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Hugh Fitzgerald: Christian Arabs, Muslim Arabs (Part 3)

Dec 16, 2015 11:41 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

Copts-Egypt-Christians-AP

Perhaps, despite all kinds of opposition from the very people who would benefit, a large-scale transfer of peoples were to create a Christian Preserve in the Middle East?

Following World War I, and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the first of the twentieth century’s large-scale transfers of populations took place. By the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, which was signed at Lausanne in 1923, the Greek and Turkish governments agreed to the compulsory population exchange of peoples. About 1.5 million Greeks who had been uprooted during the Greek genocide and then by defeat in the Greco-Turkish war were forcibly sent to Greece. Turkey wanted to formalize this exodus, and at the same time to create a new exodus, but from Greece this time, and the people being forced out were Turks, moved to Anatolia where they could repopulate areas from which the Greeks had been moved. And at the same time, the properties left behind by the Turks could be taken over by some of the Greeks expelled from Anatolia.

This exchange of populations was based on religious identity, and not ethnicity or language. And the goal was to create for each of these countries, Greece and Turkey, if not complete ethnic homogeneity, at least to drastically reduce the numbers of Muslims (Turks and Albanians) in Greece and the number of Orthodox Christians in Turkey.

The second great population exchange of the twentieth century is that which took place among the Muslims and Hindus of India at the time of Partition. Out of India itself, a second state was carved; it included part of the Punjab to the west, and part of Bengal to the east, and together West Pakistan and East Pakistan formed the Dominion of Pakistan. In 1971, East Pakistan rose in revolt and seceded from the Dominion of Pakistan to become an independent state, called Bangladesh.

As many as half a million people died in the communal riots between Muslims and Hindus before the Partition. And as part of the general upheaval in this period, 14 to 15 million people, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh, were uprooted and, as Muslim refugees from India, or as Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan, then resettled in Pakistan or in India. It is impossible to say if the people of India and Pakistan were better off because of the rearranging of populations; it was meant to deal with the effects of communal riots and large-scale homelessness — to put Hindus in mainly-Hindu India, to put Muslims in mainly-Muslim Pakistan.

Still a third example of large-scale population transfer is that which has gone largely unrecognized: the half-million Arabs who left Mandatory Palestine beginning in November 1947 (when they were urged to leave and to return together with triumphant Arab conquerors — that triumph, and that return, never took place) while, at more or less the same time, 900,000 Jews from all over the Arab lands, from Morocco to Iraq, fled local pogroms and made their way to Israel. This population transfer was not, like that of Greeks and Turks in 1923, or the resettlement of Hindus and Muslims in 1947, the result of a formal treaty. It was simply the result of Arabs listening to other Arabs just before and during Israel’s war for independence, and Jews reacting to the violence visited upon them before, during, and after that war, all over the Middle East and North Africa.

We have seen that the Christian Arab population all over the Middle East is dwindling. We have reviewed the history of the “West Bank” and its importance for Israel’s survival. Is there any way to join these two themes — to give some Christian Arabs a sure refuge, and to strengthen Israel’s hold, and Israel’s perceived right to hold, on to the “West Bank”?

Let’s start with the world of the counterfactual. You know what a counterfactual is. It’s that which didn’t happen, but you allow yourself to change that history in your mind, and twist it, to make it go as you would have wished it to. Usually these counterfactuals involve something simple — for example, the killing of some dictator, a Hitler or a Stalin, before he could fully do his murderous damage, thus saving tens of millions of lives. Or someone chooses something a little more complicatedly counterfactual. Suppose, for example, we tell ourselves that in their long series of naval battles, Genoa and not Venice had emerged victorious and powerful, and rich. If that had happened, then later in the next century, when a certain Genoan named Cristoforo Colombo sought financial backing for an expedition to find a new western passage to the Indies— the land route now blocked by the Muslims who completed their conquest of Byzantium in 1453 — he did not have to first go to England and Portugal (turned down in both places) or, as he finally and successfully did, to Spain, with the backing of Ferdinand and Isabella and Luis Santangel. No, he could have been backed instead by his very own native city, and would have claimed the New World for Genoa.

What would that New World look like? Oh, north of the Fiume Grande it would look much the same — the French and English would still have settled North America. But south of that river, what would things be like? Spain’s conquistadores were hardened by the half-millennium of the Reconquista, and thus were aggressive conquerors who seized booty. The Genoese were traders from a maritime city-state. They set up trading entrepôts on the shores of the Black Sea, and did not go inland, did not attempt to conquer peoples and seize loot. A very different pattern of settlement.

Now imagine another counterfactual scenario that would create a very different pattern of settlement: Muslim Arabs in Gaza and the “West Bank” exchanged for the Christian Arabs displaced from Iraq, Syria, and other majority-Muslim countries. This would give Christian Arabs a preserve where they would be protected, and where they in turn could (if they chose) help Israel militarily — as the Rev. Gabriel Naddaf is encouraging those who are in Israel to do.

There is something in this also for those Arab leaders who do not want war with Israel. Those leaders actually have a stake in Israel keeping the “West Bank,” which makes it perceptibly more powerful: if you are al-Sisi, for example, you probably want Israel to hold onto the “West Bank.” This population exchange would enable the Israelis to do so. Nonetheless, the opposition of Arab leaders in the area to this plan, were anyone in a position of power to propose it, is virtually assured. Some Israelis, likewise, won’t like the idea of agreeing to let Arabs to live on “West Bank,” even if the Arabs in question are Christian and are traded for Muslim Arabs. There is considerable Christian Arab hostility toward Israel, and that will be hard to change. And there are some Israelis who think they can kick out all the Arabs from the West Bank.

All this opposition makes for an impossible counterfactual — but would that it could actually come true, for the sake of all three groups involved: Israel, the Arab leaders who don’t want war with Israel, and above all, the Christian Arabs themselves.

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Filed Under: Featured, Hugh Fitzgerald, Muslim persecution of Christians Tagged With: West Bank


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Comments

  1. eduardo odraude says

    Dec 16, 2015 at 12:38 pm

    Even if impossible now, it’s good to have such counterfactuals broached for their possible influence on the future.

  2. Charlie in NY says

    Dec 16, 2015 at 1:51 pm

    Resettling Arab Christians in a portion of what, since 1922, has been formally declared the historical homeland of the Jewish People and, implicitly, in which the Jews are the indigenous people. Interesting idea but why, as always, are intra-Arab problems to be solved at the expense of the Jews?
    Here’s a different counter-factual to consider: the various Arab Christian communities unite with the Armenians and establish a Christian majority state on “Arab” land (which I put in quotes, as the Christian communities, like their Jewish counterparts, predate the Islamic Imperial invasion of the 7th century).

    • mortimer says

      Dec 16, 2015 at 10:01 pm

      ‘Resettlement’ is not necessary if you consider the people in the article as immigrants who can be naturalized and move in the country wherever they chose.

    • DP111 says

      Dec 17, 2015 at 6:21 pm

      I suggest Lebanon as the region that should be made into a Christian nation – a refuge for Christians from Arab Muslim countries.

  3. Angemon says

    Dec 16, 2015 at 3:28 pm

    Perhaps, despite all kinds of opposition from the very people who would benefit, a large-scale transfer of peoples were to create a Christian Preserve in the Middle East?

    Wasn’t that why Lebanon was created in the first place?

    • dumbledoresarmy says

      Dec 17, 2015 at 2:05 am

      Yes.

      Here’s *my* counterfactual/ hypothetical.

      The two most powerful daughters of, respectively, western and eastern Christendom combine to sponsor the creation of Mont Liban REBORN; an entirely secular-and-Christian state (into which the Druze and Yazidi non-Muslim minorities might also be permitted to enter).

      Let the precedent be Kosovo. If a sovereign *Muslim* state can be carved out of a previously majority-non-Muslim entity – supposedly to ‘protect’ the resident Muslims from oppression – why cannot a sovereign *non-Muslim* state be carved out of a *Muslim* region, in order to protect the *non-Muslims* from very manifest and obvious oppression? Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.

      The Maronites would identify an economically-viable and militarily-defensible region into which they would welcome – as demographic reinforcements – their displaced-and-mortally-imperilled Christian brethren, and other imperilled non-Muslims – from Iraq and Syria, who don’t really have readily-identifiable and potentially-economically-viable chunks of territory that they could control and defend longterm. ALL MUSLIMS would be told to leave that new “Mont Liban”, and compelled to leave if necessary; they can live in Syria and Iraq. (Russia might want to continue protecting the heretical-syncretic Alawites in *their* core territory).

      The new “Mont Liban’ would centre on the Lebanon massif; its southern border would *have* to be with Israel, a friendly and peaceably-inclined, and generally trustworthy, NON-MUSLIM state; its western border would need to be the sea; the east and north borders would have to be determined with a view to longterm military defensibility, since, like Israel, knowing that the Jihad never stops, one must resolutely establish a boundary and then fiercely and forever defend it into the foreseeable future. It would be lovely if all Muslims apostatised and the Jihad came to an end, but…that’s not gonna happen anytime soon and in the meantime let’s concentrate on consolidating the Lands of the Infidels and protecting as many non-muslims as we can, into the foreseeable future.

      As for Israel, including Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem; in the light of the Stabbing Intifada, I’ think it’s becoming apparent to the Jews of Israel that if there were no Muslims at all inside Israel, life would be a lot safer and more peaceful. You wouldn’t always be wondering which previously-apparently-peaceful Muslim Arab was going to pull out a knife in the street or the shops and shove it into your back…or suddenly run amok with a car, ramming it into Jews on the street.

      They’re going to have to turf out all identifiable Muslims one day and probably sooner rather than later; and they *have* to hold Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem because those areas constitute military high ground without which tiny Israel is basically indefensible. The Christians and other non-Muslim Gentiles *currently* resident within Israel – along with the remnant still in Judea and Samaria, though that remnant, within the PA-controlled areas, is a *lot* smaller than it used to be, because of the Muslims attacking, harassing and driving them out – could remain; *they* are not getting out knives and stabbing little old ladies and rabbis. It’s *only* the Muslims doing that.

      Final hypothetical: Aegyptia Nova. Let the *Copts* have Sinai…and Gaza . And all the Mohammedans from Gaza and Sinai can be in Egypt.

      The virtue of this hypothetical is that you’d then have three wholly non-Muslim nations running from the Suez canal right up the eastern shore of the Med all the way to a point north of Israel. And *all three* would be allied with each other, shoulder to shoulder, and protected by and allied with the most powerful non-Muslim nations.

      Muslims spend all their time dreaming grand dreams of Total World Domination; well, why can’t Infidels dream dreams of small but strong sovereign homelands for terribly-oppressed remnant non-Muslim minorities of the ‘middle east’ (Copts, Jews, and the Maronite and Syrian Christians, with the Druze and Yazidis thrown in?).

      • DP111 says

        Dec 17, 2015 at 6:23 pm

        The weak point in this counter-factual is that the USA would be supporting Saudi Arabia.

  4. Kepha says

    Dec 16, 2015 at 7:19 pm

    I’m not sure this would work. And why should we tell the Islamic world that it’s supremacism is still acceptable?

  5. neversink says

    Dec 16, 2015 at 11:47 pm

    Can we please have links in the article to Part 1 and Part 2. And why not just combine all three articles together?? Otherwise, thanks for a great website.

    • danfromtn says

      Dec 17, 2015 at 9:39 am

      For links to part 1 and 2 just click on the author’s name.

  6. dumbledoresarmy says

    Dec 17, 2015 at 2:16 am

    A further thought.

    I think it would be very helpful if Mark Durie’s book on Dhimmitude, “The Third Choice”, were translated into Hebrew…and French…and Russian…and into the form of Arabic most commonly used in Israel, especially by the Christians. I think people like Fr Gabriel Naddaf would find it very useful; and perhaps also those Israelis who wonder why so many of their fellow Jews are so puzzlingly willing to appease Muslims, and also why so many of the local Christians are so eager to carry water for the Jihad and side with their own Muslim oppressors, against Jews, might understand the pathologies afflicting such people, and have a better idea of how to liberate them. It would be helpful for the de-dhimmifying of *both* Jews *and* Christians within Israel. “Liberty to the Captives”, the companion booklet, should be similarly translated. Let non-Dhimmi rabbis and psychologists read through it, slowly and carefully. It is written from a specifically Christian pastoral perspective but it has this virtue – the techniques employed *have* been known to work, they have been ‘road-tested’, and it might well be possible to take an analogous approach with those Jews within Israel who are manifesting the psychological warping that marks many who – or whose forebears – have lived as Dhimmis.

    (Similarly: those Hindus and secular Indians who, in India, are worried or dismayed or infuriated by the tendency of some Indian Christians – not to mention the tendency of many of their fellow Hindu and secular Indians!! – to side with Muslims, should read “The Third Choice” and get it translated, and try to find ways of circulating it and “Liberty to the Captives” amongst the Christians in India, as widely as possible. Non-Dhimmi Christians would NEVER make common cause with the Muslims nor act in any way to further the Jihad within India).

    • Ron Barak says

      Dec 17, 2015 at 4:42 am

      I’d be willing to translate to Hebrew “The Third Choice”, Mark Durie’s book on Dhimmitude:
      have Dr. Durie contact me (http://tinyurl.com/oap5bo2).

  7. Gea says

    Dec 17, 2015 at 9:18 pm

    Unfortunately it was an atheist Arab, Edward Said who had used taqiyya and kitman to blame the Western colonialism and imperialism for all the problems of the world. Since his nonsense book The Oriantalist, many departments because teachers of his falsehood and had banned open discussions of history and ideologies, especially of Islam which is the root cause of terrorism and violence these days.

    The Christian Arabs in Israel now want to be called Israeli Arabs and join the army because they had finally come to realization that only Israel protects ALL people, unlike Muslims who are now ethnically cleansing Christians from their midst as they did with a million of Jews that lived among Arabs before Israel was formed and proclaimed independence in 1948.

  8. Matthieu Baudin says

    Dec 18, 2015 at 6:23 am

    Very thoughtful and probing, once again, many thanks.

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