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It’s true that Israelis aren’t bleeding hearts about whether Gazans move to the west. But it’s also a poor WN talking point, it’s not like Israel wants them to go to Europe, they just want them to go anywhere but their backyard, and they don’t really care.
When Britain says they want Channel migrants to stay in France, this isn’t some grand racial action against French ethnic sovereignty, it’s just ordinary politics of not wanting to continue to import a problem.
The Israelis would be fine with the Gazans in their back yard if they'd stop pissing over the fence. But they won't, and that's why no one else wants them either.
But that’s exactly my point. When an Israeli MP says ‘why don’t the Gazans just move to Europe’, wignats on Twitter go crazy because it’s “confirmed proof” that “Jews want to import Muslims into Europe”. In reality, it’s anything but, it’s just an Israeli politician saying “I don’t care where they go, I just don’t want them here”.
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Sure. The juxtaposition between naked self-interest and "an attack on them is an attack on me (justifying the deportation of some hot dog vendor)" is what I find very amusing.
And they think Westerners - unlike Arabs, Indonesians Kenyans and so on. - are dumb enough to be prodded into facilitating this.
It's not so much about some general theory about Jews possessing an innate hostility towards the West or other people's societies.
It's just...I'm in awe of the sheer audacity to think you can manufacture consent for your hegemon/allies to eat these costs and to let them know you think that.
When Western nations play games over migrants I think it's with a clear-eyed view that everyone wants to pass the hot potato insofar as they can. There's not an implication of "those guys are soft-touches" (since there's basically zero reason for them to indulge you - unlike EU countries that have at least some pragmatic arguments).
Getting high on Western amity seems to harm you here: Britain was going to pay Rwanda to take refugees, there was no pretense they were going to be humanitarians just cause they're all in this "civilization" thing together.
The Israelis certainly have tried others, and I don’t think they expect Gazans to move to the West (as you say, it’s very unlikely any Western nation would take them).
Rather, it’s a rhetorical tool. ‘If European politicians keep critiquing Israeli action in Gaza, why don’t they take the supposedly peaceful Gazans?’ To then turn this around and suggest that Israel is deliberately encouraging mass immigration of Muslims into Europe is ridiculously dishonest.
Why? It’s ultimately the fault of the ‘hegemon/allies’ that the Palestinian situation exists because the US was willing to accept the UNRWA’s world historically unique terms for solely Palestinian migrants to placate Arab states versus the Soviet Union.
I can think of several parties more responsible for the Palestinian situation than the new hegemon.
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That isn't really clear in either article but using it as a move is at least more understandable to me. If someone pulled it out in a panel debate against some leftist I wouldn't have blinked there. Those articles seem to be treating it as an actual solution and the WSJ seems to be offering it up as a moral alternative to a Western audience.
Shit. That's a good point.
So what happens in the counterfactual? The refugee claims of the Gazans just die out over time and they're pushed to become Egyptians or various forms of Arabs? Would they see it that way?
If one analogizes Palestianians removed by Israel to Germans removed by Czecho-Slovakia and Poland, one would expect "expellee societies" to form. They might hinder reapproachment between Arab states and Israel, but unlike Germany, Arab states even without such co-ethnic newcomers, favour antagonism towards the country which expelled.
Identity would naturally more diluted when surrounded by those with a more similar one. It is easier to maintain distinction, if ones offspring would have alter their values more radically to join the majority, than the shift required is smaller.
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The analogy would make sense of Britain was scheming to send their Muslim population to France, not if they're merely not letting French Muslims in. If Brits were planning such a scheme, it definitely would look like some grand racial action against France.
Are the Israelis scheming to deport Muslim Israeli citizens? While it might be a distant goal in the eyes of some hardcore religious Zionists (no different to the mass deportation of Muslim French being a distant goal of some hardcore French reactionaries, which it is) it certainly isn’t in the regular Overton window.
Who said anything about citizens? If the UK schemed to send all it's Muslim immigrants, who have not yet been granted citizenship yet, to France, that would also qualify as "some grand racial action against France".
If the UK invaded a Muslim territory, and schemed to send all it's inhabitants to France, that would be even worse.
Stay on topic, please.
The condition of Palestinian Arabs is no different to those of German Ostsiedler, who (even in cases where their ancestors had spent 500+ years outside the territory of modern Germany) were resettled to Germany after WW2. This was an accepted Western action with the support of all major surviving Western powers.
Why should Israel be any different? The Arabs lost three wars against Israel (the Germans lost only one against Russia, really), so they have forfeited their land. They can be resettled in one of the many Arab ethnic homelands in the rest of the region, just as the Germans were resettled in Germanic homelands in Central Europe.
So you’re pro the expulsion of Germans from Hinterpommern and Upper Silesia? I think it was a textbook example both of the nationalist spiral and of people absurdly ‘reclaiming’ land they had no legitimate title to from the descendants of people who’d been there since before the region entered history (the Silesians and Pomeranians having finished Germanizing culturally and linguistically only in early modern times, and presumably being at least 30% descended from Slonzoki and Pomorzonie (as in modern Vorpommern).
I came to history with a pro-Czech and pro-Polish bias (despite being neither) - before I knew enough about history to not be exactly pro-anyone. It was the history of hard and soft ethnic cleansing here the gradually turned me against the nationalist approach despite my initial sympathy.
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Exactly, and Meir Kahane made this exact parallel in 1984. I find it strage that Israelis are condemed for wanting to get rid of a minority, when a man Americans to this day celebrate (FDR) sanctioned a removal on a much larger scale, of a people whose loyalty was less in question1 than of Arabs from Gaza.
1: Benes et al promoted stories of alleged "Werwolf" cells, but consensus among historians is that the threat was overstated.
… IIRC the U.S. military regretted supporting the population transfer more or less immediately and the officers involved recommended against allowing similar moves in future. If anyone’s still defending this, it’s presumably on the basis of ‘Nazis’ rather than some general principle.
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I think the problem is the hypocrisy.
It seems that the people who want Westerners to believe that it's okay for Israelis to get rid of a minority are also the ones who think it's not acceptable for Westerners to get rid of a minority (Jews for example).
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Sending ethnic Germans living in eastern Europe to Germany is no different than sending Palestinians to Germany?
Indeed, let's send all the Palestinians to Tel Aviv then.
Since when is Europe "the rest of the region"?
Sending a Palestinian to Jordan or Syria or the Sinai is no different to sending an arbitrary German Ostsiedler to Düsseldorf after several centuries of living in the East, sure. Population movement in the Ottoman and earlier Levant was commonplace.
And yeah, the analogy is more true than you suggest. Many of the peoples the Eastern European Germans lived around had been there for little longer than they had, or had themselves been otherwise migratory in the past.
Israel’s first preference has always been to send the Palestinians to another Arab nation.
That they troll European leftists by suggesting they take them doesn’t change this.
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