After World War II, the Russians and their neighbors expelled more than fourteen million Germans from places where their ancestors had lived for centuries. On a smaller scale, something similar happened in 1923, when almost a million Greeks, that is Christians, had to abandon the remains of the Ottoman Empire in which their ancestors had settled two and a half millennia, and several hundreds of thousands of Turks Muslims left Greece. It was a religious exchange; Few believe that Muslims and practitioners of other cults could live in peace.
It is that in those days, what time would be convicted as “ethnic cleaning” and therefore a crime against humanity, did not motivate the outrage of the biempensagers. Rather, in the opinion of the “international community” at that time, separating ethnic or irreconcilable ethnic groups was the least bad way to end blood internal conflicts and minimize the risk of more wars in the future. For this reason, those “repatriated” Germans who insisted on their right to return to their ancestral homes were denied by almost all as “revenge”, “ultra -right” or “neo -Nazis.”
The times have changed. The current consensus is that it is absurrs to neighboring countries of language, culture, religious beliefs and customs very similar to yours.
By raising this possibility with the enthusiasm that characterizes it, Donald Trump became white of countless angry protests by alleged “experts” in the Middle East. They treated him as a clueless lunatic, a rabid imperialist who only thought about seizing foreign territory to fill it with hotels and to be so stupid that he does not understand that the only solution conceivable to the conflict between Israel and the Arabs would consist of the creation of a Palestinian state with a democratically elected government.
Is it as ridiculous as Trump’s proposal say so many? Only if one believes that the alternatives that claim those despise are clearly better. Unfortunately, they are far from being. As things are, the new Arab State with which the American Democrats, the Europeans, the Saudites and others dream, would be governed or by Hamas or by an related jihadist group, such as the “Islamic State, which would make destruction of destruction from Israel an absolute priority.
As perverse that many seem to them, it is an event that the Israelis are not willing to tolerate. Before suffering the horrific mass of October 2023, most were affirmed in favor of the idea of ”two states”; At present, very few assume that it would help to inaugurate a prolonged period of peace. For more signs, Israel has just won his nth war against his closest enemies, Hamas and Hezbollah and, governed as they are by people of “right -wing” ideas, resists allowing their enemies to achieve in the diplomatic sand what, according to guidelines Supposedly obsolete, they lost on the battlefield. For the rest, at any time Israel could be in an even greater war with Iranian Islamists who have never hidden their willingness to erase it from the face of the earth and that, they are informed, they are about to acquire a nuclear arsenal that would allow them do it.
It is common to hear that wars never serve anything, but the truth is that the geopolitical conformation of the planet is completely due to the results of wars that were fought in the past. The Israelis, surrounded as they are by villages in which fans resolved to exterminate them abound, are not proposed to be deprived of the fruits of their expensive recent victories by those who, quite successfully, are mobilizing the “world opinion” against them.
Although Trump’s idea took them by surprise, the Israeli authorities soon recognized that trying to specify it would be preferable to resign to the perpetuation of the status quo that virtually would guarantee that every four or five years they would have to react militarily to an exceptionally fierce attack, such as that of October 7, 2023, which would not be given merely routine.
While almost all the Palestinians consulted immediately repudiated the departure proposed by the impulsive American president, this does not mean that it is unfeasible. In the last years, many millions of Arabs have left their places of origin to seek refuge in other parts of the world. However, despite the religious fervor that they profess so many, most have chosen to try their luck in Europe or North America, Lands of kindly infidels where they would be better treaties than in countries dominated by their co -religionists. Thus, Trump’s plan would work very well if he was accompanied by a commitment to Western governments, including his own, to welcome displaced Gazaties. OTHER OUT THAT NOT Even governments that are proclaimed more supportive with the Palestinians, such as those of Ireland, Norway and Spain, would think about collaborating in such a way.
Nor are the regimes of Egypt, Jordan and other Muslim countries open; The last thing they want is to allow the entry of contingents of people scheduled to be ruthless jihadists. In the Middle East the collective reputation of the Palestinians could hardly be worse. In 1991, the Kuwaitis threw 280,000, using death squads to scare them away, for having supported Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and the Saudites did the same. In 1970, the Jordanian army attacked Palestinian settlements, killing, according to PLO, tens of thousands of civilians.
Since it was a matter of internal struggles between different groups of Muslims and nobody came up to blame the Jews for what was happening, the bloody killings that occurred did not motivate street or university protests in the west. Also, at present few feel too disturbed by the extremely confusing civil war in Sudan, where brutal non -combatant massacres are frequent or, until very recently, so it happened in Syria.
Western leaders and intellectuals have a hard time taking the religious dimensions of the conflict between Israel and their neighbors seriously. For them, it has to be a territorial dispute that could be resolved if the Israelis would give their enemies a few square kilometers in exchange for a peace treaty, since in their opinion the wars of religion belong to the past. Such an attitude is due to how difficult it is to understand that principles that seem obvious are not shared by all peoples; For many people in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, Islamic traditions in the field remain in force.
Even though in Muslim countries there are governments that have come to the conclusion that it would be counterproductive to hold on to ideas that are incompatible with the existing world order, they have to take into account the convictions of those who refuse to “modernize.” Among these are those religious leaders who remind them that Israel occupies a piece of land that had previously been part of the Islamic Caliphate and that therefore must be reconquered by the means that were.
For those who think like this, the truces, such as the reluctant signed by the Benjamín Netanyahu government and the Hamas jihadist group, are necessarily passing. They are “hudnas” that mean nothing permanent, only that the faithful need some time to prepare to resume war. On the other hand, Trump and his advisors are convinced that Israel, such as the allied powers in 1945, has triumphed and therefore does not have to behave as a defeated country.
The prolonged tragedy of the Palestinians is due to the refusal of the other Arabs, and hundreds of millions of other Muslims, to resign themselves to the existence of Israel. Since the creation of what many still call “the Zionist entity”, they have clung to the illusion that one day it would share the fate of the kingdoms that, in the Middle Ages, the European crusaders implemented in the Levante.
To press Westerners, with the collaboration of international organizations, they chose to treat all Arabs displaced by the formation of Israel as refugees, a condition that, walking time, would become hereditary. It goes without saying that the same did not happen to the millions of Jews who were expelled from Muslim countries. Unlike the qualified Palestinians who were confined in “refugee fields”, they were accepted as full citizens of Israel. Since both they and their descendants understand very well the mentality of their mortal enemies, they usually vote for more “rightist” politicians than those favored by Israelis with European ancestors who, before the sadistic massacre perpetrated by Hamas, believed that it would be feasible to reach the Paz negotiating with Islamists who did not hide their willingness to exterminate them.
By James Neilson
