In the 20th century, when the Arabs regained power after the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the practice was resumed. Indeed, no sooner were the Arabs handed power by the British in Mesopotamia (Iraq) in the 1930s, than they proceeded to kill or drive out large numbers of Christian Assyrians.

In recent years, the Arabs have violently driven out of ancient Kurdish lands hundreds of thousands of Kurds, and Arabized the country. In Egypt, beginning with the riots in September 1951, large groups of Greeks, Armenians, and Italians had their property seized, and were forced out of Alexandria and, subsequently, out of once-cosmopolitan Egypt. In Libya, the mercurial Qaddaffi has on more than one occasion expelled fellow-Arabs, mostly Egyptian and "Palestinian" Arabs, in the tens of thousands, and also recently expelled tens of thousands of black Africans (this expulsion was accompanied by the public lynching of black Africans, including one diplomat, by Libyan Arabs -- an event that went strangely unremarked in the Western press). Saudi Arabia expelled more than 1 million Yemeni Arab workers overnight, claiming to fear an internal threat of subversion. Morocco and Algeria, in their proxy war over the Polisario movement, expelled each other's nationals. The most recent mass expulsion in the Middle East took place in 1991, when overnight 400,000 "Palestinian" Arabs were forced out of Kuwait, because of their collaboration with the Iraqi invaders.

But there is one place in the world where, in the midst of all these examples, many defensible (the Czech expulsion of the Sudeten Germans being the most defensible), some less so (the Saudi expulsion of 1 million Yemenis), people who have every right to consider such a possibility have felt abashed even to consider it. That place is Israel. Some Israelis have internalized the double standards of the rest of the world, and insist on imposing on themselves requirements and moral inhibitions that no one else, anywhere, has assumed. This whole business of being a "light unto the nations" can be carried to a suicidal extreme; the most persecuted tribe in human history has no obligation to the world to refrain from extricating itself from possibly mortal danger, and certainly need not require the citizens of its state to permanently accept living with people who have made clear they delight in the mass murder of Israeli civilians.

Reason demands that all measures of national self-defense be considered. Some Israelis believe that the most they can do is build a wall, but a wall will concede a kind of de facto recognition of the initial Arab demands. It is being built not along the Jordan, but along the line the Arabs now claim was established by the Armistice Agreement of 1949 as Israel's border (though they never recognized it as such). The Israeli refrain of despair, accompanied by a studied refusal to seriously study other possible responses, encourages the Arabs.

In public opinion polls, 80% of the "Palestinian" Arabs have expressed their heartfelt support for suicide-massacres. Many of those 80% might, to some degree, actively help in the commission of such massacres. Israelis are under no obligation to live indefinitely in a state of maximum insecurity, an insecurity far greater than what the Czechs or Poles faced in 1945, or what any of those who have engaged in population transfers or mass expulsions faced -- including Turkey, Greece, India, Pakistan, and a host of other countries (Cambodia, at this very minute, is attempting to expel large numbers of Vietnamese). The fact that many in the "civilized" world have not experienced such threats, and are fed information by unsympathetic-to-Israel media outlets (beginning with the BBC and Agence France-Press, and ending with National Public Radio) is part of the problem. Another is the widespread collapse of training in historical awareness (so the many, and recent, historical parallels are unknown); this prevents many outside Israel from making relevant comparisons, and certainly few feel keenly what it must be like to live in Israel today.

Rational discussion of what sort of large-scale expulsion of Arabs might be undertaken, and for what reasons, and in what circumstances, and with what explanation, and through what means, makes sense. Even to raise the issue at all, and to provide the historical parallels, would help Israel make its case. For then those who oppose it will have to present their reasons for distinguishing, for example, the case of the Sudeten Germans, from that of the "Palestinian" Arabs. It will necessarily raise the real issues, and not the false issues of "Jewish-occupied Arab land." As a matter of rights derived from history, from morality, and from international law (both the Mandate for Palestine, and international legal precedents regarding wars of defense) it would be far more accurate to describe Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") and Gaza not as the BBC and Al-Jazeera consistently do, as "Jewish-occupied Arab land" but more accurately, as "Arab-occupied Jewish land."

There is no solution to the Arab assault on the Infidel state of Israel. There is only the possibility of a long-term standoff, which will have to include an understanding, by the rest of the Infidel world, that for its own sake it will have to permanently deprive not only Iraq, but the entire Arab Muslim world, to the extent possible, of weapons of mass destruction. And while that state of truce -- not the result of a "peace" treaty, but a truce -- continues, it will be enforced by Israel's threat of retaliation. But within its own defensible borders (the Jordan River being the only sensible one to the east, and including the Golan Heights to the north), Israelis have to allow themselves

Outpost               - 4 -               October 2002