Why do the recent, hyper-bloody events in Israel rate discussion at VDARE.com, focused as it is on immigration?  It’s because the actual underlying subject is The National Question—whether ”the US can continue as a coherent nation-state in the face of current immigration policy.” 

But limiting the coverage to America would be needlessly parochial, for as Mark Steyn says, ”[W]estern civilization is sliding off the cliff, and most people in the western world aren’t even aware of that.”  [Dead Superpower Walking, August 17, 2021; in the same essay, Steyn riffs that ”Wokeness is weakness, and diversity is where nations go to die.”] 

Symptoms of the slide—enormously wasteful and inefficient national governments with growing totalitarian tendencies; the disdain of nominal ”elites” for the ”deplorables” they boss around; and the banishment of political questions from electoral politics (especially ceaseless immigration in the face of great popular opposition)—are present across the West.

So let’s call it, instead, ”The Civilizational Question.”

My take: Israel is part of Western civilization, founded (after all!) upon Judeo-Christian values.  And in common with much of the West, Israel is weakened by struggles with its own depraved, tyrannical Left while external enemies mass.

The peril of Israel being located in an undesirable neighborhood goes back to its 1948 founding (founding of the state—the Jewish presence goes back millennia).  But after its stunning victory in 1967’s Six Day War, it could have imposed a solution that would have attenuated the dangers from its immediate surroundings.  Instead Israel succumbed to decades of bafflegab about the putative ”peace process.”  (If you’re talking about ”process,” you’re not serious.)

What is that solution?  Population transfer.

Has any big name ever publicly broached such a possibility?  Not that I’m aware of until this October 11, when David [”Spengler”] Goldman concluded his piece Israel’s Darkest Day at Law & Liberty as follows: 

The twentieth century resolved its ethnic wars by population transfers, some orderly, some horrific. The Israeli-Arab conflict should have been resolved in the late 1940s with a transfer of roughly equal populations. The Arab states aborted the transfer by imprisoning 800,000 Palestinians as permanent refugees and incubated a monster.

There will be no two-state solution in Israel; after Hamas gulled the Israelis into complacency and then committed horrific acts reminiscent of the Holocaust, Israel will not, and should not, countenance Palestinian statehood. One way or another, the population exchange of 1948 will be completed sometime during the next several years. Either Israel will destroy Hamas, and the population of Gaza will dwindle over time through emigration, or a large number of Israelis will deem the cost of a Jewish polity too high, and decamp for Europe or the United States. This may seem cruel, but if the events of the past few days have taught us anything, it is that the monsters of the ancient world still walk abroad in daylight, and they will not be banished by the bland pronouncements of diplomats.

My essay "Israel's Darkest Day" at Law&Liberty: https://t.co/ZfHK0rmmqO

— David P. Goldman (@davidpgoldman) October 11, 2023

So Goldman envisions, vaguely, two transfer possibilities.  Robert Locke, writing at VDARE.com in 2003, was much more explicit about one of those possibilities—how Israel should deal with Palestinian Arabs dwelling under its administration. 

Locke’s classic article, Is Population Transfer the Solution to the Palestinian Problem—And Some Others?, actually discusses forced transfer of Palestinians from Judea and Samaria (”the West Bank”) east across the Jordan River and into Jordan.  (Let the Hashemite kingdom take responsibility for their fellow Arabs!)  But similar arrangements could surely be made to remove Gaza’s Palestinians from Israel’s border.

Two excerpts capture Locke’s sober tone:

[I]t is the genocidal aspect of ”ethnic cleansing” that decent people rightly object to. Non-genocidal ethnic cleansing—even if nothing to be taken lightly—is another question entirely.

Involuntary population transfer obviously cannot be wholly peaceful and fair. But if properly organized and carried out in a disciplined manner, it can be done with a tolerably low level of violence, i.e. one involving less long-term bloodshed than the current situation, in which people are dying every day. It would not require machine-gunning people in the streets.

And:

Governments all over the world regularly deport people. It is a legitimate function of a sovereign state to determine that the presence of certain persons is not in the national interest, to make it illegal, and to enforce it. Even the United States, which has de facto given up enforcing its southern border, still deports 300,000 people per year.

The closest precedents for population transfer are the expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe following World War II and the exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece after World War I. Both precedents were bloodier than anything I’m proposing. But both did settle longstanding issues that could not be settled any other way. Both have been accepted as legitimate by the world at large. [Links in original]

Read Locke’s article for the practical details.  And if anyone has an email address for David Goldman, please send him the link to Locke’s piece!