The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History

This chapter is not about the ways this implicit veto has taken hold and become embedded in modern Western societal consciousness. It does, however, contain within it a hope that fellow historians might contribute something to a healing process between necessarily often-embittered and hostile neighbors by opening up the conversation as to how these two peoples’ tragedies had common roots. The conventional wisdoms do not simply repudiate such a connection but also emphasize historical singularities in the natures of the respective catastrophes which brook no grounds for comparison. This chapter does not challenge the exceptionality of the events themselves. Nor does it propose sameness in terms of scope, scale, or outcomes, which should not need reprising here. But it does question the way master narratives have created a cordon sanitaire around the “sacred” memory of both events, thereby blocking off the legitimacy of alternative interpretations which might make these events less exclusive (and hence less untouchable) and more part of the stream—the violent stream—of modern European and near-European history.

In the case of the Holocaust, while the hegemonic role of Nazism is not in doubt, nor the entirely extraordinary turn in the fulfilment of the (as far as we know) unwritten Hitlerian command for a Europe-wide Jewish “Final Solution” and the subsequent creation of bespoke, industrial-scale, conveyer-belt-implemented death camps, these Germanocentric foci have served to buttress the Holocaust as a sui generis category of genocide, in the process obscuring the anti-Jewish goals and agendas of all manner of other Europeans. Pace Timothy Snyder’s recent attempt to draw parallels between Hitler and Stalin in their giant, murderous contest for control of the lands between Berlin and Moscow, 1 the role of non-German perpetrators in the Holocaust has traditionally been treated largely in terms of their willing or unwilling collaboration with the Third Reich and much less in terms of their own autonomous drives and urges toward nation-state building. That said, recent revisionist studies have begun to explore how such anti-Jewish agendas were repeatedly at the cutting edge of the political programs of “New Europe” countries in their efforts to be rid of any number of so-called “minority” peoples who did not fit the national prescript.²

It is no accident that these anthropoemic goals were at their most intense in these eastern and southeastern regions of the continent—the “New Europe”—comprising those states which had been violently conceived at the end of World War I (1914–1918) out of the “shatterzones” of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian Empires—in other words, in precisely those European regions where a multilayered, multiethnic coexistence had been the prior norm. Alongside the Ottoman Empire, whose collapse had already been presaged in the earlier Balkan wars of 1912–1913, these historically plural borderlands or, as I would prefer, “rimlands” (that is, countries at the geographical conjuncture between the metropolitan, avant-garde, already heavily homogenized nation-states of the West and the retreating world empires of what in Wallersteinian terms were now a semiperiphery) became not just in the course of Hitler’s conquests but in a period spanning 1912 to 1948 the primary locus of a repeated sequence of genocides, or genocidal ethnic cleansings.³ This process, in what amounted to the state-authorized expurgation of ethnoreligious difference, thus fated not only Jews but many other internally complex and heterogeneous communities to compulsory deportation and/or overt elimination across a geographical range spanning the lands between Danzig to Trieste in the west and the Caucasus to Mosul in the east and southeast. In 1948, as an extension of this sequence, these ethnic cleansings would also embrace Palestine.

Readers should immediately see what is being proposed by way of linkage here. Proponents of the Nakba as ethnic cleansing largely frame the 1948 expulsions within a long-term, ongoing program of Zionist colonial settlement which, on the one hand, can be historically situated within a more general, usually Western sequence of invasion and subjugation—whether in Ireland, the Americas, southern Africa, or the Antipodes—and, on the other, emphasizes the singularity of the Zionist project.4 As with the assertion of Holocaust uniqueness, a case can be made for the exceptionality of the Nakba expulsions, not least because they were carried out by largely secular, eastern European Jews who claimed a historic, religiously founded birthright to the land which thereby superseded (if not negated) the ownership rights of a majority indigenous-Arab population. But such tendencies to “imagine” territory as unredeemed birthright suggest less a function of colonial settlement of the classic Western type (even if such tendencies can be found within, for instance, the New World puritans or South African Boers) and more the sacro egoismo characteristics of a rampant yet, in the period 1912–1948, very common ethnonationalism.

This is not to propose that the settler paradigm has no relevance in the emergence of modern Zionism.⁵ But emphasizing a Jewish colonialism, which actually could have envisaged Africa, South America, or even Australia as its locale—with all the consequent dispossession and displacement of native peoples—takes us too far away from the nationalizing mindset of the Palestinocentric Zionist actors who forged the Yishuv (the pre-Israel Jewish community) prior to 1948. Born and raised almost to a person in the eastern European rimlands—the Russian Empire, more particularly—their thinking about the world, as the late Tony Judt neatly put it, “closely tracked the small, vulnerable, resentful, irredentist, insecure, ethnically exclusivist states to which World War I had given birth.” ⁶ That might suggest a need to more keenly historicize the connecting threads between the origins of the Nakba and the pan-European tragedy out of which the Holocaust emerged. The standard, embedded tropes emphasizing the special status of either case have had the effect of pulling in the direction of disconnect, consequently diminishing dialogue between historians and public on both sides of the divide.

By the same token, recent efforts to reconfigure the Holocaust as a form of late recapitulation of European colonialism, but now within an extended Continental setting pushing out to the east, while arguably supportive of a case for a causal connectedness between Holocaust and Nakba founded on none other than settler colonialism, in my view go too far in that direction. Instead, what I am seeking to do here is reposition the debate through a tighter focus on the nationalist urges which—particularly evident in an emergent, early twentieth century “rimlands” nationalism—might provide not only an underlying framework and context for the relationship between these two events but equally might make them more understandable within a wider process of historical development heralding the genocidal birth pangs of the contemporary international nation-state system.

To develop this argument, I will be looking at two sequences of European and near-European nation-building through ethnic cleansing in the “shatterzone of empires.”7 The first is the decline and collapse of Ottomania in the period 1912–1923; the second is the more European sequence, closer to, including, or overlapping with the Holocaust itself between 1939 and 1948. I will then briefly consider the wider ramifications of these developments in relation to the fate of Jews and Palestinians in the decade of the Holocaust and Nakba, before finally returning to an evaluation of their place within a seemingly embedded single-track trajectory of modern state formation.

In May 1915 the Entente Allies responded to evidence of a mass assault by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) regime on the some two million Ottoman Armenians with a ringing declaration promising to hold it to account for any crimes it had already or might yet commit against “humanity and civilization.”⁸ Eight years later, at the culmination of a sequence of continued war, mass murder, and genocide on Ottoman soil, these same Allies—minus the now Bolshevik-led Russians—signed a treaty at Lausanne with the newly minted, militarily victorious republic of Turkey in which the very names Armenia and Armenians were obliterated from the text. They also put their signatures to a “Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations,” giving their imprimatur to a program of comprehensive and compulsory deportation of entire peoples.⁹ How, one might ask, had this seeming volte face come about?

Was the truth actually that nineteenth-century progressive thinking about the rightness of national peoples living within their “natural” borders already informed by a Western distaste for a multiethnic empire repeatedly dubbed “the sick man of Europe”? Certainly, the ethnic mélange of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Ottoman Balkans was considered by many commentators as not only abnormal but an impediment to its modernizing development under its rightful Christian “nations,” regardless of the fact that the vast majority of the region’s peasants or transhumant pastoralists did not understand themselves in national terms at all.¹⁰ Even so, while coercively removing vast numbers of people from hearth and home to somewhere entirely different was almost standard Western colonial practice, when it came to Ottomania, fin-de-siècle blueprints, such as those of Siegfried Lichtenstädter, for a compulsory mass transfer of Christian populations westward across the Bosphorus and Muslim populations eastward to create homogeneous and supposedly stable post-Ottoman nation-states, were largely dismissed as the ramblings of fantasists.¹¹

If this was a case of European states turning a blind eye to some of the more localized population reorderings—for instance, in eastern Anatolia—which their diplomats had already scoped on paper,12 the whole matter was dramatically put to the test in the First Balkan War of 1912 when Greeks, Serbs, Montenegrins, and Bulgarians joined together to “finally” kick the Ottomans out of Europe. The intent of these ephemeral partners vis-à-vis the Muslims of the Macedonian region was immediately apparent through journalist reports from the front. Lev Bronstein (a.k.a. Trotsky), writing for the Ukrainian paper Kievskaia Mysl, for instance, noted that the Serbs, in order to “correct data in the ethnographical statistics not quite favorable to them, are engaged quite simply in the systematic extermination of the Muslim population.”¹³ These atrocities—primarily against Albanians—quickly provoked widespread panic across Macedonia, precipitating a mass flight to the port of Salonika, which rapidly became a muhajir (refugee) choke point. It was not the first time that Muslims had been ethnically cleansed in vast numbers from the Balkans, nor was it the last. Nationalist onslaughts on Muslims in Kosovo and especially further north in Bosnia, were repeated under the cover of war in the 1940s and again in the early 1990s.¹⁴ What was novel for other Europeans in 1912, however, was to read about “fellow” Christians—traditionally represented as heroic victims of “Turk” savagery—so blatantly acting as the carriers of fire and sword to their nonresisting neighbors and, worse, to discover that what began as an attack on Muslims quickly mutated into wholesale assaults on Christian communities suspected, for whatever reason, of being fifth columnists. Indeed, no sooner had the first war been won than a second broke out in 1913 over the Macedonian territorial spoils, with the Bulgarians now the main enemy of their erstwhile allies and the Ottomans also mounting their own counterattack. What followed included, on the one hand, the forcible renunciation at the point of a gun of the religious orientation of whole communities and, on the other, the repeated massacre of local inhabitants, leading to the flight of the remainder and hence the depopulation of whole districts.

Like the Nakba of 1948, however, this was not a simple case of military excess in the course of war. The atrocities of 1912–1913 were so widespread and prevalent that they precipitated a fact-finding commission, under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation, to investigate both the causes and consequences of the conflict. Carnegie’s authoritative findings found that all parties had committed wholesale atrocities but that these could not be solely attributed to paramilitary bands operating ostensibly outside of state control.15 On the contrary, their “softening-up” role in massacring the men among villagers or townsfolk, then setting their homes alight, represented a standard operating procedure for inducing the remainder of the unwanted inhabitants—women, children, and the elderly—to flee, thus enabling the official military force, usually a few hours’ march behind, to proclaim the town or village’s national “liberation” on their arrival—minus the “alien” elements who had previously been either a majority or significant element of the population.

The charge of atrocity extended to the Ottomans, who in recaptured districts of southeast Thrace were reported by the commission to have dealt with (mostly Bulgarian speaking) “men, women and children” of more than forty-five villages by killing them “without exception.” ¹⁶ This was a significant finding because it pointed to a government agenda aimed at the total cleansing of an area in order to repopulate it with “loyal” refugees, usually those displaced from elsewhere in the Balkans. While founding new land and homes for refugees in a much destabilized empire had been a matter of Ottoman necessity for decades, since the Young Turk “revolution” of 1908 this had taken on a much more virulent edge, as the CUP regime sought to consolidate the “Turkish” national hold by breaking up other, supposedly suspect nationalities and deporting them to the far reaches of the empire, where they would be “absorbed” by supposedly loyal populations. The principle had been debated in CUP congresses since at least 1910.¹⁷ The “local” genocide in Thrace, then the wholesale cleansing of Greek towns and villages in the Aegean littoral before the onset of Ottomania’s entry into World War I—in both cases spearheaded by violence specialists, the Teskilat-i Mahsusa—pointed to the translation of principle into lethal practice.¹⁸ A year later, the extreme crisis-conditions of invasion and potential Ottoman destruction became the state’s “military-security” pretext for further, Teskilat-i Mahsusa-led deportations of Armenians. Whether their official, empire-wide removals from Anatolia and residual Ottoman Thrace to a totally inhospitable Tigris-Euphrates desert were themselves no more than a CUP cover for intended extermination remains a debatable question. What is clear is that consciously preplanned or not, the mass deportations were quickly subsumed within a systematic program of annihilation, with hundreds of thousands of survivors of the first round of massacres and death marches (most of them women and children) intentionally wiped out in the desert region around Deir Zor in 1916.¹⁹

Yet if what Armenians call the Medz Yeghern (the catastrophe) and Syriac-speaking Christians (who suffered a parallel fate) refer to as the Sayfo (the year of the sword)20 represents the climax in the great sequence of genocidal ethnic cleansings which marked the final decline and fall of Ottomania between 1912 and 1923, it is important to remember that it was not only the CUP or their Kemalist successors who were responsible. As the empire imploded with its defeat in World War I in late 1918, Greeks and Armenians, as well as (in a more ambivalent fashion) Kurds and Circassians, aided and abetted by the Western Allies, sought to encompass as much post-Ottoman territory as they could lay their hands on, similarly assuming that possession necessitated the violent expulsion of “Turks” in favor of their own peoples.²¹

The Greek Megali Idea is a case in point. With its charismatic prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos firmly at the helm, Athens sought to promote the notion of a Greek-Christian commonwealth on both sides of the Aegean, harking back to an imperial Byzantium. This was bound in itself to appeal not just to Greeks but to Western Hellenophiles with a sense of history. But as with all ethnonational projects, the Megali Idea aimed to mobilize and primordialize a distant past in the interest of a modern, culturally homogenizing agenda.²² In 1919, as part of the Allied-enacted Treaty of Neuilly with a once-more-defeated Bulgaria, Athens sought to reverse Sofia’s World War I efforts to eliminate the Greek presence in western Thrace through an exchange of populations which were compulsory in all but name. The policy was in fact geared toward getting rid of Bulgarian speakers “at any cost.” The Greek share of this region, which had before been predominantly Turkish and Bulgarian speaking, jumped within a few years from a mere 21 percent to almost 70 percent.²³ A few months prior to Neuilly, the Paris Peace Conference (at the behest of British leader David Lloyd George) had requested that Athens disembark troops at Smyrna (modern day Izmir), ostensibly to help maintain law and order in occupied Asia Minor. In practice, however, this was another Allied green light for what Venizelos conceived of as the creation of “an ethnological wall formed out of the most healthy and the most profoundly Greek representatives of the race,” acting, in his view, as a civilized buffer between Europe and the Muslim world.²⁴

What was particularly shocking about the timing of the Smyrna venture was that it came in the same month in which the Big Three put their signature to the creation of a New States Committee (NSC) aimed at protecting communal groups, Jews in particular, from exactly the victimization of nondominant peoples which the building of nation-states in the “New Europe” was feared to augur.25 The physical protection of Greek and other minorities in Ottoman Anatolia was one thing, but if the Greeks, or anybody else for that matter, read their proxy remit as the right to dispossess unwanted communities under their jurisdiction, it killed the so-called Minorities Treaties which came out of the NSC deliberations before the protocol’s ink had even dried. That was not immediately evident, of course, because the Greek advance further into Anatolia and the massacres of Turks which accompanied it were incremental. When the Greek military campaign went into disastrous reverse in 1922, it was not the Turks who were on the receiving end but ethnic Greeks, and Armenians. The final denouement of this episode—referred to contemporaneously as the Smyrna Holocaust—was a highly visible example of how, through mass terror, murder, and engulfing flames, the majority population of a great city could be expunged within a matter of days.²⁶

If these events, then, were a foretaste of the expulsions which would happen in untold numbers of towns and shtetlech in eastern Europe, as terror-filled Jews were rounded up for the ghettos, killing pits, or gas chambers of the Holocaust, and again, albeit with different outcomes, to the Arab inhabitants of towns and villages in Palestine in 1948, the broader significance of the twilight struggle for the Ottoman spoils is twofold. On the first count, it is clear that as the conflict became an overtly national one between actual, putative, or prospective nation-states, it also became entirely social-Darwinian and hence zero-sum in character. In other words, however good intercommunal relationships were over decades or centuries at the local level in Thrace or Anatolia, these were now destroyed by the introduction of an external, destabilizing ideology. One may debate who suffered the most casualties in the atrocities which followed—within the context of the specifically Greco-Turkish conflict, the hard evidence points firmly to the Pontic and Asia Minor Greeks, their menfolk in particular. Nevertheless, there were—as in the Balkan wars—massacres on all sides. A one-dimensional narrative of barbarous perpetrators and virtuous victims is mis-reportage of what actually took place. ²⁷

On the second count, what is again shocking is the manner in which the Western Allies accepted the expulsion of peoples from one side or the other as the only way out of the conflict. True, the British foreign secretary Lord Curzon wrung his hands about the “unmixing of populations,” but this in itself had its own plangent irony given that the British—and French—were responsible in significant part for the outcome through their proposed carve-ups of the empire into national protégé spheres, first in the secret Sykes-Picot arrangement of 1916, then in the putative Treaty of Sèvres of 1920. Instead, faced with the reality of Turkish force majeure, they endorsed a radical solution founded on ethnic cleansing, with the time lapse between the agreement on the “exchange” and its implementation enabling the Turks to accelerate the anti-Greek terror. The result was that the vast majority of the 1.3 million estimated Greeks who were not killed (again, these were mostly women, children, and the elderly) but left their homes instead did so before the Lausanne Convention came into force. Unlike Neuilly, the convention made exchange compulsory. It was also final and irrevocable. There was no right of return, only promises of compensation for land and homes lost which were never honored. The only human right considered (if one can speak of human rights in the matter at all) was one offered in negation, that is, the right not to be physically liquidated but only expelled from one’s place of birth. This “right” also applied to several hundred thousand Muslim inhabitants of Greece. Indeed, it is not surprising that on both sides, those who were deported usually had much more in common, linguistically and culturally, with those who were expelling them than with the inhabitants of the receiving nation-state to which they supposedly belonged.28

But there is something more telling about this seismic yet now largely forgotten event. The Lausanne Convention was quickly upheld, most vociferously of all by the British and French, as a model for how intercommunal disputes might be resolved. Henceforth, the conventional wisdom stated that different national or religious groups could not live side by side. Instead, the thing to do was separate them. This principle was invoked, for instance, in 1937 by the British Peel Commission on Mandatory Palestine as part of its proposal to partition the land into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. ²⁹ The fact that if implemented it would have involved an almost entirely one-way transfer of Arabs from the proposed Jewish polity—even while it flew in the face of their residual convictions that the Arabs would be tolerated therein—seems not to have caused the commissioners any anxiety. Nor were they concerned, it seems, by the violent reality underlying the Lausanne precedent. By the same token, commentators up to the present day have chosen to read into the Lausanne Convention a benignity which simply was not there. Pavel Polian, an expert on Soviet forced migration, for instance, characterized the subsequent events as an example of “mutual peaceful ‘ethnic cleansing.’”³⁰

So far the thrust of these historical precedents most obviously connects to the Nakba. Yet what the Greeks remember as the “Asia Minor Catastrophe” also plays into the unfolding of the Holocaust. Because we tend to see a uniquely Nazi stamp on European ethnic cleansing between 1939 and 1945, we sometimes forget that even they were influenced by Lausanne-style considerations. The territorial “rectifications” of Versailles, which a newly hegemonic Germany oversaw in the early stages of World War II—favoring an irredentist Hungary in its takeover of northern Transylvania at Romanian expense and an irredentist Bulgaria in its takeover of southern Dobrudja, also at Romanian expense—was seen by the respective parties “as simply an extension of the League of Nations Minority Commission.”31 This hardly made the suffering which accompanied either the extreme violence (in Transylvania) or mass compulsory removals (in Dobrudja) any less traumatic. But then with the Nazi-Soviet carve-up of what remained of the Eastern European rimlands in August 1939, the principle of transferring peoples into their “correct” national polities was not just accelerating but taking on a wholly new and more terrifying dimension. Nazi Germany itself, recognizing the potential fate of an estimated one million Volksdeutsche—ethnic Germans—about to come under Soviet control in eastern Poland and the Baltic states (and later in Romanian Bessarabia), sought to forestall disaster with an emergency evacuation of as many of them as it could, although this was explained away by its primary organizer, Reichsführer-SS Himmler, as a case of “Reich strengthening.” The endless wagon trains of German peasants trundling across the river San westward into Nazi-occupied Poland contrasted with the NKVD-organized cattle-train deportations eastward to central Asia of hundreds of thousands of other of the most active national elements from these polities, as Stalin sought to foreclose their independence. But that could be no more than cold comfort to the Poles and Jews of Nazi-conquered western Poland, who began to be deported in 1940 into the central area of the country now known as the General Government in order to make room for the displaced Volksdeutsche.³²

With hindsight, these developments might appear as the sinister antechamber to the “Final Solution.” Yet seen through a contemporary lens, they might also justifiably be interpreted as the final stages in the Nazis’ desperate bid—through deportation—to be rid of the ever-increasing number of Jews in their expanding Reich.³³ Stalin had stymied Germany in its attempts to force as many Polish Jews as possible across the San and Bug Rivers in the opposite direction of the incoming ethnic Germans, thus frustrating SS efforts to place them in temporary ghettos or, alternatively, in a vast Lublin reservation pending a mass exodus eastward. As a result, Berlin scoured the world for an alternative mass dumping ground. Again, what we remember today as the Madagascar Plan to remove all four million or so of the European Jews then under Nazi hegemony to the French colonial territory, hypothetically available from summer 1940 following the defeat of France, was the very same dystopian mirage to which Warsaw and Bucharest had been looking for some time to export their “Jewish problems.”³⁴ With the British fleet largely in control of the high seas, thereby denying a practical implementation of the SS project, Hitler’s default position remained the defeat and conquest of the USSR, thus enabling the mass expulsion of European Jews to the far Soviet interior, a fate shared by the peoples already genocidally deposited there by Stalin.

To be sure, mass Jewish killings were underway in the course of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941, even before his realization that the USSR could not be militarily defeated, rendering inoperable this “last resort” option. Yet even at this point, as the deportation agenda began to spill over into first a Russian Jewish, then a total European Jewish extermination, the question of what to do with Jewish expellees—and not just the expellees from the Reich—continued to inform genocidal outcomes. Notable is what happened at the Nazi-occupied Soviet Ukrainian city of Kamenets-Podolsk in late August 1941. The massacre there of some 23,600 Jews is considered by historians as a step change in the implementation of the “Final Solution,” not only because it yielded the first five-figure death toll but also because it was one of the first systematic liquidations of men, women, and children. Yet what is often overlooked is that the majority of those killed were not local Soviet Jews but citizens of Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, and Romania who had been turned into unwanted stateless refugees by Hungarian and Romanian authorities and then expelled over the nearby frontier.35

What is arguably even more telling is that the German response to this refugee influx fed back into other Axis-state calculations as to how they might deal with their own Jews tout ensemble. Slovakia, a new and rather weak Nazi satellite, sought to dispense with a large proportion of its Jews by paying the SS in spring 1942 to ship them across the former Polish border, the Slovaks thereby making themselves party to the origins of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex as European-Jewish extermination facility par excellence.³⁶ The Romanians, by contrast, insisted on a cleansing of their own volition. Their initial efforts to deport Jews from “liberated” northern Bukovina and Bessarabia across the Dniester in the course of Operation Barbarossa quickly took on very similar, chaotic contours to the Turkish death marches of Armenians a quarter of a century earlier. But with the Antonescu regime stymied by Red Army resistance of its aspirations for mass Jewish exit to the Soviet interior, Bucharest had to make do with a giant, sprawling dumping ground—Transnistria—on the far side of the Dniester. To be sure, this took the form, by and large, of a slow-speed route to death, facilitated by starvation and illness—but not before the Romanian military and police had carried out some of the largest massacres of Romanian and Soviet Jewish citizens of the Holocaust.³⁷

What is also noteworthy about the ultranationalist—but not overtly fascist—Antonescu regime is that its grand purification agenda was not just about its Jews but about all five million of its non-Romanian population. Bucharest got as far as deporting some twenty-five thousand Roma across the Dniester (half of them to their deaths) but was never able to put into practice its detailed plans for the “transfer” or exchange of its Bulgarian, Hungarian, Serbian, Ukrainian, and German populations—along with the remainder of it Jewish, Roma, and other assorted “minorities”—and their replacement by incoming Romanian settlers.³⁸ But then Romania’s obsession with ethnic reordering was neither a solely wartime concern nor anything other than a mirror image of every other rimland’s polity, practically without exception.

It is true that some of the Nazis protégés were more gung ho about carrying through these agendas than others. The undoubtedly-fascist Croat Ustasha regime in Zagreb, for instance, set about exterminating its small Jewish and Roma populations with what the German regime considered exemplary zeal, though Berlin then raised the alarm at the scale of violence the Ustasha’s Black Legion militia deployed in their efforts to be rid of their two million or more Serbs. This again suggests a certain piquant irony, as Zagreb was in part responding to Berlin’s request to make room for 170,000 Slovenes it wanted resettled from the spoils of its Yugoslav annexations, the quid pro quo being the deportation of an equivalent number of Serbs into the rump territory of a puppet Belgrade. As always, these mass demographic reorderings had limited timescales for their completion, which may have been the primary impetus for Ustasha leader Ante Pavelic to go for broke and eliminate or forcibly assimilate all Serbs on Croat soil. Some 180,000 of them were killed in the first four months of Ustasha rule alone.39 This in turn precipitated the first popular uprising of World War II and a descent into a Balkan sequence of “wars of all against all,” whose signature was as much interethnic violence as Nazi genocidal reprisal.⁴⁰

Nor should we assume that the primary perpetrators were only on the Axis side. Further south, a pro-Axis Bulgarian attempt to reannex eastern Macedonia and Thrace—lost to the Greeks in 1919—on the coattails of the Nazi victory in 1941 involved an attempt to either eliminate or reduce the Greek population by fire, sword, and starvation—with the destruction of the region’s Jews as a further subtext—only for the whole thing to be thrown into reverse at war’s end with the pro-Allies, nationalist Greeks using the cover of anticommunist civil war to almost completely eliminate the region’s Slavic-speaking inhabitants once and for all.⁴¹

What is the common denominator in this wretched (if only partial) litany of genocidal expulsions and deportations? The answer is nationalism and an attempt to apply it in regions where it went against the grain of actual, lived human reality—in short, something which could only be done by extreme violence. And its geopolitical corollary was the Lausanne wisdom that the creation of stable new states could only be built on the basis of (an in practice illusory) ethnic homogeneity. Today when we think of the most egregious and flagrant abuse of international norms we rightly turn to Nazi Holocaust and Lebensraum as our benchmark. Even so, at the end of the World War II, it was the Allies who promoted the single largest act of ethnic cleansing in modern history: the compulsory transfer of some twelve million Germans from the lands of the “New Europe” while at the same time conveniently burying the Minorities Treaties, the last flimsy, residual barrier from the previous world war against a world order founded on ethnic domination.42 It was the mindset of this brave new world against which we need to set the events taking us from Jewish annihilation to Palestinian destruction.

In August 1941, Winston Churchill, alongside US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, issued a ringing statement of Anglo-American intentions for a postconflict international order, in which self-government would be restored to those deprived of it, territorial changes or aggrandizement disallowed when opposed by self-governing people, and all nations afforded “the means of dwelling within their own boundaries…[so that men] may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.”⁴³ But in retrospect, it was perhaps what was not enunciated in this famous Atlantic Charter which matters most. Three years later, Churchill, citing the Greco-Turkish exchange as precedent, proclaimed to the British parliament Allied postwar intentions for the dispersed German communities of the east:

Was Churchill implying that mass eviction—ethnic cleansing—could be accomplished without violence? Perhaps he did not know or care to know how his ally Stalin in just the previous year had removed six whole Muslim and non-Muslim nations—Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Karachai and Balkars—from south and southwest Russia to central Asia in a manner which, far from being nonviolent, was utterly genocidal.45 But then Stalin had his alibi: these nations were “enemies of the people”; the security of the now, the stability of the future depending on their punishment and removal to some distant “nowhere.” Nor, apparently, was he alone in wishing to ensure that peace and well-being writ large should not be destabilized by the supposed disruptive behavior or, just possibly, the superfluity of peoples—many more of whom, after 1944, in part or in whole, followed the six aforementioned nations in their long cattle-truck journeys eastward. We now know, for instance, that Roosevelt had a secret wartime team of experts at his at beck and call, the so-called M-Project (M for migration), whose remit was to consider the mass migration of anywhere between ten and twenty million “surplus” Europeans—on the rather colonial premise that they could be settled somewhere, even if that meant the most obscure corners of the globe.⁴⁶ Roosevelt’s thinking was especially driven by Jewish “refugees”—an anxiety shared by the British Foreign Office to the extent that in spring 1946 it solicited Moscow as to whether Holocaust survivors could be settled in the thoroughly obscure “Jewish” territory of Birobidzhan, in the Soviet far east.⁴⁷ But there was another tack in this sort of M-Project thinking which again harked back to Lausanne: get the Arabs in Palestine to make way for the creation of a Jewish majority—and hence a Jewish state—by transferring them to Iraq.⁴⁸

Any prospect of such plans being implemented through an M-Project-envisaged, UN-administered, International Settlement Authority (ISA) died with Roosevelt. But the point here is that the postwar international climate was sufficiently favorable toward solutions based on top-down, forced population movements that any negative appraisal was regarded as little more than sanctimonious. That “displacement” or deportation, for instance, might have had something to do with genocide was consciously kept out of discussions leading to the creation of the UN Genocide Convention (1948), save one passing, uninvited—and curtly suffocated—effort in the General Assembly by the Syrian delegate.⁴⁹ The terrible paradox, however, is that it was none other than Hitler who had opened up the possibilities for deportations being directly implemented by a liberal world order. Here is David Ben-Gurion’s take on the matter in 1941:

In the present war the idea of transferring a population is gaining more sympathy as a practical and the most secure means of solving the dangerous and painful problem of national minorities. The war has already brought the resettlement of many peoples in eastern and southern Europe, and in the plans for post-war settlements the idea of a large-scale population transfer in central, eastern and southern Europe increasingly occupies a respectable place.⁵⁰

Ben-Gurion’s own backroom boys had been working on the idea of a mass “transfer” of Arabs since at least the time of the Peel Commission; one highly considered destination being the Jazirah, the desert triangle straddling Iraq and Syria where in 1915 and 1916 the lives of so many Armenian deportees had been forfeit.51 The name we most associate with this covert agenda is Josef Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund’s Land Department; in fact Weitz has become notoriously synonymous with the expulsions of 1948.⁵² But if we placed him alongside individuals such as Sabin Manuilă, the director of the Romanian Central Statistics Institute, or Sofia’s Foreign Ministry–sponsored academics who devised its blueprint of 1941 on “the Strengthening of Bulgarisation in the Aegean provinces,” we would find him to be a rather typical example of a rimlands technocrat driven by uncompromising ethnonationalist convictions.⁵³ More pointedly, if we are looking for an obvious model for Ben-Gurion’s argument for the transfer of Arabs, or indeed for Chaim Weizmann’s diplomatic overtures in 1941 in favor of the same, it is to Edvard Benes, the unimpeachably liberal Czech prime minister in exile in London, that we might turn.

A month prior to Ben-Gurion’s confidential memorandum, Benes had publicly stated that compulsory transfers of Germans from Czechoslovakia could “be made amicably under decent human conditions.”⁵⁴ It was Benes’s supposed moderation which fed into a consensual—if not necessarily immediate—Allied imprimatur in favor of Czech odsun (transfer). In practice, Prague’s first major cleansing, in the summer of 1945, of some 800,000 of its German population into the Allied zones of control in Germany and Austria, far from evincing moderation, was carried out with a ruthlessness and brutality which left not fewer than thirty to forty thousand dead and many more incarcerated, in what the British press were to describe as Czech Belsens.⁵⁵ But by then the violent expulsions and “exchanges” of peoples throughout Eastern Europe were a fait accompli. Nor were they simply symptomatic of a demotic vengefulness in the face of what had been done to Czechs by Germans or Axis collaborators. On the contrary, the softening up by sheer terror and atrocity perpetrated by “national” militias in the Czech lands, as elsewhere, was simply a convenient cover for what state leaders, Benes included, knew was their best opportunity to clear out unwanted populations while the going was good. Or, to paraphrase Dragisa Vasic, a leading wartime Serbian-Chetnik ideologue: other countries would be too busy with their own problems to care about whether an unwanted population was being annihilated somewhere else.⁵⁶

It is within this framework that the contours of the ethnic cleansing not only in Palestine but also, almost simultaneously, in India (albeit within a rather different colonial frame of reference and with much larger death and displacement tolls) need to be set. The fact that in terms of the act of tihur (cleansing) what a nascent Israel did to Palestinians was not exceptional hardly makes it any less egregious, not least given that somewhere in that reckoning is the knowledge of what had happened to Jews just two or three years earlier. But then the historical record we have presented is of victims—or rather those claiming to speak for “a national community” of victims—justifying themselves as perpetrators, with one notable historical irony. For Ben-Gurion, the figure at the center of the struggle for Israel, nothing was more important than that the Jewish condition should be normalized, by which he meant that Jews, by becoming a national people within their own sovereign national territory, would become like other people, thereby bringing to a close centuries of anti-Semitism. Whether he achieved the latter goal is debatable. But on one level he certainly did achieve normalization, by the same route as practically every nation-state which emerged out of the rimlands’ shatterzone had already taken: ethnic cleansing.

In the first instance, let us suppose it had not been the Haganah and the Israel Defense Forces but the Arab opposition which had won the conflict of 1947–1948. We should not need to be reminded that for Israelis as for Palestinians this was an existential struggle. For the former, in addition to military casualties that were massive relative to the size of their army and their overall population, there were also civilian massacres which fed an underlying Jewish anxiety about what awaited them if they were to lose the war.57

One might retort that there is no evidence of equivalent mass-removal plans on the Arab side as there were within Ben-Gurion’s government in waiting—secretive, unofficial, and tentative as those plans were. But then it was not just the violence of the Palestinian response to Zionist encroachment through the period of the British Mandate which may explain the Yishuv’s besieged mentality. We know that the so-called Assyrian affair in Iraq in 1933, in which the minority, refugee Nestorian community suffered military atrocities at the hands of a recently independent Baghdad, raised alarm bells in Tel Aviv, as it did in the mind of the genocide campaigner Raphael Lemkin.58 Six years later, the “return” of the sanjak of Alexandretta from French mandate Syria to Turkey, despite its non-Turkish majority population and the terrorization and flight into Syria and Lebanon of tens of thousands of Armenians as well as Christian and Muslim Arabs, equally suggested a gloomy forecast for any minority community in the region.⁵⁹ Moreover, if we were to take the rimlands as our model, a rising Arab-national consciousness presented the possibility of a victorious Palestine ethnically cleansing its Jews, an outcome that might have been just as plausible as the inverse scenario. In June 1941, a mob atrocity against the two-millennia-old Baghdad Jewish community—the so-called Farhud—perpetrated in the aftermath of a failed coup by Rashid Ali (an Iraqi nationalist, Nazi supporter, and beneficiary of the support of Hajj Amin al-Husayni) offered one stark indicator of exactly such a prospect.⁶⁰ In the rimlands, as we have seen, ethnic cleansing had been repeatedly mutual, not simply one-sided, depending on which nation-state builders had the upper hand at any given point. The severely under researched causes of the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Mizrahi Jews from Arab lands to Israel after 1948—whether they were pushed, pulled, cajoled, or coerced—also need to be considered within this wider historical framework.⁶¹

But if all this speaks to the dark side of history, there is another side to the rimlands equation which needs restating in the context of Palestine and of the Middle East in general. Ethnonationalists in the Macedonian region today hate the reminder of what it once was: a mazemata—“a collection of people and social groups from different places,” many of whom had arrived quite recently and who, despite the resulting plethora of ethnic communities, were “tied together in a complex web of interaction.”⁶² The description could apply to anywhere in the rimlands, just as it could also describe pre-Mandate Palestine, where before modern political Zionism or Arab nationalism flattened ethnographic variation and turned “permeable boundaries…into rigidly patrolled national cages,” Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived side by side in plural, multifaceted coexistence.⁶³ The notion of different Middle Eastern peoples coexisting within the same habitat would seem remote today, not just by dint of a deafening sectarianism but more precisely because of the cultural homogeneity which nation-statism had already attempted to impose. Yet in the imperial rimlands before the nation-state became hegemonic there were plenty of progressive models—Austro-Marxism, for instance, or the lived practice of Salonika’s post-1908, multiethnic Socialist Workers Federation—working though how different cultural, linguistic, and ethnic communities might develop consociationally under the aegis of a single, color-blind state. Some of these ideas have also infiltrated the Palestinian landscape in plans for a specifically binational state, as first as enunciated by the Jewish founders of Brit Shalom, and then by their successor group, Ihud, in the 1930s and 1940s. Such ideas have been articulated more recently still through the advocacy of Jewish and Palestinian intellectuals, in the latter case as an extension of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s 1969 resolution in favor of a democratic, nonsectarian state for Muslims, Christians, and Jews.⁶⁴

To be sure, the need for accommodation between ethnic groups has always spoken to a less streamlined, less fast-paced path to modernity than that of sacro egoismo. It is significant that Moshe Shertok, the avowedly doveish political secretary of the Jewish Agency and later Israeli Foreign Secretary, when faced with the 1947 Ihud plan for a binational Palestine objected to it on the grounds that it gave to the “static” Arabs “a stranglehold on development”—not least on the “dynamic” Zionist agenda for a mass absorption of Jewish immigrants.65 But then Shertok was no different from any other political nationalist in his rejection of any diminution of national sovereignty, the one thing C. A. Macartney, the sane and accomplished secretary to the interwar League of Nations, thought firmly off the international agenda with regard to the “problem” of difference within the “New Europe.” But, said Macartney, that left only three alternatives: revision of frontiers to minimize the demographic weight of minorities within the state; emigration and/or population exchange; and finally, physical slaughter.⁶⁶

However, if it has not just been Jews and Palestinians but a slew of humanity who have suffered some or all of these lived nightmares in the recent past, the stricture that we are disallowed from rethinking the political terms and conditions upon which societal conviviality is built is no longer tenable. In a world in which accelerating biospheric crisis, including acute water scarcity, cuts across political fault lines, it is not utopian for people to wish to bequeath a tolerable future to their children and grandchildren. Of necessity that will require a form of healing—a tikkun—based on the virtues of human scale, and with it a cooperative politics of “together with” and “alongside,” not “against.”