As I have written before, there are many political assessments that should be made on the basis of what everybody can see, and not on the basis of esoteric “insider” knowledge. Further, these judgments should certainly not be made on the basis of a paradigm powerful enough to invert what is obviously happening — powerful enough to make us not be able to see what everybody can plainly see.
Again, a great place to turn for illustrations of this principle is Israel. The most telling (and damning) indicator of this phenomenon is the popular refusal to call the demand that Israel give up its settlements in the West Bank and Gaza by its proper name. What is the name for an insistence that hundreds of thousands of people be uprooted from their homes and relocated because of their race? No, it is not “land for peace.” It is called ethnic cleansing.
The problem is that we have all been taught that ethnic cleansing is universally bad and wicked. As soon as you allow that there might be some occasions where ethnic cleansing is a “regrettable necessity,” like in Israel today, some Serb or other is going to say, “Yes. And what I have been trying to tell you . . .” And we say to him that he needs to shut up because ethnic cleansing is always wrong and no further discussion is needed. And it then occurs to our public intellectuals that we must not allow the forceable removal of people from their homes by the hundreds of thousands, on account of their race, to be called ethnic cleansing, at least not in this situation. It leads to awkward situations, and even more awkward questions. Far easier to call it land for peace.
Now somebody is going to say, “yes, but,” and go on to talk about what a bonehead idea Zionism was two centuries back), and how that movement displaced people that it shouldn’t have. And apart from the questions of displacement, I am no Zionist and agree that it was hardly the most farsighted move. But before getting into the details of that, shouldn’t we agree that we are getting into the sorts of arguments that would justify ethnic cleansing? There are all sorts of directions this argument could go. We could say that Zionism didn’t displace anybody, we could say that it did, but justly, or we could say that it did so unjustly, but that to turn around and try to reverse it now would simply compound the injustice. Water under the bridge, and all that.
If Zionism didn’t displace anybody, to insist on ethnic cleansing for Jews now would be unjust. If they displaced people justly, ethnic cleansing for Jews now would be unjust. If they displaced people unjustly in the middle of the last century, do we suppose that we can unscramble those eggs by stirring the pan ever more vigorously? Suppose we decided that the Chinook tribe owned Seattle by right, and we therefore made all the non-Chinook move to Des Moines. Suppose that we thought we had good reasons. Fine, but what good reasons can we advance for not calling this by its proper name? I have friends who would be indignant about their forceable relocation to Des Moines, including people that never agreed to the philosophy of Manifest Destiny, that fighting creed that displaced the Chinook in the first place.
So for the sake of discussion, let us suppose that the Jews came to occupy the settlements they currently occupy by manifestly unjust means. This is a big suppose, but my argument here depends on that not really mattering. If Solomon were here, how would he cut the baby? It seems to me that governance of the contested settlements ought to be given to the group that would let the other group live there peaceably. If the Israelis keep the settlements, can Palestinians live there? And if the Palestinians get the settlements, could Jews live there? After all, don’t we agree that what we want to avoid here is ethnic cleansing?