The disingenuous “just asking questions” genre of op-eds is hardly novel, but few examples of it have ever been as morally reprehensible as Sadanand Dhume’s at the Wall Street Journal on February 12 (“If Indians and Pakistanis Can Relocate, Why Can’t Gazans?”). Dhume poses the question in the context of Trump’s stated intention of taking over Gaza and expelling the current population, in order to turn the area into another Riviera, Atlantic City, Merv Griffin Show set, or whatever location represents “high-class” in his disordered mind.
Dhume’s “argument,” if you want to apply that label to his despicable word-vomit, is of the “it’s not fair that everybody else gets to do it” variety:
Many population transfers have taken place over the past century. In the 1920s, Greece and Turkey agreed to a forced population swap: Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey moved to Greece, while Muslims in Greece moved to Turkey. After World War II, millions of Indians and Pakistanis were forced to find new homes, as were ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. In the 1970s, Uganda expelled Indians. Only in the Palestinian case has the refugee question festered endlessly.
He left out the Trail of Tears.
The thing is, all these cases he mentioned are examples of the horror implicit in the modern ethno-state, which is based on the idea that every nation-state is a State of the X People and everyone within the borders of the state who does not share that ethnic identity is officially Other and contaminating the National Body. These mass ethnic cleansings, expulsions, and exchanges of population are prime illustrations of why the ethno-state and its associated ideology are evils. Further, when carried out by countries other than U.S. allies, such actions are commonly regarded as war crimes. When carried out by Serbia in the 1990s, they were the pretext for American bombing and Milosevic’s war crime prosecution. As for the expulsion of South Asians from Uganda in the 70s, it’s interesting that Dhume didn’t mention the name of the leader who carried it out; it was Idi Amin — maybe the name rings a bell?
Dhume himself admits, later in his piece, that the Partition of India uprooted 18 million people and resulted in two million deaths. Not exactly the sort of thing a morally sane person would mention, in the course of recommending the same practice elsewhere. Also odd that, while Dhume’s so busy using the “everybody does it” defense for crimes against humanity, he limits himself to ethnic cleansing. Why stop there? Why not go for broke and argue for genocide? After all, there’s a pretty lengthy list of past examples, so it must not be that big a deal — right?
He also manages to twist the whole thing into an argument for the superior virtue of Israel, and the double standard to which it is allegedly held. The 600-700,000 Palestinians who “fled their homes” (not, please take note, “were driven from their homes”) during the creation of Israel, and their descendants to this day, are still regarded as refugees rather than citizens of the countries they relocated to. He contrasts this to the 800,000 Mizrahi Jews who fled or were expelled from Arab countries, whom Israel accepted as citizens (“Israel never stuck them in permanent refugee camps or used them as a geopolitical bargaining chip”).
Well, there’s some interesting background to that: those Mizrahi Jews didn’t just happen to show up at Israel’s borders. See, there was this thing about Israel being an officially Jewish ethno-state, to which every Jew in the world had a “right of return” and automatic right of citizenship. And it was an active policy of the state of Israel, not just to charitably accept Jewish refugees from Arab countries who happened to request entry, but to get as many as possible to migrate to Israel by one means or another. There were clandestine Mossad operatives in the Arab countries actively encouraging Jews there to emigrate to Israel. Whether the Baghdad bombings of 1950-51 were carried out by antisemitic extremists, or by Mossad agents attempting to hasten emigration has been a matter for historical debate (although Israel eventually admitted to the analogous “Lavon Affair” in Egypt. Somewhat disingenuous that Dhume neglected to mention any of this, don’t you think?
Also odd that he not only raises the fact of Palestinian refugees’ claims of a right of return, but also states: “No one expects Pakistan to transform its religious demography by offering a ‘right of return’ to descendants of Hindu and Sikh refugees. Why should it be any different for Israel?” — without mentioning either that Israeli policy today explicitly allows for a right of return for Jews anywhere in the world despite many generations of ancestry in their present location, or that the very project of a Jewish ethno-state was predicated on the assumption that Jews everywhere were to be regarded as refugees whose true home was Palestine after centuries of separation. Again, pretty disingenuous, eh?
I repeat, the idea of the ethno-state itself is a wellspring of crimes against humanity. To take the example of one of the first ethno-states to emerge in modern times, the so-called “French” national identity was artificially constructed around the particular langue d’oil dialect spoken in the Ile de France, and then imposed on everybody within the borders of “France” — not only the other langue d’oil areas of northern France, but on Bretons and the languedoc tongues of the south. France is just one example. Everywhere an official national identity has been created, it has carried with it things like the Native American boarding schools, or schoolchildren being forced to hang “I spoke Basque/Aragonese/Welsh/Ainu/Gaelic” signs around their necks.
And most of the ethnic cleansings and genocides in the post-colonial world are the rotten fruit of this same ideology, imposed by the conquerors. As recounted by scholars like Edward Said, Nandita Sharma, and Mahmood Mamdani, colonial administrators acted on the assumptions of Orientalist ideology to make ruled populations more legible, artificially classifying them into ethnic categories based on essentialized understandings of ethnicity, giving traditional authority figures completely ahistorical levels of absolute authority, and generally ruling people along reductionist ethnic lines treated as more real than the actual individuals assigned to them. The territorial states that predated European colonization were complex and multiethnic, with a variety of interrelationships between coexisting ethnicities and forms of political identity. Before European rule, ethnic and sectarian identity were nowhere as primary or absolutized as they became under the colonial authorities.
As Mamdani wrote, in Neither Settler Nor Native:
Historical writing, census-taking, and lawmaking fostered new subjectivities by creating for the colonized a new past, altering their status in the present, and anticipating for them futures that otherwise would never have come to pass. Colonizers wrote European race theories and perverted variations on local history into the histories of colonized peoples, making European categories of race and tribe appear local and natural. Thus did colonized peoples learn that they had always been rivals. Colonizers then mapped the colonized using census categories organized according to these histories, reinforcing racial and tribal identifications. Finally, by predicating laws and their application on identification with racial and tribal distinctions, colonizers ensured that future political, economic, and social realities would reflect these distinctions.
The primacy of Hindu and Muslim identity that resulted in the Partition of India was almost entirely the result of British rule. To quote Sharma, from Home Rule:
In 1862, the idea that Hindus and Muslims were wholly different types of people was shored up by identifying each as having discrete customs, culture, history, and traditions. The British Raj institutionalized such ideas by empowering the supposed guardians of tradition — princes, priests, and landholders — and by consolidating authoritarian British rule. The passing of separate “personal codes” or “personal laws” was part of this. The “civil” (or “personal”) matters of Hindus and Muslims would be dealt with by separate Native authorities established by the British but portrayed as emanating from the “traditions” of the named group. In the subsequent decade (1862–1872), further legal and administrative reforms were enacted to “preserve” and “protect” these now-differentiated groups of Natives. The British thus actively constructed new identities — communal and individual — by institutionalizing the significance of religion in social and political life in unprecedented ways.
The same is true of the Hutu-Tutsi divide, Christians in South Sudan, and the Rohingya people — in every case, the level of animosity today is the result of colonial authorities essentializing identities into a level of importance far beyond anything that existed before, and then utilizing them as a tool of divide-and-rule strategy.
Dhume, surveying the history of horrors created by the modern nation-state, treats this history as normative, and uses it in turn to justify still more horror. “Evil, be thou my good.” I assume, based on his op-ed, that Sadanand Dhume long ago destroyed whatever capacity for shame he might once have possessed. But whoever greenlit the publication of this screed at the Wall Street Journal should be deeply ashamed.
