Why Does the West Bank Need to be Ethnically Cleansed?

By the OP’s logic, deporting illegal immigrants from the US is “ethnic cleansing.”

The IDF expects a lower standard of conduct from settlers than is acceptable from normal decent people. It is an odious racism that runs through a lot of the discussion of Israel.

In a different context it is termed ‘the soft bigotry of lowered expectations’. Here it is to do with moral quality, rather than academic and economic achievement. It is the same idea: A group of people, at core are just not as competent as most others. It is constantly implied to excuse the behaviour of settlers and other Israelis.

See previous.

*‘n’est ce pas?’ * - Gaudere alert

The argument is not that settlers are subhuman, but that the IDF regards them so. It is a view that must be rejected.

So as I was asking, you can back up your claim that the IDF regards settlers as subhuman? Right? It’s hardly a view to be rejected if it’s not a view the IDF holds. Since you keep talking about it, you must have something to back this up; even something very thin. I’d love to see it. I very highly doubt that you can provide it, but again would you provide some kind of support that the IDF considers settlers subhuman aside from the voices in your head or stormfront?

So you are saying that there is nothing inherently or generally wrong with advocating policies to reduce or eliminate the number of people from ethnic or religious Group X in Area Y?

It depends what you mean by “same boat.” There are both similarities and differences between any two situations.

The question of whether it was right or wrong to expel millions of ethnic Germans from various parts of Europe after world war 2 is a difficult one. The fact that the Nazis did some horrible things doesn’t resolve the issue for me.

Part of the reason these expulsions were done was, apparently, the idea that it’s better to separate groups who don’t get along.

Turning back to the situation in Israel, if Jewish settlers are to be removed from the West Bank why not also remove Arabs from Israel? Why not have a state which is 100% Jewish and another state which is 0% Jewish?

Well, the point raised was the actual ethnic cleansing that was inflicted on Germans. The proposed ethnic cleansing to which you have referred never occurred. (There was mass murder of specific groups, but people who did not match those identities were not killed, (they were oppressed in place), and there was no mass movement of Germans into the conquered lands. You specifically said, (and I quoted):

This event did not happen, unless you were referring to the Teutonic Knights. There was no act of “driving the natives off” followed by “replacement with German” colonists in WWII. Therefore, your statement was irrelevant to this discussion. Such an ethnic cleansing may well have been seriously proposed, but as it was never put into place, it does not satisfy the claims of your post to which I replied. If you want to throw up a straw man argument to defend or mitigate the ethnic cleansing of Germans that did occur, you need to expect to be challenged.

Dissonance, let us take up a few scenarios:

  1. The Jews, Romani, and others who were killed and deported without being killed specifically because of their ethnic/cultural identity.

  2. Germans moved from Prussia because they were German in order to make room for those of Polish ethnicity. Justified in part because others of your ethnic identity had done some horrible things in the recent past.

  3. Hypothetical Germans who had colonized areas depopulated of Jews and Slavs, etc. who were relocated back to Germany because the property had been illegally and immorally acquired.

All of those scenarios include the forced relocation of ethnic groups. The first two are ethnic cleansing. The last is not.

Agreed?

Actually, your whole thread is some sort of meta-debate. You started off with a claim that there were proposals for “ethnic cleansing” of Jewish settlers on the West Bank. You have provided no evidence that ethnic cleansing has actually been proposed. And you later admit that you are applying an idiolectic version of the phrase “ethnic cleansing” that would not be recognized by anyone else in the discussion.

Making up a definition, (that you do not explain until three pages into the discussion), based on an assertion that you have not actually supported sounds pretty “meta-” to me.

Now, if other posters wish to dance to your tune, I am willing to let them, but please do not pretend that you are doing anything other than what you have done.

Is this posted as a moderator or a regular poster?

Both. That is why I have stopped short of describing your actions as trolling.

Tom

Speaking to you as a poster - I may disagree with his assessment, for reasons that I have already stated, but indeed some here have defended the position that Jews should be removed from the West Bank even if there was an acceptably legal means to keep them there because as Jews they would be poorly tolerated and an incitement to conflict. If that is the case then removing them is ethnic cleansing even if another factor is given as the proximate cause and even if the Israelis evacuate them. Whether or not that is true is a justifiable debate. Clarifying what is and is not ethnic cleansing is also a useful exercise.

Speaking to you in you mod capacity - it is useful to us mere posters if you very clearly keep your posting positions and your moderating positions clearly demarcated and not try to save time by doing both at the same time. Just sayin’ is all. [/JrMetaModding]

And this is where you are wrong. I don’t see how you can not consider it to be ethnic cleansing to exterminate people by the millions because of their race. If you only consider forced relocation of people to be ethnic cleansing, that too occurred on a massive scale (though honestly, how is it not ethnic cleansing if people are being relocated to the afterlife?). See for instance Expulsion_of_Poles_by_Germany. Pertinent bits for WW2:

See also Pacification_operations_in_German-occupied_Poland and Forced_labor_in_Germany_during_World_War_II; 12 million people were forcibly brought to the territories of the Greater German Reich for use as slave labor. Two-thirds of them were from Eastern Europe, and their removal both worked towards the goal of ethnically cleansing these lands while at the same time providing labor.

In short, this was not simply a proposed ethnic cleansing that didn’t occur, it was an ethnic cleansing on a massive scale that fortunately only entered the early stages - though the early stages involved murder and forced relocations in the millions. It was present from the start of the war, Einsatzgruppen went to work murdering the Polish intelligentsia the day that Poland was invaded.

Colonization was occurring during the war, though not on the grand scale of 8-10 million which was envisioned after Germany had won the war, a relocation of this size while in the midst of fighting a war has obvious issues, namely that they were needed to win the war in the first place. However, it was occuring. Most colonists weren’t from inside Germany’s pre-1939 borders, but were

Somehow I doubt the Poles who were driven from their homes to be replaced by Germanic people cared much that they weren’t Germans who had been living in Deutschland proper before the war.

You are correct that I overstated the case that the Germans were not generally engaged in ethnic cleansing in Poland.
However, this discussion arose with your claim that the Germans who suffered ethnic cleansing were merely the people who had taken advantage of Nazi ethnic cleansing to occupy other peoples’ lands.
Your claim was

The point is that when people speak of the ethnic cleansing of Germans at the end of WWII, they are referring to the massive displacement of Germans from lands they had lived on for 700 - 1200 years. Your own citation to Wikipedia notes that those (never numbered} German “colonists” were actually ethnic, (but not national), Germans from Eastern Europe, (notably Ukraine), who had emigrated from Germany almost 200 years earlier at the invitation of Czarina Catherine II.

We already have a word for that: genocide. Ethnic cleansing does not refer to genocide, specifically, because it has a different meaning. I am not making a claim that one is worse or less bad than another; I am noting that when you use a term outside its normal usage, you confuse the issue, (for example, by pretending that the term refers to one action while ignoring a much larger event).

Not really. The “others who were killed and deported without being killed specifically because of their ethnic/cultural identity,” were in fact being killed and deported because of their cultural/ethnic identity. Slavs were considered under Nazi ideology to be barely above Jews. They were to be expulsed from all lands from the eastern end of pre-war Germany all the way to the Urals through extermination or forcible relocation. Exceptions being a few millions to be used as slaves. Poles got no better, it was the intention of the Nazis to destroy the Poles as a race.

With regards to point 2, Drang_nach_Osten wasn’t entirely recent; it dated back to the mid 19th century. For example:

The removal of Germanic peoples after WW2 was seen by some as a rollback of Drang Nach Osten. With regards to point 3, see my previous post. It was most certainly not a hypothetical, it happened.

No. The reference to Drang nach Osten was a rationalization to cover the immoral action of ethnic cleansing in which the Soviets engaged on Prussians. Based on your own citation, the “Germans” moved into “cleansed” lands were from farther east, so pushing them back into Germany was hardly a valid rationale for the Soviet action–and the Prussians who were moved could not be legitimately called the beneficiaries of Drang nach Osten.

Well, I overstated my case as well, I was meaning to referring to the colonists placed there by the Nazis, not all Germanic peoples expulsed after the war. The claim that colonization and ethnic cleansing didn’t occur made me pigheaded.

Well again, I don’t see how you can consider genocide for the purposes of removing an ethnic race (or in the case of the Nazis, quite a number of races) in order to make room for you own people to not be ethnic cleansing. It’s genocide as well, but it **is ** ethnic cleansing.

We’re getting waay off-topic here, but how could Drang nach Osten be a cover for the immoral actions of the Soviets if the phrase long pre-dates the existence of the Soviet Union? Are you really claiming that Germany didn’t have designs on Polish lands dating back long before WW2? Again as an example

Note the intention to expel the population by the millions and replace them with German colonists. The beneficiaries of the expulsion of Germanic peoples were Poles and Slavs - which is who considered it a rollback of Drang Nach Osten. While yes, it is brutally unfair that people who just happened to be of Germanic decent and had fuck all to do with Nazi policies were expelled from their homes - that was the fate of millions of Poles, Slavs, etc as well. I agree that it was wrong and horridly unfair, but well, when your people were murdered or ethnically cleansed by the millions… and this occurred in even greater number in the USSR than in Poland. Einsatzgruppen alone in the USSR murdered 1.5 million Jews, Communists, Gypsies, etc by shooting them - which was deemed to be far too inefficient.

Note what the Wikipeia article actually says:

In other words, the Soviets were claiming that their complete depopulation of a land occupied by the same people for over 700 years was “justified” as a response to a concept that was roughly a hundred years old.

Poles are part of the Soviet Union? I mean they were by and large huge beneficiaries of this, and were the actual immediate target of Drang Nach Osten. Poland is kind of in the way of driving to the east before you hit Russia. Any comment on the Kaiser’s plan to expel 2 million Poles, colonize the land with Germans and use the remaining Poles as laborers once he won WW1?

Look, I’m not claiming the removal of everyone of Germanic decent from the Ostlands was just or the right thing to do, but throwing it all on the Soviets and ignoring the massive, massive genocide and ethnic cleansing committed by Germany immediately previous to it or any history aside from a nation that only existed long after the phrase Drang Nach Osten was coined (the USSR) is removing any context of it.

I do not recall ever suggesting that Germany should be excused for the twelve million deaths they caused above and beyond the military casualties. However, your posts read as though what was inflicted on the people of Prussia was justifiable. When you make a plea for “context” and you ignore the fact that it was the Soviet Union that ordered the expulsions, that it was the Soviet Union that told the Poles what to say about the matter, and that the expulsions, (just coincidentally, of course), allowed the Soviets to extend their borders far to the West while using Poland to push Germany’s Eastern border a similar distance West, your claim appears to be rationalization to punish any Germans who happened to be handy, regardless of specific guilt.
If it was supposed to be some sort of legitimate claim based on Nazi actions, then you need to explain why it was OK to do that to Prussians while the Bavarians, Saxons, Hanoverians, Westphalians, Thuringians, Hessians, and other German populations were not subjected to anything similar.