The Liberia Solution

     Of all people you would expect Jews to know better. Yet here are the advocates of a Greater Israel proposing to expel Palestinians from their home and ignoring the brutal history of such expulsions. They know they can’t live in a Jewish democracy with a majority Arab population. Their answer is to deport them. They argue that most Palestinians are recent immigrants or their descendants and so aren’t really Palestinian. They should be sent home. At least they aren’t proposing to kill them all as Joshua did the Canaanites. Of course Arabs make essentially the same argument in reverse, only they would appear to be more amenable to Joshua’s strategy.
     The “not really Palestinian” logic goes like this. In the early days of Zionism Palestine was a very sparsely populated place. The Palestine of 1918 included all of what is now Israel, Jordan and the “Occupied Territories.” An estimate counted 512,000 Arab Muslims, 61,000 Christians, and 66,000 Jews, including by then a number of Zionist immigrants. There is substantial evidence that most of the Muslims even then were recent arrivals, many of them refugees from Russian expansion into Central Asia. The inhabitants were so badly exploited by absentee Arab and Turkish landlords that families rarely stayed more than a generation before moving on. The original Zionist idea was to establish a Jewish homeland in what was essentially empty space.
     The Zionists moved in, bought nearly worthless property at exorbitant prices, irrigated, and turned arid ground into productive farms. As they prospered the local economy improved and created a demand for labor. Arabs flocked in looking for work at a time when, from 1925 to 1947, the British were strictly limiting further Jewish immigration. The old landlords began to think they had been cheated and initiated the myth that Jews were stealing the land, forcing Arabs from their homes and …, well you know how that part of the story has escalated. The point of this is that there was never a Palestinian national identity. That was a propaganda creation of the 1950s to help generate sympathy for Palestinian refugees.
     Now all of this is true. The problem of course is that regardless of how they got there or when, there are today somewhere between 2.4 and 3.4 million Arabs living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. The numbers are intensely disputed but if Israel expands into the West Bank and Gaza as the Greater Israel advocates want to do, they will have if not a majority, a sizeable minority of Muslims living among them. Population growth statistics suggest that would be untenable for a Democratic Israel.
     It is an interesting coincidence that the numbers involved are roughly equivalent to the populations of Blacks and Whites in the American Anti-bellum South. Many anti-slavery activists thought Blacks and Whites could not live together with common citizenship and a popular solution was to transport freed slaves back to Africa. Modern Liberia was founded for that purpose. Fortunately the idea was dropped soon after the Civil War. We can get some idea of the horror it would have entailed by looking at the experience of the Cherokee as they were sent to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears.
     What could make all this moot is a mass voluntary exodus. That isn’t as inconceivable as it sounds. Large Jewish minorities in Arab countries migrated en-mass to Israel after 1948. Christians have largely left too over the years. I suspect more than a few Palestinians would emigrate if they could but no one wants them. If that changes all bets are off.