On Wednesday, “Nakba Day” was commemorated around the world with even more vehemence than usual as outpourings of hatred against Israel, sprinkled with ample doses of anti-Semitism, issued from screaming crowds.
What was entirely missing was any historical perspective on the Nakba – that is, the displacement, mainly through voluntary flight, of Palestinians from mandatory Palestine. Stripped out of its broader context, the event was invested with a uniqueness that distorts the processes that caused it and its contemporary significance.
It is, to begin with, important to understand that the displacement of Palestinians was only one facet of the sweeping population movements caused by the collapse of the great European land empires. At the heart of that process was the unravelling of the Ottoman Empire, which started with the Greek war of independence in 1821 and accelerated during subsequent decades.
As the empire teetered, religious conflicts exploded, forcing entire communities to leave. Following the Crimean War of 1854-56, earlier flows of Muslims out of Russia and its border territories became a flood, with as many as 900,000 people fleeing the Caucasus and Crimea regions for Ottoman territory. The successive Balkan wars and then World War I gave that flood torrential force as more than two million people left or were expelled from their ancestral homes and sought refuge among their co-religionists.
The transfers reshaped the population geography of the entire Middle East, with domino effects that affected virtually every one of the region’s ethnic and religious groups.
The formation of new nation-states out of what had been the Ottoman Empire then led to further rearrangements, with many of those states passing highly restrictive nationality laws in an attempt to secure ethnic and religious homogeneity.
Nothing more starkly symbolised that quest for homogeneity than the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations signed on January 30, 1923. This was the first agreement that made movement mandatory: with only a few exceptions, all the Christians living in the newly established Turkish state were to be deported to Greece, while all of Greece’s Muslims were to be deported to Turkey. The agreement, reached under the auspices of the League of Nations, also specified that the populations being transferred would lose their original nationality along with any right to return, instead being resettled in the new homeland.
Underlying the transfer was the conviction, articulated by French prime minister (and foreign minister) Raymond Poincare, that “the mixture of populations of different races and religions has been the main cause of troubles and of war”, and that the “unmixing of peoples” would “remove one of the greatest menaces to peace”.That the forced population transfers, which affected about 1.5 million people, imposed enormous suffering is beyond doubt. But they were generally viewed as a success. Despite considerable difficulties, the transferred populations became integrated into the fabric of the recipient communities – at least partly because they had no other option. At the same time, relations between Turkey and Greece improved immensely, with the Ankara Agreements of 1930 inaugurating a long period of relative stability.
The result was to give large-scale, permanent population movements, planned or unplanned, a marked degree of legitimacy.
Thus, the formation of what became the Irish Republic was accompanied by the flight of Protestants to England and Northern Ireland, eventually more than halving, into an insignificant minority, the Protestant share of the Irish state’s population; that was viewed as easing the tensions that had so embittered the Irish civil war.
It is therefore unsurprising that further “unmixing” was seen by the allies in World War II as vital to ensuring peace in the post-war world. In a statement later echoed by Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill made this explicit in 1944, telling the House of Commons he was “not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before”.
The immediate effect, endorsed as part of the Potsdam Agreements and implemented as soon as the war ended, was the brutal expulsion from central and eastern Europe of 12 million ethnic Germans whose families had lived in those regions for centuries. Stripped of their nationality and possessions, then forcibly deported to a war-devastated Germany, the refugees – who received very little by way of assistance – gradually merged into German society, though the scars took decades to heal.
Even more traumatic was the movement in 1947 of 18 million people between India and the newly formed state of Pakistan.
As Indian novelist Alok Bhalla put it, India’s declaration of independence triggered the subcontinent’s sudden descent into “a bestial world of hatred, rage, self-interest and frenzy”, with Lord Ismay, who witnessed the process, later writing that “the frontier between India and Pakistan was to see more tragedy than any frontier conceived before or since”. Yet in the subcontinent too, and especially in India, the integration of refugees proceeded to the point where little now separates their descendants from those of the native born.
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