where the PLO operated, until Israel invaded Lebanon, which set off the whole chain of events that led to Hezbollah.
Why is it the Free Palestine cult is full of ignorant, stupid people? There was no warfare at all in the stretch of 1949-1970 between Israel and Lebanon. Why did it start in the 1970s? What happened in the Middle East around then that triggered it?
The Jordanians expelled the PLO from Jordan in 1970 after the PLO tried to overthrow the King of Jordan. The PLO relocated to South Lebanon, where they used the Palestinian refugee camps as support. They then proceeded to cause a civil war in Lebanon and continued their attacks into Israel which led to the collapse of the Lebanese state, and its invasion and long term occupation by Syria and, twice, Israel. Israel's second invasion of Lebanon, again in response to PLO activities, led to the creation of Hezbollah.
Close, but intentionally forgetting the main part. Those “Palestinians” ejected from Jordan were Jordanians. There was never a “Palestine” - the West Bank is called that was because it was always intended to be part of Transjordan - a Hashemite kingdom across both sides of the Jordan River. The West Bank was conquered by the Jordanian Arab legion, and was part of Jordan from 1948-1967, with all Jews living there historically forever ethnically cleansed. Every “Palestinian” there had a Jordanian citizenship, and Jordan never created a “Palestine” in those 19 years. The PLO was expelled because it was a Soviet created terrorist entity trying to take over Jordan by force, similar to Hamas taking Gaza over by force. They weren’t ethnically cleansed by Israel to Lebanon, they escaped being killed by Jordan for their coup attempt.
There was no ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank. They were already there, as part of Jordan, and they still are in their majority part of Jordan. There was very little ethnic cleansing of “Palestinians”, meaning local Arabs in British Mandate Palestine, and most of them traveled a tiny distance to Gaza or the West Bank. They had states to be part of - Jordan, Egypt. A far greater number of Jews were completely ethnically cleansed from the Arab World and mainly absorbed by Israel.
I have a question for you. Do you think that if you spend enough time on the internet arguing that Israel's actions were justifiable according to a given moral code then the Palestinians will dissolve into the ether and stop being a problem?
No, it’s just an alternative to punching people in the face, which would be far more gratifying, but their faces are far off.
You should consider that some things have no “solution”, beyond the fact that nobody needs you particularly to solve anything. Islamists aren’t going to be reformed, for example - they should be killed when they prepare to attack you, but otherwise the concept of “solution” is meaningless. One thing Zionists had figured out in the past is that you live your life like a Wolverine, build your country, and make sure the cost of attacking you is considerably unpleasant. Israel forgot how to do that for a while, because of too much American “influence” from administrations left and right insisting on “restraint” and too many retarded Jewish American progressives butting in with their Tikkun Olam idiocy.
As for “spend time on the internet” - what do you think is the amount of time I spend writing comments and some notes compared to some “deep thinker” writing articles. You think that was a ‘gotcha’?
OK there are no Palestinians. It was only my ignorance and stupidity that caused me to imagine them. Things are actually going great.
Things are in fact doing great in northern Israel and Lebanon. The Palestinians of Jordan are still Jordanian. Seems like most of the Palestinians behind October 7 are dead due to their initiative. Most of the leadership of Iran’s Islamists proxy armies aren’t doing so well either. Seethe and cope.
Btw, my family has been ethnically cleansed, and while it’s not great, we’re all perfectly fine upon return to our ethnic homecountry.
Would it be possible for Israel to conquer a piece of Yemen or Somalia and put them there? Perhaps Trump would let you get away with it/assist, and they would be far away.
Or could the Dutch perhaps make some new island somewhere? Maybe in the red sea or so?
You could also think of some option giving asylum in Europe, some Arab country or even Israel, but only to young unmarried women. Would be more popular/less safety risk and have demographic benefit.
Just ideating here, do not endorse this, but curious as to your perspective
Qatar would be the best choice, so naturally no one is pushing for it.
Well Qatar does not want to, and has the power to enforce its will..
Put them in South Korea, that place is about to be vacant anyway.