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Contributors
Daniel Pipes- Contributor
Daniel
Pipes is director of the Middle
East Forum, a member of the
presidentially-appointed board of the U.S.
Institute of Peace,
and a prize-winning columnist for the New York Sun and The
Jerusalem Post. His most recent book, Miniatures:
Views of Islamic and Middle Eastern Politics (Transaction
Publishers) appeared in late 2003. His website, DanielPipes.org,
the single most accessed source of information specifically
on
the Middle East and Islam, offers an archive and a chance
to sign-up to receive his new materials as they appear. [go
to Pipes index]
 The
Forcible Removal of Israelis from Gaza
No precedent...
[Daniel Pipes] 4/20/05
My column
last week, "Ariel
Sharon's Folly," noted the likelihood that more than 8,000
Israelis living in Gaza will soon be removed by their own government,
with force, if necessary. I called this step historically unprecedented
and then challenged the reader to name "another democracy that
has forcibly removed thousands its own citizens from their
lawful homes."
Not surprisingly,
readers took up the challenge, both by posting comments (such
as here, here, here,
and here)
and sending me e-mails. Their responses fall into three main
categories:
-
Eminent
domain, a government prerogative properly used "to
build roads, public works and the like" but often abused
these days to encourage commercial projects. As a writer
puts it, "American state and local governments, through
a commonplace abuse of eminent domain, displace thousands
of American citizens each year. Not exactly the same
as Sharon's proposal, sure, but just as insidious for
its creeping power over property rights." Three correspondents
specifically refer to cases where their own families
were evicted: the Tennessee Valley Authority which in
1933-35 forcibly evicted thousands of citizens to build
the Norris Dam; Boston, in the 1960s, when hundreds of
homes were seized to make way for a highway; and a
Los Angeles project to build a shopping center. The
case of the Navajos
in the Joint Use Area with the Hopis in Arizona is
also mentioned, as is the use of eminent domain in Australia.
-
Japanese
internment in the United States during World War II: "The
United States removed many American citizens of Japanese
descent from their lawful homes and placed them in camps
during World War II."
-
Cases
of "ethnic cleansing," where a population perceived
as foreign is thrown out of its homes and even out of
the country. Examples include the
American Indians, the
victims of Nazism and apartheid South Africa, Germans
after World War II, Muslims in India in 1947, and Russians
in the Baltic States in 1991.
I don't see
either any of these categories comparable to the case at hand.
As one
commentator says about eminent domain, it "applies to ALL
citizens regardless of skin color, nationality or creed that
live and own property in the area which is to be used for public
development. … nothing of the sort is scheduled to happen [in
Gaza]. Instead ONLY JEWISH residents are to be forcefully removed." Another
reader concludes: "There is no conceptual equivalence whatever
between what ‘eminent domain' means in terms of its core concepts
of ‘development' and ‘benefit,' and what Sharon is planning." Precisely.
As for the
Japanese internment, this involved the temporary relocation
of citizens, not a permanent move nor the razing of their houses.
Again, there is no comparison with what Sharon is doing.
Ethnic cleansing
is hardly comparable to the Gaza situation, if only because
the government and the evicted citizens are alike ethnically,
and Israeli citizens are being returned to the heartland, not
expelled.
Two other
suggestions bear notice. General Charles de Gaulle, "elected
under the slogan of Algerie française, immediately after
his election began the withdrawal of French troops, thereby
laying the basis for Algerian independence." This would count
as a very close precedent had de Gaulle required French citizens
in Algeria to leave, but he did not do that. In fact, the
French government did not expect the exodus of nearly a
million pieds noirs and Jews in just a few months in
1962:
The motto
among the European and Jewish community was "Suitcase or
coffin" ("La valise ou le cercueil"). The French government
had not planned that such a massive number would leave, at
the most it estimated that maybe 200,000 or 300,000 may chose
to go to metropolitan France temporarily. Consequently, nothing
was planned for their return, and many had to sleep in streets
or abandoned farms on their arrival in metropolitan France.
De Gaulle
let the French citizens in Algeria decide their own future,
whether to stay or leave; this is a policy, incidentally, that I
have recommended to the Israeli leadership for Israelis
in Gaza.
The best
analogy proposed was the razing
of Africville, Nova Scotia. The authorities
in 1965 bulldozed this, Canada's oldest and largest black
settlement, to the ground, but it was done in the name of slum
clearance, not relocation.
Reviewing
these replies to my challenge confirms me in my view that what
the Israeli authorities are about to do to their citizens in
Gaza has no historical precedent. tRO
This
piece first appeared in Front Page Magazine
copyright
2005 Daniel Pipes
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