US president Donald Trump’s proposal to annex the Gaza Strip and transfer its two million Palestinian inhabitants to Egypt and Jordan has provoked a predictable outcry. Virtually all Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, oppose the idea. Human rights organizations and international lawyers note its violation of international law.
By contrast, most Israelis welcome the proposal, and its supporters point to precedents from the first half of the last century: the Turkish-Greek population exchange of 1923, the millions of ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, and the partition of India in 1947. Ruling out the transfer of Palestinians indicates a double standard against Israel, they complain.
Five historical truths are required to make sense of this debate. These truths are not proof of a double standard but evidence of how the restraints imposed by the global order founded eighty years ago have eroded. That order, however, did little to prevent repeated mass expulsions. If the emerging order repeats the violent logics of nation-state consolidation and imperial statecraft, it will lay bare the conditions that underpinned the founding of states after the World Wars, especially in the Global North. It is no accident that African states, the Gambia and South Africa, are among the strongest defenders of the norm against ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Expulsions and Nation-States
One truth is that large-scale population expulsions have indeed been a feature of imperial statecraft and nation-state foundation for at least two hundred years. Multinational empires deported peoples when it suited their security interests. The new nation-states carved out of them expelled “alien” peoples that threatened their ideal of demographic homogeneity, access to resources, and sense of security.
Indigenous peoples in the Americas and colonial Australia were shunted off to unwanted land when they were not outright massacred. In the struggle with Greek Orthodox insurgents to establish a Greek nation-state in the 1820s, Ottoman authorities contemplated expelling them to Egypt, while the Greeks set out to remove all Muslims from the Peloponnese as well as massacring many. In the 1860s and 1870s, the Russian Empire induced the flight of thousands of Muslim Circassians into the Ottoman Empire as it conquered Black Sea territory, settling Greeks in their stead.
In subsequent decades, hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Muslims were expelled or fled from Christian Balkan states after they defeated Ottoman forces in establishing nation-states. When Greece absorbed the largely Jewish and Muslim Ottoman city of Salonika during the Balkan Wars in 1912, it set about “Hellenizing” the place with Greeks from Turkey.