The Gaza Plan Isn't Ethnic Cleansing
President Trump has proposed to resettle the people of Gaza and have the United States occupy the region. If you read my essay a year ago, “The Case for Colonizing Gaza,” you know I’m open to the idea. But no, he didn’t get it from me.
And no, it isn’t ethnic cleansing. As with “genocide” or “colonizer,” the people throwing this term around know not what it means. Gazans themselves identify as refugees, and relocating refugees from a war zone is not ethnic cleansing, in fact it’s legal to forcibly remove civilians from war zones for their own safety.
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention allows forced transfers “if the security of the population or imperative military reasons so demand.”
Article 8 of the ICC’s Rome Statute allows forced displacement “if the security of the civilians involved or imperative military reasons so demand.”
If Israel removes Gazans for their own security and the imperative military reason of keeping Israelis alive, while ensuring a safe transfer and possibility of return, then there’s nothing to see here. But even if not, it still wouldn’t be ethnic cleansing, which Merriam-Webster defines as “the expulsion, imprisonment, or killing of an ethnic minority by a dominant majority in order to achieve ethnic homogeneity.”
Israel and the United States are addressing Palestinian terrorism, not ethnicity. So while you may oppose the method, that’s the reason. Besides, ethnic uniformity is not even on the table because if the U.S. takes the region, it’s going to become one of the most ethnically diverse parts of the world within hours. And if Israel takes it, Israel is not only more ethnically diverse than the U.S., but 21% of its population is Palestinian.
So not only would there be a decrease in homogeneity, but the ethnic group that is allegedly being cleansed from the area would actually form part of the group that is doing the cleansing, which means Palestinians will never be removed. Palestinians of Gaza will be removed, while Palestinians of Israel may well settle there.
To be clear, I am not taking a position on the Gaza Plan. For that, see my essay above, but know that my heart goes out to all those displaced by war. Refugees have been one of the focal topics of my journalistic career, and I have interviewed so many, and absorbed so much second-hand trauma, that I can never be numb to their plight.
Rather, I am arguing for linguistic accuracy at a time when politically motivated semantic expansion has gutted the discursive power of perlocutionary acts, which is a fancy way of saying some terms are also actions that produce an effect on the listener, like how calling something racist used to make people recoil, and that for terms like genocide or ethnic cleansing, the effect is the function—and its erosion is deliberate.
Let me make it make sense. This is not about ethnicity, but safety. The overwhelming majority of Gazans have supported genocidal violence against Jews for decades. Yet for many who claim “ethnic cleansing,” it is in fact about ethnicity—Jewish ethnicity.
Because this is little more than blood libel.