A short history of exodus in the Middle East
Go back to Palestine/get out of Palestine
‘As for the encampment itself, it has an intifada-meets-Woodstock quality at times. Dance clubs offer interpretive performances; there are drummers and other musicians, and obscure poets reading obscure poems. Some tents break out by identity groups: “Lesbians Against Genocide,” “Hindus for Intifada.” Banners demand the release of all Palestinian prisoners. Small Palestinian flags, embroidered with the names of Palestinian leaders killed in Gaza, are planted in the grass.’
The latest round of campus protests, this time at Columbia University in New York, has provided a great deal of amusement from afar, offering the usual parade of the comically unaware; I especially enjoyed the protester demanding that the university provide ‘humanitarian aid’ to students, apparently a PhD instructor in ‘theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens’.
I enjoy the pantomime quality of American student protests, although some aspects have been less amusing, in particular the taunts of ‘go back to Poland’ shouted at pro-Israeli opponents. It’s a line seen a number of times on social media since the October 7 massacre and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza, and a particularly ironic one. After all, as my uncle once told me, while working in 1940s Dublin for a member of Ireland’s small Jewish community, people used to shout ‘go back to Palestine’ at his boss, a phrase that was not uncommon once upon a time. (‘Okay, I will’ ‘no, not like that’.)
I have nothing to add to the conflict in Gaza, beyond utterly bland platitudes about how horrible all the human suffering is. If I was an interested party on either side, I would have strong views on our historic claim and be dismissive of foreigners who had a tendency for team-picking, often based on irrelevant domestic partisan concerns. Most of all, though, I see no hope of an end to the wider conflict in the Holy Land, because neither side is willing or able to offer a territorial compromise that will satisfy the other.
But I am interested in how the conflict reverberates in my own corner of the globe, how it interacts with the more benign tensions in the English-speaking world, and in particular how western views and ideologies shape our view of that war.
I suppose a big driving force behind western anti-Zionism today is the idea that Israel is a European colony that was allowed to grab Arab land out of pity and guilt for the Holocaust (which, of course, Arabs weren’t to blame for). This explains the glee with which so many people on Twitter point out that Israel suffers from unusually high skin cancer rates, apparently second only to Australia, the implication being that white Europeans have no place in the Middle East. Wouldn’t they just be better off in their real home far to the north? Get out of Palestine, or you’ll get a melanoma!
Anti-Semitism is quite a drawn-out subject, particularly when it comes to criticism of Israel, and much of the animosity, at least in my opinion, is driven less by anti-Jewish hatred than anti-whiteism. Israel is uniquely bad because it is a settler state in a non-white region, and that’s what makes its crimes worth protesting, while the indescribable atrocities committed elsewhere in the region – in Yemen by the Saudis, by Assad against his own people – are brushed under the mental carpet. It matters not just that an atrocity is committed, but who commits it; I think that’s faulty logic, but I comprehend it.
While I understand why people are upset by the Nakba, and by the conditions of Palestinians since 1948, or particular Israeli acts of violence, I find it harder to understand why people frame it as one of colonial settlement. The counter is not so much that Palestine was 2,000 years ago the historic Jewish homeland – which is, to put it mildly, a weak argument – but that the exodus of Arabs from the Holy Land was matched by a similar number of Jews from neighbouring Arab countries. This completely ignored aspect of the story complicates things in a way in which some westerners, well-trained in particular schools of thought, find almost incomprehensible.
The 20th century was a period of mass exodus, most of it non-voluntary. Across the former Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires the growth in national consciousness and the demands for self-determination resulted in enormous and traumatic population transfers, which in Europe reached its climax at the end of the Second World War.
Although the bulk of this was directed at Germans, the aggressors in the conflict, they were not the only victims – huge numbers of Poles were forcibly moved out of the east of the country to be resettled in what had previously been Germany. The entire Polish community in Lwów, as they called it, was moved to Wrocław, formerly Breslau.
Maps of central and eastern Europe in the 19th century would have shown a confusing array of villages speaking a variety of languages and following different religions, many of whom wouldn’t have been aware of themselves as Poles, Romanians, Serbs or whatever. These communities had uneasily co-existed under imperial rulers until the spread of newspapers and telegraph poles began to form a new national consciousness, usually driven by urban intellectuals LARPing in peasant fantasies.
This lack of national consciousness was especially true of the people who came to be known as Turks; the Balkans in the late 19th century had a huge Muslim population, most of whom were subsequently driven out by nationalists of various kinds. Many not only did not see themselves as Turks but didn’t even speak Turkish; their ancestors had simply been Greeks or Bulgarians who had adopted the religion of the ruling power, as many people do. Crete had been one-third Muslim before they were pushed out by Greek nationalists and came to settle in the Ottoman Empire, which is why there is still today a Greek-speaking Muslim town in Syria.
This population transfer went both ways, and when that long-simmering hatred reached its climax after the First World War, the Greeks came off much worse. Half a million ‘Turks’ moved east, but one million Greek speakers were forced to settle in Greece, causing a huge humanitarian crisis at the time, with many dying of disease or hunger.
That population transfer was skewed simply because Atatürk’s army won the Greco-Turkish War, and Britain was too tired to help its traditional allies and have another crack at Johnny Turk, who - as it turned out at Gallipoli - were pretty good at fighting.
The Greeks who settled in their new country were quite distinctive to those already living there. The Pontic Greeks of eastern Anatolia, who had inhabited the region since the early first millennium BC, had a distinct culture and dialect, as did the Cappadocian Greeks. Anthropologically, one might even have seen them as distinctive ethnic groups altogether, yet they had no choice but to resettle in their new homeland and lose their identity and traditions. The largest number settled in Macedonia, where they formed a slight majority of that region, with many also moving to Athens.
The loss of their ancient homelands was a bitter blow to the Greek psyche, perhaps none more so than the permanent loss of the Queen of Cities itself, Constantinople. This great metropolis, despite four and a half centuries of Ottoman rule, still had a Greek plurality until the start of the 20th century but would become ethnically cleansed in the decades following, the last exodus occurring in the 1950s with the Istanbul pogroms. Once a mightily cosmopolitan city, Istanbul today is one of the least diverse major centres in Europe, part of a pattern of growing homogeneity that has been repeated across the Middle East.
But the Greek experience is not unique. Imperial Constantinople was also home to a large Jewish community, many of whom had arrived in the Ottoman Empire following persecution in Spain and other western countries. Many spoke Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, a Latinate language native to Iberia. Like the Greeks and Armenians, the Jews prospered under the Ottomans and became what Amy Chua called a ‘market-dominant minority’, the groups who often flourish within empires but who become most vulnerable with the rise of nationalism.
And with the growing Turkish national consciousness and the creation of a Turkish republic from 1923, things got worse for them. Turkish nationalists and their allies murdered vast numbers of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrian Christians in the 1910s, and the atmosphere for Jews became increasingly tense too, with more frequent outbursts of communal violence. After the First World War, many began emigrating to Palestine, now under British control and similarly spiralling towards violence caused by demographic instability.
Palestine itself had been about 5-7% Jewish before the great influx, with communities speaking a mixture of Arabic, Ladino and Yiddish, but that proportion was to rise sharply with the rise of Zionism, a largely European idea. The founding father of Zionism was a Hungarian, and its chief architects came from the Ashkenazi population of eastern Europe, as did the men who formed its early militias. But while the ideology of Zionism was certainly European, European nationalism also influenced the Arabs, too; Ba’athism, perhaps the most prominent – and arguably the worst – strand of Arab nationalism, was the creation of a Syrian Christian well-versed in European thought, educated at a French school and the Sorbonne. Both European nationalism and European Marxism were hugely influential with Europe’s former colonies, often, in countries like Vietnam, mixing the two.
These ideologies also continue to frame how many people in the West see the Middle East, yet the Marxist-influenced idea of a conflict between settlers and colonial victims only works if one ignores the confusing existence of large Jewish communities in the Arab world, all of them native to the region.
These were often quite ancient, the Jewish community in Iraq having been in existence for 25 centuries, and comprising 150,000 people before their exodus; they played a significant role in the region, and at the start of the 20th century Baghdad was perhaps one-third Jewish (as well as being home to a large Christian community).
Iraqi Jews, speaking Judeo-Arabic, were very distinct from co-religionists in other countries, let alone those in Europe. Under the protection of the Ottomans they had enjoyed a great deal of toleration, although always vulnerable to spasms of violence, and many had moved to India under British protection. As whenever an empire fell, this sense of menace grew with independence and accelerated rapidly after Israel was established and a wave of anger spread across the Arab world. Almost the entire Jewish population fled within two years, the bulk going to Israel although many moving to the US and other English-speaking countries (the Saatchi brothers are among the Iraqi-Jewish diaspora who migrated to Britain at this time).
Morocco and Algeria had similar numbers of Jews, while Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Libya all had communities in the mid five-figures. By the early 21st century there were just a handful of Jews living in most Arab and Muslim countries including, famously, in Afghanistan where there were just two Jews left when the American arrived – who weren’t on speaking terms.
The Nakba was traumatic and unjust, but the movement of people between Jewish and Arab lands was not unique; when India was partitioned, over seven million Muslims left for Pakistan and a similar number of Hindus and Sikhs moved the other way.
In terms of numbers, the Greeks came off worst of all. Would many Greek nationalists love to ride back into Constantinople and have prayers in Hagia Sophia, like the iconic image of Israeli soldiers by the Western Wall in 1967? I bet they would - as would a million Twitter anons - but it’s not going to happen and the dream has thankfully been left to die.
But the Arabs haven’t yet given up on the dream of Jerusalem, and nor would I in their position. Palestinian identity hasn’t disappeared in the same way as that of the Pontic Greeks or Ladino-speakers, but has only grown stronger.
This is really the crucial point. Some more hard-line supporters of Israel would argue that the Palestinians aren’t really a people, and it’s true that at the turn of the 20th century they might not have had a distinct identity based on ‘Palestine’ and perhaps felt no different to the people of the east bank of the Jordan, or had identities instead based on religion or clan - but this was also true of many people who now believe themselves to be a nation. What is more relevant is that Palestinians now do have a distinct identity, even if it is one heavily influenced by outside actors who have made it a symbol of anti-colonial struggle.
The case for Palestinian national identity is central to the argument of whether its Arab inhabitants be allowed to return to the Holy Land, or are be absorbed by neighbouring Arab countries, just as the – at least as ethnically distinct – Anatolian Greeks were. Jordan has been generous in granting citizenship to Palestinians, but other Arab countries less so, and from a realpolitik perspective it makes no sense for them. On top of the huge efforts and risks involved, to do so would be to grant their enemies their wishes, and the Arabs are not going to accept the loss of Jerusalem as the Greeks have of Constantinople. As a result, and uniquely among these tragic transfers of peoples, the Palestinians’ misery has been prolonged, and probably will be indefinitely. Israelis may take pride in the fact that they, in contrast, allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants from Arab countries to resettle and integrate, but it also made sense for Israel to absorb them.
Across the world, millions of people today live away from countries from where their parents and grandparents were expelled following the end of empire. The vast majority will never see those lands again. That is a tragedy, but it is not one unique to the Arabs of Palestine.
Where this goes from here, I have no ideas or solutions. Most reasonable outside observers would prefer some division of the Holy Land between the two groups, although where the borders are drawn is impossible to answer. Both the earlier Peel commission and the UN partition plan of 1947 might have been fairer than what followed, with perhaps Jerusalem an international city under the care of the Hashemites, but those partitions could not be agreed upon and there is no way the Israelis would accept them now; and, again, nor would I in their position.
The rights and wrongs of what happened after 1948, the occupation of the West Bank, and the current war in Gaza, are issues worth debating, but the argument that Israel is a European colony ignores the reality of what happened.
The anti-nationalist response, and I accept that I am making an argument framed by European ideas of nationalism, would be that most Mizrahi Jews fled the Arab world only after the creation of Israel, so had European Zionists not thought up such an idea, they would have continued living happily in their homelands. It’s a what-if question, so unanswerable, but personally I think it rests on a naïve understanding of human nature, and a willingness to ignore post-imperial history.
Wherever empires have begun to falter, nationalism and religious identity have tended to become more prominent, and violent, with woeful repercussions for minorities, especially market-dominant minorities, since resentment of wealthier out-groups is the most atavistic and dangerous of human social emotions.
This is what happened in Europe from the 19th century, with ultimately catastrophic consequences for its Jews, but it was already well under way in the Middle East before Israel was established. By this stage there was growing communal violence in much of the region, and pogroms aimed at minorities, such as the 1933 massacre of Assyrians in Iraq.
Maybe Iraq’s Jews might have continued to thrive and prosper in this new world of nation-states, but it seems highly unlikely. In recent years, and accelerated by the woeful stupidity of the Bush regime, the Christians of Iraq have largely been driven out, while the position of other religious minorities in the region, such as the Maronites, Yazidi and Copts, is shaky, subject to political instability, communal violence or official discrimination. If that doesn’t push people out, then economic opportunities elsewhere will pull them away.
Both the Assyrians and the Maronites at times had the prospect of their own states dangled before them by western powers, but it’s difficult to carve out ethnic homelands from former empires without extreme brutality and human suffering. In most cases it’s best avoided.
But the reality of living in multi-ethnic states after the empire has fallen is that minorities always have the sword hovering over their neck, and this is as true in the Middle East as it proved to be in Europe. It is the chief reason why large majorities of diaspora Jews support Israel, even if they have little connection to it, disapprove of much of what it does, have little religious feeling and have no desire to leave their own countries. It’s a back-up policy if things ever turn nasty again.
Which they now are. The post-October 7 protests, which began indecently soon after the murders which triggered the conflict, have ironically helped to harden this logic. One of the stranger things we’ve seen is people both denouncing Zionism as a bloodthirsty colonial monstrosity and at the same time doing their best to ensure that Jews in their own country feel as threatened as possible. If you thought that Israeli Jews should all just up sticks and leave, wouldn’t you try to make other countries, from where some of their ancestors fled, more welcoming?
Instead, we’ve seen the opposite. ‘From the River to the Sea’ is at best an ambiguous phrase, but ‘go back to Poland’ is one that makes me recoil. If you – shudder – educated yourself about 20th century history, you’d know that the number of Jews who came from Poland to Israel was not much larger than the number who came from Iraq and far smaller than from the Maghreb. Many more Polish Jews would have liked to come, but the vast majority were turned into ash by the Nazis.
It’s true that Poles historically played an outsized role in Israeli political life, including the Israeli military, just as certain ethnic groups often come to dominate the politics and culture of multi-ethnic societies (once upon a time in the United States, men of British ancestry). Indeed, many Poles were proud of the achievement of the Israeli army in the 1967 war, despite government disapproval, seeing it as proof of Polish prowess.
Polish Jews do, or did, tend to be light-skinned, and Ashkenazi ancestry seems to be roughly a 50/50 mixture of ancestral Middle Eastern and European populations, perhaps most closely related to Italians in Europe. Many eastern European Jews have freckles and fairish hair, but most Israelis don’t.
I visited the country towards the end of the Second Intifada, where I heard and saw the immediate aftermath of a suicide bombing outside a nightclub. The security situation was very tense, and I was acutely conscious of everyone who approached the door, and nervously curious as to whether they were a Jew or Arab. It was essentially a pointless exercise, since as a northern European visitor I couldn’t tell them apart, except for the occasional blond Russian immigrant - because so many Israelis have overwhelmingly Middle Eastern ancestry. It’s hardly surprising then that, contrary to what so many people believe, Israel doesn’t in fact have high rates of skin cancer and most have no need for the Factor 50. It’s just one of those things that people feel must be true, because it fits the narrative.
One thing I would add is that I think in many cases the creation of national identity, outside of larger entities like Italy and Germany was in many cases defensive. Many of the empires of the 19th century, in order to compete against more unified, industrial and military stronger rivals were going down the route of making themselves giant nation states. One only has to look at say modern France, China or Russia (the parts that remained attached to it) to see what this meant for the local customs and traditions involved. Britain's nations retained some sense of distinctiveness probably because the Burkean political developement allowed a degree of incongruity and eccentriity in what was once a relative efficient system but even there, how many speak Scottish Gaelic now? Whether these things are good or bad is a different debate, but the consequences of modernity means that even in cases where nominal empires survived as political structures, the concept of multi-ethnic empires and decentralised political entities faced extreme difficulties in the 20th century even without wars that pushed political systems to breaking points. It is noticeable that the one of the few countries that has retained anything like a plurinational and decentralised political system is Switzerland, a land protected by mountains and that has the luxury of effectively disconnecting itself from the rivalries of the great powers. All the European empires, except perhaps the Austro-Hungarian empire were going the way of centralisation and an attempt at creating a unified nationality - the Ottoman reform movement, National Orthodoxy in Russia, Bismarck's Kulturkampf against the Catholics and Poles. And the Austro-Hungarian empire's decentralisation was not really a policy choice but more an externally forced weakness forced on it by its rivals (especially Prussia) in order to keep it somewhat chaotic and pliable to the German empire's need. I perhaps lack the romanticism to imagine if the empires had survived that they would have continued to be multi-national cosmopolitan entities. I think, cynically perhaps, had they survived the result would have been instead large homogenised nation-states of the kind that actually did come into creation in the southern and eastern Asia. Maybe this would have been better, more efficient economically. Modern technology, war and economics all militate towards this conclusion I would say, unfortunately.
So it is this cynical perspective one needs, I think, in order to have the context in which Zionism can be understood. If one returned to the early 20th century, then there was actually two strands of Jewish thought in terms of how the Jewish people may adapt to the modern world. They were Zionism and Bundism. Both were impelled by the historical consequences of Russian rule in much of Poland. A great deal of the Jewish population had migrated there in the Middle Ages as the old Polish kingdom was a relatively safe place for them to be and had become deeply interwoven into the transnational structures of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. The first rupture for the Jews was the partition of that old commonwealth and the fact that Jews became the subjects of Empires with a lot less benign view of their existence. By the early 20th century the situation for Jews in Russia was an internal issue and perhaps the trigger for the first great wave of mass migration the world has seen - the large Jewish populations of London, New York or Buenos Aires owe their existence to the pogroms, such as those in Kishiev. Even outside Russia there were pograms in Romania, the passions aroused by Dreyfuss affair in France, the election of a pro-German nationalist anti-semite in pre-war Vienna.
Faced with the nationalising tendencies in Europe the solutions were: either the absorption of a subnational Jewish identity within existing national structures (Bundism) or a Jewish nation-state (Zionism). It's interesting to read the subtext say, of the character of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. The book was written immediately after WW1 when these two directions were still live options. Bloom is clearly something of a Bundist. The book, by consciously paralleling Jewish and Irish visions are making specific reference to the parrallel solutions offered by both Jewish and Irish political movements. In his disavowal of nationalism (in the Cyclopes episode) and his association with the pre-WW1 Sinn Fein of Arthur Griffiths - who proposed an Austro-Hungarian solution for the 'Irish Problem' - is clearly sympathetic to Bundism and to the possibility of a solution that goes above and beyond nationalism. I digress on this just to show at this crucial turning point in history there were other ways considered, and the reason they were not ultimately sucessful was not due to fashion or caprice.
Why? The Holocaust shattered the political debate. Bundism ceased to exist. Great swathes of traditional Orthodox Jews who saw the creation of a seclar Jewish national state as outright heresy did a volte-face and became ardent Zionists. So this, to me, if the crucial context to understand Zionism. The Jews have a long history. They have been betrayed multiple times. Their devotion to one God, and one God only, saw their homeland turned into a desert and their capital turned into a pagan city after welcoming the Romans as protectors against their Seleucid tormentors. Romantic moralising about the duties Christian ideals or the promises of protection the English, French, Portugese or Castilian kings did not shield them from explusion when it became expedient to do so. Even the last throw of the dice: an attempt to modernise and become European and thoroughly integrated with the European nationalities and cultures was rewarded with mass extermination. Arab populations with whom the Mizrahi had played quiet roles of importance in society for centuries suddenly turned on their in an access of violence as Israel was created.
I am not a Jew. But given this history would you have anything other than cast-iron cynicism about the world? Romanticism - or naivity about human nature - under these circumstances is, as the modish phrase goes, a luxury belief. Yes, they had oases of peace and prosperity under the gentiles, but it almost always ends up in humiliation and catastrophe. In some sense the question of Zionism and nationalism is, except for a few early ideologues, almost irrelevant. Just as Portugese conversos had the strategem to pretend to convert to Christrianity and then after a century and a half suddenly reverted to Judaism in Amsterdam, well, more than anything the modern nation-state and nationalism is just a stratagem to survive. Jewish laws always put the emphasis on life, the continuation of life above all else (which is why Masada was shocking to the sensibilities of the time) and the propogation of tradition. Which is why, yes, the idea of Jewish nationality is anachronistic. Yes, the modern religion, forged in the post-exile years of Rabbianic tradition perhaps bares little relation to the pubic religion of the Judean kingdom. Yes, the modern Jewish population may well have once had periods of conversion, may have moved around the Roman empire long before the destruction of the second Temple, and yes may have a great deal of admixture from the genetic pool of the hosts of their centuries of exile. But none of this is relevant against the sheer admonition from God to *survive* as his people. Even secular, non-religious Jews are bathed in this tradition. I don't think Israel, with its focus on a sort of modern day Maccabean strength through mass conscription, a repudiation of the image of the weak and defenceless Jew that was propogated a 100 years ago, makes sense at all without understanding this. Even the USA, its main ally, is, if necessary, expendable and ignorable because ultimately gentiles, their ideas, their politics, their nations are just tools in the great task of survival. The Palestinians, for all the rationalisations, always were and always will be, just an irrelevancy in this goal. Palestinian territory was taken because it could be and because historical forces allowed it to be, and whatever the tortured argument over the validity of the claims to the land, the simple fact that this was the land promised and spoken of in their holy book gave a powerful romantic filip to the armies in 1948 and 1967. The emotions of the soldiers in that famous photo of the Waling wall in 1967 are very much real. They are also the reflective of the kind of messianic force that had led conquering armies, the kind the Arabs had once, that which Islamists are trying to encourage more and more of them to have once again.
Now the tragedy of this, what I think is a pefectly reasonable response to a doleful history is that this say realism and cynicism - and I would add the Arab populations have these same qualities in droves too - is that a little bit of romanticism is needed to carve out brief, often all too brief, historical moments of peace and prosperity. Not an execessive romanticism, which leads to folly, but enough that some degree of realpolitik can be left alone, for a time, or at least archived. Yes, realpolitik can generate peace too, but how brittle and bitter it can be - see Bismarck's fragile peace both domestically and internationally. In this case, a little romanticism on both sides could, as one saw in Northern Ireland, create a little space for something other than war, for a time, without any grand plan for actually solving the issues. It is why I feel some intristic sympathy for the Ukrainians despite my head knowing strategically and militarily it is a lost cause. But in the Middle East, both sides, burnt by the brutal fire of their modern history, have no reason to even entertain such a suspension of disbelief. And so, as you, say, it will go on, until, I fear, some yet another great tragedy is unleashed upon the world.
Great historical reminder, thanks.
Israel was just one of many new lines drawn on the map/states created post WWII as former empires and mandates were carved up, and not one of the larger or more traumatic changes. The Indian partition is another example (followed by the split of E Pakistan/Bangladesh from Pakistan proper). Let’s also not exclude Mecca switching from the Hashemites to the Saudis as well as border and ethnic conflicts in Africa and Indochina. Naive leftist anti-semites talking about settlers usually know little of the actual history in the region let alone the overall historical context where borders were being drawn and states created all over the world, with millions of refugees and numerous wars.