Ethnic Cleansing and the Stakes in Gaza

What's left of the liberal international order may be on the line

Map of the ethnic Serb population of Croatia circa 1981.

---

Back in 2002 or thereabouts, at the height of the Second Intifada, I remember sitting with my boss on the trading desk, reading the latest awful news, and him saying, “don’t you get the feeling sometimes that things would be a lot simpler if Israel just didn’t exist?” To which I responded, quietly, that perhaps so, but the world was full of people who, for other people, it would be convenient if they didn’t exist. Are they supposed to stop existing for those other people’s convenience?

I’ve heard similar sentiments off and on over the years from various people about the Palestinians. Wouldn’t it have been better if they’d all been expelled in 1948? Or in 1967? Not only for Israel, but for them—wouldn’t they have better lives in some other country? To which I give a similar answer: if they’d rather be elsewhere, they would be by now. You’re just saying it would be more convenient if they didn’t exist.

From a very high and amoral vantage point, though, one unconcerned about ethical niceties, it’s not hard to point to situations where ethnic cleansing—because that’s what we’re talking about—has, to all appearances, improved things for everyone. Consider as an example Operation Storm.

In 1991, Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia. Immediately thereafter, Serb militias in the Serb-dominated Krajina region declared their own independence from Croatia, and began cleansing their territory of ethnic Croats, driving over 200,000 Croats into territory controlled by the Croatian government. In 1995, Croatia turned the tables. They launched Operation Storm, a decisive attack on the breakaway Serb republic that controlled the Krajina region, reconquering the territory, and driving nearly the entire Serb population out.

Some Serb refugees from Croatia have returned since then, but only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands who fled or were expelled during the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. Largely as a result of displacement, the ethnically Serb population of Croatia shrank from nearly 600,000 pre-independence to 200,000 a few years after the war’s end. The Croatia that emerged from the war is a successful and largely homogeneous ethno-state, whose main demographic challenge today primarily is a top-heavy population pyramid resultant from a persistently low fertility rate. Meanwhile, Serbia itself has prospered since the fall of Slobodan Milošević and the end of the dream of Greater Serbia. The country is smaller, but also stabler, more homogeneous, and more readily integrated into Europe’s economy and institutions.

Ethnic cleansing has happened and is still happening more often than many people realize. Only last year, Azerbaijan crushed the breakaway Republic of Artsakh, whose ethnic Armenian population fled en masse fearing they would be expelled or killed by the conquerors. Nationalist movements around the world have transitioned smoothly from seeking self-determination to suppressing minority identities, and modern European history in particular is substantially the story of a concerted drive toward ethnic uniformity, achieved through a combination of agglomerating new national states out of pre-modern political entities, suppressing subsidiary ethnic identities, transferring populations between states, and carving out new ethno-states for geographically concentrated minorities.

Israel itself was the beneficiary of two campaigns of ethnic cleansing. One was conducted by Israel, when in 1948 upwards of 80% of the Palestinian Arab population of the eventual territory of the State of Israel fled or were expelled during Israel’s war of independence, the event that Palestinians refer to as the nakba or “catastrophe.” The other was conducted by much of the Arab world, as Egypt, Iraq and other countries with Jewish communities dating back hundreds or even thousands of years dispossessed and expelled their Jewish populations, a substantial fraction of which went to Israel, where the Sephardi and Mizrahi communities are now the demographic plurality of the country.

But ethnic cleansing is a war crime—and deservedly called such. A bedrock principle of the liberal international order established by the Allies after World War II was that war against civilians that was the notable characteristic of both that war and its aftermath, would no longer be permitted, at least not where the liberal powers held sway. Which is why the most notable things about Operation Storm are: that it happened in Europe, long after the establishment of the post-World War II “liberal international order,” and it had the (unofficial) support of the United States.

America had no particular interest in the expulsion of the Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia, of course. We did have an interest, though, in bringing the Yugoslav wars to a conclusion, and in a post-war Croatia that was viable enough to be integrated into Western European institutions. A successful Croatian offensive to route the separatist Serbian militias would—and did—facilitate both goals: it not only ended the war in Croatia on favorable terms to that country, but also forced the Yugoslav government to give up on its dream of Greater Serbia and accept peace negotiations in Bosnia, leading to the end of that war as well. The ethnic cleansing of the Krajina Serbs wasn’t an American goal, but it was a predictable and acceptable side effect the goals we did have.

I’ve engaged in this long digression into history because an increasing chorus of liberal, left and far-left observers are asking whether the United States is facilitating another, much larger ethnic cleansing in Gaza. I think it’s worth taking that possibility seriously, and considering the likely consequences.

The official policy of the United States is that we are doing nothing of the kind. Yes, we are supporting Israel, but Israel is engaged in a justified war against an enemy—Hamas—that only three months ago perpetrated the worst massacre of innocent Jewish civilians since the Holocaust, and the war aim we are supporting is limited to the destruction of Hamas as a militarily-capable entity. After that is accomplished, we want the Palestinian Authority to take control of Gaza and supervise its reconstruction with financial support from America, Europe and the Arab world. Yes, we are also aware that Israel’s current government includes parties whose leaders are openly calling for the removal of most of Gaza’s population, and the resettlement of the territory by Jewish Israelis. But as Yair Rosenberg and others have pointed out, the Biden administration has repeatedly and forcefully attacked anyone who has voiced such sentiments, the purpose of said attacks being to drive a wedge between Netanyahu and the extreme right parties in his coalition, and eventually cause his government to fall and be replaced by a more stable, popular and non-extreme government led by Benny Gantz.

Netanyahu, though, is well aware of how badly he needs the support of the far right to remain in power. The only way his government falls and early elections are called is if either his own party or his far right allies abandon him—and his own party knows that new elections will cost them their jobs, so they won’t abandon him. Meanwhile, the escalating humanitarian crisis in Gaza may well be moving on a faster timetable than Israeli coalition politics. If Gazans begin to die of starvation, or from outbreaks of pneumonia or cholera, the humanitarian case for letting the civilian population of Gaza flee the war zone will be unassailable, if it isn’t already. Under those circumstances, will America actually oppose letting them escape? Or will we, regretfully, conclude that we have no choice but to try to save lives even at the cost of giving Bezalel Smotrich exactly what he wants?

Indeed, even if Gaza’s food and health situation stabilizes with an influx of emergency aid, that doesn’t mean that normal life in Gaza will resume. Much of the housing stock has been destroyed, and Gaza’s government, such as it was, has been shattered. Yet once the situation has stabilized, Israelis—and not just the far right—will likely resist pressure to bring in any new entity that they do not control to administer Gaza, for fear that doing so will lead to new security threats. If they succeed in resisting, the future in Gaza could be beyond bleak. It’s possible that the people of Gaza will cling to the land so fiercely that they will endure a new normal that is far worse than living under the combination of Hamas’s brutal regime and Israel’s blockade. But how many, and for how long?

At this point, most of the kinds of people who follow this chain of logic will argue that this is why the United States must pressure Israel to end its war, and why we must interpose some other force into Gaza—whether American or European or Egyptian or pan-Arab—to provide security for both Israelis and Gazans, and allow for proper reconstruction. But I’m not going to make that argument, because I don’t think that’s going to happen. Overt pressure to end a war that Israelis overwhelmingly continue to support could be a lifeline for the Netanyahu government, allowing him to posture as the only one prepared to stand up to said pressure. That’s particularly the case given that both Biden and Netanyahu know no such pressure would be forthcoming from a second Trump administration, knowledge which should encourage Netanyahu to wait Biden out while playing to a sympathetic chorus in the GOP Congress. (That’s precisely how he handled the Obama administration’s pressure.) Most crucially, though, it won’t happen because no other country—very much including America—has any desire to interpose itself between the IDF and Hamas.

No, I’m writing this post to make a different point. Ethnic cleansing in Gaza still strikes me as unlikely—the numbers involved are enormous, an order of magnitude larger than in Nagorno-Karabakh or the Krajina, and there is no one opening their arms to accept the Palestinians of Gaza as brothers the way Armenia and Serbia respectively did their ethnic fellows. But the possibility can no longer be ignored. I still hope that the terrible logic of this war will shift, that the Israeli public will remember who was in charge on October 7th and ditch not only Netanyahu but his whole political persuasion, and that, ultimately, we’ll look back at this period as the darkness before the much-deferred dawn. But I’m not counting on it. The Israeli far right might yet get its fondest wish—and if it does I don’t think considerations of justice will impel America to prevent it from doing so.

But considerations of prudence might. So what I want to point out is the practical consequence of ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

It’s possible that, in the short term, the practical consequences would be less than people fear. There’s the possibility of a larger regional war, but Hezbollah hasn’t launched a full-on war against Israel yet despite repeated threats to do so, and even an expanded regional war might mean a lot of death and destruction but no real change in terms of America’s position. (Indeed, the most likely scenario for the expulsion of a large number of civilians from Gaza is in the context of a larger regional war, so the arrow of causation probably runs the other way.) Once exiled, the Palestinians would be even more of a cause célèbre than they already are, but they’d know they lived on sufferance wherever they were admitted, and how many divisions does Amnesty International have anyway?

Any short-term quiet, though, would be illusory. The bigger picture would be dark indeed. Israel would have achieved something like what Milošević had aimed at—and done so under American sponsorship. It would therefore be clear, to the entire world, that these are the new rules of the game, for all teams. Today, if Russia or China allows or facilitates or even engages in conquest and expulsion, that demonstrates the limits of America’s ability to prevent such things things; ditto if they happen far from any major power’s area of influence. But Israel is not only an American client, but arguably our most visible one. Regardless of what we may claim, its actions are widely understood to have our imprimatur.

The United States is currently engaged in a years-long campaign to support Ukraine against a Russian invasion, a war characterized from the start by ethnic cleansing and other war crimes. Much of the world is already cynical about America’s Ukrainian crusade, convinced that we are applying a double standard, demanding they care about Ukraine because it’s a European country, where America would turn a blind eye to similar behavior to Russia’s if engaged in by an American ally in the Global South. The cleansing of the civilian Palestinian population from Gaza would seal the question absolutely, from much of the world’s perspective, and with it the possibility of distinguishing the value of an American connection from a Russian or Chinese connection in any way but in terms of raw power.

Murtaza Hussain recently wrote that he could not imagine either the violent dissolution of Israel or the wholesale expulsion of the Palestinians “without also causing the collapse of the entire post-WWII liberal-international order.” I think he’s correct in that. Inasmuch as the United States still sees any value in the tattered remnants of that order, we should recognize those as the true stakes.