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.

…I’d disagree that the reason for tolerating the settlers is racist; it seemed politically expedient at the time when they were started.
You do know that you are the best gift hard line pro-Israelis could be given on this message board, n’est pa? You make a perfect caricature for people to point to and say disagreeing with anything Israel does is anti-Semitic. I mean honestly, Israeli settlers (Jews) are subhuman (untermenschen) – do you think anyone not reading stormfront agrees with you?
Not that you will or can provide a cite for it, but cite that the IDF considers settlers subhuman?
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.

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?

.
Well, this is where it just gets bizarre. The phrase “ethnic cleansing” is understood by almost every English speaking person on the planet to carry an extremely negative connotation. Your continued use of it as if it was a neutral term after it has been pointed out to you repeatedly that is a loaded term (i.e. has extreme negative connotations) is frankly disingenuous.
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?
Murdering millions of inhabitants to make room for you is pretty much wrong. I don’t consider the expulsion of Germans from lands the Nazi regime murdered inhabitants by the millions to be simply ethnic cleansing. But if the expulsion of Germanic peoples from lands where millions were murdered to make room for Germanic colonist is ethnic cleansing , do you honestly consider this to be in the same boat as the removal of Israeli settlers?
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?

Really, find me **once **that I looked back to the seventh or tenth century, or admit that you are making up my position in your head, not on anything I’ve actually written.
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):

. . .a violent displacement of the indigenous population (which involved not just driving the natives off but murdering them) and their replacement with German colonist while the Germans were winning followed by a removal of these same said people after Germany lost is ethnic cleansing of the Germans?
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:
-
The Jews, Romani, and others who were killed and deported without being killed specifically because of their ethnic/cultural identity.
-
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.
-
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?

That’s ridiculous, but I’m not interested in meta-debate, either.
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.

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?

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]

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.
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:
Generalplan Ost (GPO) was a Nazi plan to ethnically cleanse the territories occupied by Germany in Eastern Europe during World War II. According to research of professor Łuczak, Germans expelled the following numbers of Poles from territories annexed to the Reich in the period of 1939-1944:
Warthegau region 630,000
Silesia 80,000
Pomerelia 124,000
Białystok 25,000
Ciechanów 28,000
Combined with “wild expulsions”, in four years 923,000 Poles were ethnically cleansed from territories Germany annexed into the Reich.116,000 Poles were expelled from the Zamość region as part of Nazi plans for establishment of German colonies in the conquered territories. Zamość itself was to be renamed Himmlerstadt, later changed to Pflugstadt (Plow City), that was to symbolise the German “Plow” that was to “plough” the East. Additionally almost 30,000 children were kidnapped by German authorities from their parents for potential Germanisation. This led to massive resistance (see Zamość Uprising).
In October 1940, 115 thousand Poles were expelled from their homes in central Warsaw to make room for the Jewish Ghetto, constructed there by German authorities.
After the failure of the Warsaw Uprising, 500,000 people were expelled from the city alone as punishment by German authorities.
It is estimated that between 1.6 and 2 million people were expelled from their homes during the German occupation of Poland. Only the German organized expulsions affected directly 1,710,000 Poles. Additionally, 2.5 to 3 million Poles were taken from Poland as slave labourers to Germany to support the Nazi war effort.These numbers do not include people arrested by the Germans and sent to Nazi concentration camps.
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
in the main part East European Germans resettled from Soviet “spheres of interest” according to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
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

I mean honestly, a violent displacement of the indigenous population (which involved not just driving the natives off but murdering them) and their replacement with German colonist while the Germans were winning followed by a removal of these same said people after Germany lost is ethnic cleansing of the Germans? The Nazis somehow had a legitimate claim on lebensraum because they won for a bit and then (thankfully) lost?
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.

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.
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).

Dissonance, let us take up a few scenarios:
The Jews, Romani, and others who were killed and deported without being killed specifically because of their ethnic/cultural identity.
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.
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?
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.
In 1941 it was decided to destroy the Polish nation completely and the German leadership decided that in 10 to 20 years the Polish state under German occupation was to be fully cleared of any ethnic Poles and settled by German colonists.
…
Those of them who would still not Germanize were to be forbidden to marry, the existing ban on any medical help to Poles in Germany would be extended, and eventually Poles would cease to exist.
With regards to point 2, Drang_nach_Osten wasn’t entirely recent; it dated back to the mid 19th century. For example:
During the First World War Germany planned to annex about 30,000 km² from Congress Poland for German colonisation. Most of the Polish population of those territories (about 2,000,000 people) was to be expelled into a greatly reduced Polish puppet state. The remaining population was to be used as agricultural labour for German colonists.
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.

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.

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.
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.
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).
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.

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.
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
During the First World War Germany planned to annex about 30,000 km² from Congress Poland for German colonisation. Most of the Polish population of those territories (about 2,000,000 people) was to be expelled into a greatly reduced Polish puppet state. The remaining population was to be used as agricultural labour for German colonists.
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.

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?
Note what the Wikipeia article actually says:
The massive expulsion of German populations east of the Oder-Neisse line in 1945-48 on the basis of decisions of the Potsdam Conference were later justified by their beneficiaries as a rollback of the Drang nach Osten.
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.

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.

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.