Expulsions and Nation-States

One truth is that large-scale population expulsions have indeed been a feature of imperial statecraft and nation-state foundation for at least two hundred years. Multinational empires deported peoples when it suited their security interests. The new nation-states carved out of them expelled “alien” peoples that threatened their ideal of demographic homogeneity, access to resources, and sense of security.

Indigenous peoples in the Americas and colonial Australia were shunted off to unwanted land when they were not outright massacred. In the struggle with Greek Orthodox insurgents to establish a Greek nation-state in the 1820s, Ottoman authorities contemplated expelling them to Egypt, while the Greeks set out to remove all Muslims from the Peloponnese as well as massacring many. In the 1860s and 1870s, the Russian Empire induced the flight of thousands of Muslim Circassians into the Ottoman Empire as it conquered Black Sea territory, settling Greeks in their stead.

In subsequent decades, hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Muslims were expelled or fled from Christian Balkan states after they defeated Ottoman forces in establishing nation-states. When Greece absorbed the largely Jewish and Muslim Ottoman city of Salonika during the Balkan Wars in 1912, it set about “Hellenizing” the place with Greeks from Turkey.

Such processes typified nation-state consolidation throughout the twentieth century. After Poland was (re)established in 1918, its governments set out to “Polonize” the third of its population that was neither Polish-speaking nor Roman Catholic. Israeli governments likewise sought to “Judaize” the Galilee because its predominantly Palestinian population was inconsistent with the Zionist ideal of a Jewish demographic majority. The same ideal drives the ethnic cleansing underway in the West Bank now.

The Long Tradition of “Voluntary” Expulsions

The second truth is that when population expulsions occurred as official “exchanges” in the context of interstate agreements — such as those between Turkey and Greece or India and Pakistan — they were often justified in humanitarian terms. The prevailing justification was that temporary suffering would prevent future generations from enduring ethnic civil wars, which were seen as inherent to multinational states. The common view held that minorities were destabilizing and that homogeneous nation-states were more conducive to human rights. Even unilateral “transfers” were considered a progressive policy by liberal Western elites between the wars, including leaders of the British Labour Party. On these grounds, the 1936 British Peel Commission recommended partitioning Palestine and transferring Arabs to Jordan.

However, forcing people to leave their homes was also a red line, and the British cabinet rejected the Peel Commission’s recommendations in part for this reason. At the end of World War II, British Christian leaders criticized the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe, comparing it to the forced relocations of the Hitler-Stalin and Hitler-Mussolini population exchange agreements. Adolf Hitler himself had once proposed deporting Jews to the island of Madagascar.

The supporters of Trump’s plan understand the optics of forced expulsion, which is why they, including the United Arab Emirates, stress its voluntary provision. Even if few believe that an authentic humanitarian motive is driving the proposal, this rhetorical framing places it in a long tradition of imperial statecraft.

The third truth is that the postwar order is premised on a paradox: the very nation-state homogeneity that was thought to guarantee human rights was achieved by violating the human rights of millions of expelled people. The decade leading up to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 witnessed the most dramatic geodemographic engineering of the Eurasian continent. Poles, Germans, and South Asians were forcibly displaced in the process of (re)founding states after World War II, as were Palestinians upon the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 — many of whom ended up in the Gaza Strip. That the national elites of these states cannot imagine returning the descendants of these refugees and expellees points to this paradox.

It is also reflected in their inability to imagine an alternative scenario from the years of decolonization: the “return” of European settlers after colonial rule ended. In Algeria, the French and other Europeans packed up and left in 1962. When Angola and Mozambique won independence between 1975 and 1976, a million European “retornados” made their way to Portugal. Some Palestine supporters cite these cases as a model, advocating that Israelis “return” to the European countries their parents or grandparents came from. However, about half of Israel’s Jewish population descends from communities in Muslim-majority countries where such a return is a chimera. Even if Israel welcomed them — having in some cases conspired with host states to induce their departure — many left under duress, compelled by local discrimination and violent episodes. Even so, that fact that no one in the West can imagine that Palestinians in Gaza might return to their ancestral homes in Israel while Gaza is rebuilt underscores both the fixation on nation-state homogeneity and anti-Arab racism.

Ethnic Cleansing in the Postwar Era

The fourth truth is that the international order erected after World War II attempted to mitigate this kind of violence. That order, embodied by the Charter of the United Nations (UN), was designed to guarantee “peace and security” for its member states by outlawing the use of interstate force. Wars, its authors reasoned, were the seedbed of genocide and ethnic cleansing. The Geneva Conventions proscribe population transfers, and so does the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

However — and this is the fifth truth — these measures have done little to prevent such violence. Uganda turned out tens of thousands of South Asians in 1972. Expulsions accompanied Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus two years later. Croatia drove off ethnic Serbs in conquering the secessionist statelet of the Republic of Serbian Krajina in 1994. Azerbaijan repeated this pattern in 2023 in dissolving the proto-Armenian state of Nagorno-Karabakh within its borders. Although the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia tried to prosecute Croatian generals for forcing out the Serbian population, the Western powers accepted the outcome in both cases. Azerbaijan has become a major energy supplier for Europe.

To be sure, NATO bombed Serbia to stop its deportation of Kosovo Albanians in 1999, but the choice was geopolitically determined: Serbia was in the Russian orbit. It is hard to see NATO taking similar action on behalf of Palestinians. On the contrary, Western weapons in Israeli hands have been killing them. It took an African state, the Gambia, to refer Myanmar to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for its violent expulsion of over 700,000 Rohingya in 2017. Another, South Africa, has likewise asked the ICJ to investigate Israel under the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide for its destructive campaign in Gaza. If European states have supported the Gambia because Myanmar is a client state of China, they have bitterly criticized South Africa because of their unqualified support of Israel.

Trump’s Gaza transfer proposal, along with US sanctions against the ICC, suggests that Washington is not just abandoning the postwar order but actively dismantling its core precepts. The system that once claimed to oppose forced displacement is being discarded in favor of open endorsement. Yet even within that order, the premise of national homogeneity long enabled ethnic cleansing when convenient. Seen in this light, Trump’s proposals are entirely in keeping with the deeper logic of the nation-state — in this case Israel — and with imperial geopolitics, now with the United States as imperial hegemon. As in the 1940s, imperial elites and their clients will determine the fate of Palestinians. Weak Arab states could not protect Palestinians then. History seems poised to repeat itself, but with one key difference: this time, there is no attempt to create the illusion of restraint.