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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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