Time to Move

A dominant theme in the news at the moment is of people on the move, from the anxious queues at the Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt to the forced repatriation of Afghan refugees from Pakistan. From a UK perspective, the issue of migration has been a persistent theme since the media focus on "bogus" asylum-seekers in the 1990s, and obviously played a crucial role in the upswell of euroscepticism between the accession of Eastern European states in 2004 and the EU referendum in 2016. The most recent manifestation, the so-called small boats crisis - itself a relatively minor subset of the number of asylum claims, which is currently around 80,000 a year - obviously pales in comparison to the prospect of 1.7 million Afghanis moved against their will. Beyond the immediate horizon, the continuing flow of migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean littoral, and the growing number of people displaced by environmental degradation arising from climate change, suggests that this century will be defined by the ebb and flow of populations.

Not everyone drawing our attention to the mass displacement of Afghan refugees by Pakistan is arguing for a more humane policy towards refugees generally. For some, it is simply an opportunity to insist that Israel should not be singled out for the crime of ethnic cleansing. But however callous the forced repatriation of refugees might be, it isn't the same as displacing people from their homeland. Of course, the issue becomes blurred over time. Some of those Afghanis were born and brought up in Pakistan, their parents having fled in the 1980s. As the Windrush scandal made clear, states are institutionally oblivious to how quickly people can put down roots, and how even within a single family the understanding of where "home" is can vary (a point well made in Horace Ové's recently reissued film Pressure). But it's also the case that public opinion tends to be sanguine about ethnic cleansing so long as there are no deaths involved, hence the minimal outcry over the Armenians who have fled Nagorno-Karabakh. 

Inasmuch as events in Pakistan have a parallel with those in Israel, it is in the leaked government discussion about the feasibility of expelling the Palestinians of Gaza into Sinai. There's certainly no parallel with the possibility of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan or Egypt being expelled back into the areas of Israel they left under duress in 1948. There are close to 110 million refugees in the world today, a majority of whom are internally displaced - i.e. they haven't crossed an international border. This figure has risen rapidly over the last decade, largely due to the conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine. If we include migrants - that is people who have moved for a better life but do not yet enjoy the rights of citizenship in their host country - the global population of those living outside their country of origin is 184 million. Add the 62 million internally displaced and you have a global population of almost a quarter of a billion people who have been uprooted: approximately 3% of humankind.

What these figures don't include is the routine deracination that doesn't qualify as forced displacement. This is a combination of economic mobility (moving for work or education), precarious tenancy (a growing problem as homeownership and social renting both decline) and the forced evictions of slum clearances. In his 2006 book, Planet of Slums, Mike Davis noted that "Urban segregation is not a frozen status quo, but rather a ceaseless social war in which the state intervenes regularly ... to redraw spatial boundaries to the advantage of landowners, foreign investors, elite homeowners and middle-class commuters." The result is that "every year hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of poor people - legal tenants as well as squatters - are forcibly evicted from Third World neighborhoods". The point is that the displacement of people is a constant of capitalism and has been since the initial movement between countryside and town driven by the agrarian and industrial revolutions (the global population became predominantly urban in 2007).

Viewed in this larger context, the struggle for a Jewish homeland during the twentieth century appears like a quixotic act of defiance against capitalism. This was one reason for the emergence of the kibbutz movement's combination of Zionism and socialism, in contrast to the universalist Jewish Bund that prioritised class solidarity across ethnic boundaries. But leftist kibbutzim, despite their presence among the victims of the Hamas attack, are atypical in Israel today, at least in comparsion to the West Bank settlements. While the Palestinian villages they displace are usually agricultural, those villages exist within a geographical hierarchy of small towns and cities housing industry and commercial services (however weak the Palestinian economy may be). In contrast, the Jewish settlements of the West Bank are typically isolated and reliant on communication with towns and cities within the pre-1967 borders. Approximately 60% of the employed population in the settlements works in Israel proper. In other words, the settlements are gated communities made up of commuters and privileged religious groups, the latter of whom are as detached from Israeli society as from Palestinian.

The only way that the Jewish settlements in the West Bank can be functionally incorporated into Israel is if the Palestinians are expelled from Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron so that these and other cities and towns become fully Jewish components of Israel's society and economy. This in turn means that a two-state solution is only viable on the basis of the 1967 borders, which would mean Jews being expelled from all of the settlements constructed in the West Bank since then, just as they were forcibly removed, by the Isreali government, from within the territory of the Gaza Strip in 2005. Liberals who advocate for a two-state solution are usually vague on these practical details, despite the very obvious "facts on the ground", preferring to deride "extremism" on both sides. For example, Jonathan Freedland thinks "the contest that matters most is the battle of hardliners v moderates, or, to be more specific, maximalists v partitionists: those who insist on having the whole land for themselves v those who are ready to share it". 

Freedland's predictably nebulous solution would see "an end to the settlement project in the West Bank and the concession of territory", but an end is not the same as a dismantling. It's clear than many hope the existing settlements can be preserved, even if there is a moratorium on further expansion, and that the major territorial concession will therefore be by the Palestinians, not Israel. But this will leave a dysfunctional West Bank, crippling both a Palestinian state (the current weakness of the Palestinian National Authority isn't solely down to corruption or incompetence) and acting as a fiscal drain on Israel. The territory needs to have integrity. If that cannot be achieved through a single-state solution, then the two states need to be cleanly disentangled. In other words, the best hope is for a bloodless ethnic cleansing. And the only practical way that could be implemented would be for Israel to withdraw all of its citizens from the West Bank (and the Golan Heights) to within its 1967 borders. 

Clearly there isn't much prospect of that happening, and the likes of Freedland would no doubt consider it "extreme", even though it was the original logic of the two-state solution. Likewise, there is little chance of a single-state solution in the foreseeable future, particularly a unitary democracy in which the Palestinian disapora would have the right of return and possible repossession of property, so raising the prospect of Israel neither being a formally Jewish state nor having a Jewish majority population. The outcome that currently appears to have the greatest chance of being realised is the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from the West Bank, whose incremental progress has stepped up in recent weeks. When Western politicians talk about it not being the right time to consider a ceasefire in Gaza, insisting that the IDF should have the chance to wipe out Hamas first, we should bear in mind that this is consistent with their refusal to consider BDS as an appropriate response to the encroachment of settlements and outposts in the West Bank. Our politicians and media have been endorsing a slow-motion ethnic cleansing for decades.