Maof

"I hold the view that, political issues aside, the Arab refugee problem is by far the easiest postwar refugee problem to solve by integration. By faith, by language, by race and by social organization, they are indistinguishable from their fellows of the host countries. There is room for them, and land for them, in Syria and in Iraq. There is a developing demand for the kind of manpower that they represent. More unusually still, there is the money to make this integration possible. The United Nations General Assembly, five years ago, voted a sum of 200 million dollars to provide 'homes and jobs' for the Arab refugees. That money remains unspent, not because these tragic people are strangers in a strange land, because they are not; not because there is no room for them to be established, because there is; but simply for political reasons."
-- Elfan Rees, Adviser on Refugees to the World
       Council of Churches, in "The Refugee Problem Today and Tomorrow," 1957.

To most of the educated world, the names of several leaders of modern Czechoslovakia evoke affection and respect, notably Tomas Masaryk, whose father was the founder of modern Czechoslovakia. The son had to endure the pusillanimity of Great Britain and France at Munich; he survived the war and the Nazis, but was killed in 1948, pushed out of a window by Soviet agents, in the Second Defenestration of Prague. Alexander Dubcek, whose Prague Spring and "socialism with a human face" in 1968 brought a Soviet military response, evokes a similar though perhaps lesser affection. Vaclav Havel, the current president of the non-Communist Czech Republic, who began as an anti-Communist dissident and wrote his Letters to Olga from prison, is another in that list.
In nearby Poland, the shipyard workers in Gdansk, who helped to found the Solidarity movement, and whose refusal to obey the authorities hastened the disintegration of Communist rule in Poland, and Soviet power everywhere, remain in Western memories as objects of admiration.
Yet the admirable Masaryk (and his foreign minister Benes) undertook the wholesale expulsion of ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland, that region where the Germans had been living for some 600 years, and the admirable Havel defends that action and refuses to apologize to Germans recently demanding an expression of remorse. All Czechs supported this policy in 1945, nor did anyone in the civilized world drop a tear of regret, or utter a syllable of recrimination. Under the circumstances, and given the history of German aggression in Central Europe, the Czechs felt in 1948, and feel now, that they had every right to limit a potential internal threat against their national security -- even though, in 1945, any threat posed by a destroyed Germany seemed vague and theoretical.
In Poland, those Solidarity workers conducted their strikes in Gdansk, a city formerly full of Germans, known before the war as Danzig (a war-cry of the appeasers was "Don't die for Danzig"). Gdansk is now entirely Polish (as Kaliningrad, ne Koenigsberg, is entirely Russian), for its German population left in 1945, harried out along with 12 million Germans all over Central and Eastern Europe, in Hungary, in Rumania, and elsewhere. Individual injustices occurred, as happens in politics and geopolitics (not everyone killed by the Allies was guilty), where large masses of people have to be dealt with. Most think that the post-World War II expulsion of Germans was justified by larger considerations.
Elsewhere in the world, expulsions of hostile populations -- sometimes in the context of war, or independence, sometimes in their aftermath -- have been the rule, not the exception. Post-Ottoman Turkey, in the 1920s, expelled several million Pontic Greeks from Turkish land; hundreds of thousands of Muslim Turks were expelled by Greece and repatriated to Turkey. Tens of millions of Muslims fled India in 1947 for the Muslim state of Pakistan, and tens of millions of Hindus fled what was to become Pakistan for predominantly Hindu India. In the recent past, Greeks and Turks on Cyprus have separated themselves into discrete populations on either side of a dividing line.
In the Middle East, expulsion of a population deemed dangerous, or otherwise unwelcome, has been common. Indeed, the Ur-Expulsion in the Middle East was that conducted by the very early Muslim ruler, successor to the Abu Bakr who succeeded Muhammad, the celebrated 'Umar ('Umar bin al-Khattab). In his study The Succession to Muhammad, Wilfred Madelung notes that "the relatively large Christian and Jewish communities in Najran and Khaybar were summarily expelled by 'Umar to the conquered territories." (p. 74). Such forced movements of population have been common since in the Middle East and North Africa, as the conquering Arabs moved about, or prohibited movement, not only to communities of Christians and Jews, but frequently to non-Arab Muslims as well.
In the 20th century, when the Arabs regained power after the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the practice was resumed. Indeed, no sooner were the Arabs handed power by the British in Mesopotamia (Iraq) in the 1930s, than they proceeded to kill or drive out large numbers of Christian Assyrians.
In recent years, the Arabs have violently driven out of ancient Kurdish lands hundreds of thousands of Kurds, and Arabized the country. In Egypt, beginning with the riots in September 1951, large groups of Greeks, Armenians, and Italians had their property seized, and were forced out of Alexandria and, subsequently, out of once-cosmopolitan Egypt. In Libya, the mercurial Qaddaffi has on more than one occasion expelled fellow-Arabs, mostly Egyptian and "Palestinian" Arabs, in the tens of thousands, and also recently expelled tens of thousands of black Africans (this expulsion was accompanied by the public lynching of black Africans, including one diplomat, by Libyan Arabs -- an event that went strangely unremarked in the Western press). Saudi Arabia expelled more than 1 million Yemeni Arab workers overnight, claiming to fear an internal threat of subversion. Morocco and Algeria, in their proxy war over the Polisario movement, expelled each other's nationals. The most recent mass expulsion in the Middle East took place in 1991, when overnight 400,000 "Palestinian" Arabs were forced out of Kuwait, because of their collaboration with the Iraqi invaders.
But there is one place in the world where, in the midst of all these examples, many defensible (the Czech expulsion of the Sudeten Germans being the most defensible), some less so (the Saudi expulsion of 1 million Yemenis), people who have every right to consider such a possibility have felt abashed even to consider it. That place is Israel. Some Israelis have internalized the double standards of the rest of the world, and insist on imposing on themselves requirements and moral inhibitions that no one else, anywhere, has assumed. This whole business of being a "light unto the nations" can be carried to a suicidal extreme; the most persecuted tribe in human history has no obligation to the world to refrain from extricating itself from possibly mortal danger, and certainly need not require the citizens of its state to permanently accept living with people who have made clear they delight in the mass murder of Israeli civilians.
Reason demands that all measures of national self-defense be considered. Some Israelis believe that the most they can do is build a wall, but a wall will concede a kind of de facto recognition of the initial Arab demands. It is being built not along the Jordan, but along the line the Arabs now claim was established by the Armistice Agreement of 1949 as Israel's border (though they never recognized it as such). The Israeli refrain of despair, accompanied by a studied refusal to seriously study other possible responses, encourages the Arabs.
In public opinion polls, 80% of the "Palestinian" Arabs have expressed their heartfelt support for suicide-massacres. Many of those 80% might, to some degree, actively help in the commission of such massacres. Israelis are under no obligation to live indefinitely in a state of maximum insecurity, an insecurity far greater than what the Czechs or Poles faced in 1945, or what any of those who have engaged in population transfers or mass expulsions faced -- including Turkey, Greece, India, Pakistan, and a host of other countries (Cambodia, at this very minute, is attempting to expel large numbers of Vietnamese). The fact that many in the "civilized" world have not experienced such threats, and are fed information by unsympathetic-to-Israel media outlets (beginning with the BBC and Agence France-Press, and ending with National Public Radio) is part of the problem. Another is the widespread collapse of training in historical awareness (so the many, and recent, historical parallels are unknown); this prevents many outside Israel from making relevant comparisons, and certainly few feel keenly what it must be like to live in Israel today.
Rational discussion of what sort of large-scale expulsion of Arabs might be undertaken, and for what reasons, and in what circumstances, and with what explanation, and through what means, makes sense. Even to raise the issue at all, and to provide the historical parallels, would help Israel make its case. For then those who oppose it will have to present their reasons for distinguishing, for example, the case of the Sudeten Germans, from that of the "Palestinian" Arabs. It will necessarily raise the real issues, and not the false issues of "Jewish-occupied Arab land." As a matter of rights derived from history, from morality, and from international law (both the Mandate for Palestine, and international legal precedents regarding wars of defense) it would be far more accurate to describe Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") and Gaza not as the BBC and Al-Jazeera consistently do, as "Jewish-occupied Arab land" but more accurately, as "Arab-occupied Jewish land."
There is no solution to the Arab assault on the Infidel state of Israel. There is only the possibility of a long-term standoff, which will have to include an understanding, by the rest of the Infidel world, that for its own sake it will have to permanently deprive not only Iraq, but the entire Arab Muslim world, to the extent possible, of weapons of mass destruction. And while that state of truce -- not the result of a "peace" treaty, but a truce -- continues, it will be enforced by Israel's threat of retaliation. But within its own defensible borders (the Jordan River being the only sensible one to the east, and including the Golan Heights to the north), Israelis have to allow themselves the freedom to end this state of permanent terror. They will have to completely disarm the Arabs within Israel, and work to keep them disarmed. The "right to bear arms" of the American Second Amendment is simply not applicable to the Israeli situation.
And Israelis will have to at least discuss, rather than avoid rational discussion, of how to limit or diminish the number of Arabs living within Israel. More than half of Arabs interviewed all over the Middle East have said they would emigrate if they could. That includes the Arabs of Palestine. Not everyone wishes to serve as a member of the shock troops of the Muslim Arab campaign against Israel. Some would like better opportunities than Israel, a country poor in natural resources, is likely, under the circumstances of self-defense imposed on it by the Arabs themselves, to be able to offer. Nor are they likely to be welcomed in great numbers in the West, which has grown wary of Muslim immigration and now realizes, if it did not before, that Muslim immigration to the Lands of the Infidels, the Dar al-Harb, is regarded by many Muslims as a weapon in the world-wide jihad.
Some "Palestinian" Arabs will seek and find jobs again in the Gulf, perhaps in a newly-revivified Iraq. Currently most of the real work in the Arab oil states is done, at the top, by Europeans and Americans, while construction is performed by Koreans, and domestic help supplied by Thais, Filipinos, Indians, Pakistanis, and others from the genuinely poor regions. But after the overthrow of Iraq, the Gulf Arabs are likely to see security threats from foreigners (whose numbers, in any case, will diminish as those foreigners see themselves threatened). An obvious replacement will be the Arabs from Israel, many of whom will find they can do better for themselves outside Israel, and may weary of bearing the main burden of the pan-Arab, nearly pan-Muslim siege of Israel.
But if voluntary emigration is not enough, there is no reason to shy away from other means. Unless one believes that demography is all, and that the deliberate overbreeding of children as a political weapon is to be rewarded, and that all that matters is a counting of heads, then the Israelis will have to do, with or without the approval of the world (to which they owe exactly nothing), whatever it takes to preserve their tiny state. A durable peace for Israel must also be an endurable one for its citizens.
The next time there is a major disaster, for example, they should expel from each of the eight main Arab population centers in the West Bank a few thousand of the worst offenders -- to Gaza, or across the Jordan River. It could be announced in advance, and then, when the attack comes, there will be no surprise. The numbers can rise with the threat, and war, and the aftermath of war, are suitable occasions for mass expulsions. If Kuwait could expel 400,000 "Palestinians" because they had sympathized with Iraq, Israel can do the same with the cheering crowds who call on Saddam to rain down rockets and bombs on Israel. It has to be considered.
The main point is, as American college students like to say, to keep your options open. The Arabs should not be led to believe that expulsions are a weapon of self-defense that Israel will simply never use. Mere discussion of the matter should alarm enough of them sufficiently so that some will be chastened in their activity. But it has to be done with reference to historical analogues, including the example of the Sudetenland, so that the burden is placed on others to explain why they think that there should be one rule for everyone else in the world, and another, much harsher rule, imposed by "morality" on the people, and state, of Israel. Meanwhile, perhaps everyone can ponder the words of Elfan Rees, made back in 1957, which appear at the beginning of this essay.

Russian version