The rest of the world has fallen in behind the flags of these bitter antagonists, each side decrying the dangerous "disinformation" of the other. Historians divide into those who see Zionism as the only sane answer to the Jews’ historic vulnerability; and those who regard the Zionist "entity" as a purely colonial construct, founded in racism and shrouded in mythology. The moralists of both camps, meanwhile, demonstrate a capacity for joint-cracking contortions calculated to make a circus impresario’s mouth water.
Perhaps the smallest group, after 12 months of blood, fire and torment, are the optimists. These brave (or idiotic) souls still insist that a "two-state solution" is the only viable way out of the unceasing tragedy that is Israel/Palestine. As if October 7, 2023, and its aftermath, can somehow be set aside. As if the trauma-stricken judgement of Israelis and Palestinians can somehow be rendered sufficiently calm and dispassionate to envisage something other than the utter annihilation of the national enemy.
What, then, is the solution to this, the Devil’s own most treasured problem? Given its constitutive role in the Israel-Palestine impasse, history may not be the most obvious of guides. But, where else can we turn? There is no war in the present that was not conceived, and brought to term, in the past. What the world has been watching these past 12 months is nothing that the world hasn’t witnessed many, many times before.
In spite of appearances, no conflict is endless. Wars end. Peace is restored. How?
Let’s begin in the aftermath of World War 1. The Ottoman Empire lies in ruins. Far away, in the commune of Sevres, on the outskirts of Paris, the victors have drawn up a treaty which shares what’s left of the Ottoman possessions (after the territories agreed upon by Monsieur Picot and Mr Sykes have been deducted) between France, Britain, Italy and Greece.
Encouraged by the British prime minister, David Lloyd-George, who dreamed, madly, of resurrecting Byzantium, the Greeks did their best to oblige him.
Mustapha Kemal, whom New Zealanders had learned to fear at Gallipoli, was having none of it. His Turkish troops drove the Greek invaders, quite literally, into the sea. But, not before the contending armies’ Muslim and Christian commanders had distinguished themselves by permitting/encouraging multiple atrocities against the inhabitants of the helpless faith communities their forces over-ran.
A new, and much revised, treaty having been signed and sealed, this time in the Swiss city of Lausanne, Kemal turned to the problem of what to do with all the Greeks who continued to live in his new Republic of Turkey (now Turkiye).
Too much blood had flowed under too many bridges for Turks and Greeks to co-exist peacefully, as they had done for centuries under the Ottomans.
Ever the ruthless problem-solver, Kemal determined to rid his new republic of Greeks — quietly encouraging the defeated Greeks to rid their own kingdom of Turks at the same time. The human beings caught up in this first example of "ethnic cleansing" got no say in the matter. They were simply ordered to leave. Enterprising tourists can still visit the decaying ruins of settlements from which Christian Greeks and Muslim Turks were summarily uprooted and deported in the 1920s.
So successful was Kemal’s "solution", that the victorious allies of World War 2 adopted it as the most efficient means of emptying the states of Eastern Europe of their numerous German-speaking communities. With the example of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland before them, the Allies were in no mood to burden the region’s future with the witches’ brew of ethno-nationalism. The victims of Nazi oppression watched with cold eyes as millions of "displaced" Germans trudged westward. Few tears were shed.
The Palestinians insist that, in 1948, they, too, became the victims of ethnic cleansing. If true, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Israelis made an uncharacteristically poor job of it.
• Chris Trotter is an Auckland writer and commentator.
