A History of Mass Relocation
Brian Horowitz
What does the 20th century show us about President Trump’s proposal to permanently move the population of Gaza?
Greek refugees at the Port of Moudania (today Mudanya, Turkey), 1922 From the archives of the Society of Friends of the People, Athens, Greece
“Population transfer is a grave surgical operation, justifiable, not for cosmetic reasons, but only where the sole alternative would be chaos and destruction.” —Joseph Schechtman, 1953.
President Donald Trump’s proposal to permanently relocate the entire population of Gaza to neighboring countries has caused a storm of condemnation. Foreign leaders, U.N. officials and experts have decried the plan as ethnic cleansing, a violation of international law, and a war crime. But in the years before and after World War II, the imperial powers, the fledgling international bodies, and global leaders alike, operating within the post-Versailles order founded on the breakup of large multiethnic empires, saw population transfer, both voluntary and compulsory, as a humanitarian tool to avoid future wars. In fact, they considered it not only necessary and legal, but also morally justified and advantageous. For British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, who negotiated the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, population transfer would achieve the “removal of old and deep-rooted causes of quarrel”—an act that reflected the very basis for the existence of nation-states, which gave a political voice to individual peoples.
A pressing problem for the post-Versailles order occurred when part of the people of one nation-state found itself trapped by map-makers and the realities of defensible geography into living in someone else’s national home. The problem was especially acute when these ethnic minorities became embroiled in war between the nation-state of their ethnicity and their country of birth. To avoid both national disenfranchisement, and to limit future wars, the answer to such problems, whenever practical, was population transfer. The first internationally sanctioned example of “unmixing populations” after the Great War was the voluntary exchange of respective ethnic minorities between Bulgaria and Greece. The Treaty of Lausanne then sanctioned the compulsory exchange of Greeks in Turkey and Turks in Greece. While 1.6 million people endured all kinds of suffering in the process, in the end the misery was widely judged to be worth the price as the transfer created a new reality in which ethnic, religious, and culturally monolithic populations were formed, putting an end to violence and conflict.
Understanding the complexities of migration, refugees, and population transfer desperately requires a capable historian. Fortunately we have one in Joseph Schechtman, a Russian Jew who authored seminal books such as European Population Transfers, 1939-1945 (1946); Population Transfers in Asia (1949); The Arab Refugee Problem (1952); and The Refugees in the World: Displacement and Dislocation (1964). Schechtman was a believer in the utility of mass population transfer, which he saw as a useful solution to thorny and bloody nationality disputes and presented a difficult subject in political terms that leaders, politicians, and ordinary people could understand.
Schechtman saw the postwar population transfers as beneficial to peace in the continent. ‘To have saddled the Polish state with millions of ardently nationalistic Germans,’ he wrote, ‘would have threatened not only the existence of Poland but the peace of Europe.’
His work has since fallen out of favor, however, because while it may be tempting to view large-scale demographic separations as neat and effective solutions, forcible movement of people from one place to another comes with a host of tragic consequences that are now considered taboo to advocate for—even if it also means saving lives. Of course, historically, transfers very frequently were less than orderly processes. Take the story of Jews displaced by the Russian army during World War I, which tells of tragedies that include death from exposure, starvation, destruction and loss of property, and mistreatment on the road to safety. Due to ineffective governments, the chance to exact vengeance, and opportunity to take someone else’s belongings, transfer is usually accompanied by tremendous suffering. To be sure, none of this bears any resemblance to what is currently under discussion for Gazans, who, despite repeatedly launching and losing wars against their more powerful neighbor, are being presented with an American offer to rebuild their lives elsewhere.
What has marred the idea of transfer, however, is that in the last century, it was often conducted to attain less high-minded goals. The Nazis, for example, pushed forces east and renamed parts of Poland and Czech territory in order to transfer the Slav population and make room for ethnic Germans. After the war, Stalin had his own plan, shifting borders westward, with Ukrainians pushing out Poles, and Czechs and Poles removing Germans.
Following World War II, similar developments accompanied a global wave of decolonization, which extended the logic of the ethno-state model that the world adopted at the end of World War I. Indians and Pakistanis exchanged populations in 1947 with a million killed as a result. The establishment of the State of Israel and its aftermath saw 750,000 Palestinians displaced across the Middle East and more than 850,000 Jews forced to leave their homes in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and elsewhere. And of course there were the victims of the Holocaust as well as the DPs (displaced people), the survivors of the Nazi attempt to cleanse the world of Jews, who made their way to Israel in the late 1940s and afterward. No one sane would describe any of these population movements as ideal. However the alternatives appeared at the time and even today to be even less ideal, namely mass murder.
Joseph Schechtman was a product—and a keen observer—of this history. Born in a Jewish family in Odessa, Russian Empire, in 1891, Schechtman was largely Russified, meaning he lived in a Russian cultural environment. Besides the usual fare of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, Schechtman fell under the influence of the rising star in Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who was himself an Odessan. In 1918, the Zionist movement sent Schechtman to Kyiv where he joined the newly formed Ukrainian government in the Nationalities Rada. Young Schechtman witnessed the anti-Jewish pogroms that broke out in 1918 and grew in intensity in 1919 and 1920. He fled to Berlin in 1921 where he joined up with the Russian emigration that had escaped Bolshevik communism. In the mid-1920s, he moved to Paris when the German mark lost its value, and wrote several books on the violence against Jews in Ukraine.
He grew more involved with Jabotinsky, who by this time had become the leader of a militaristic branch of Zionism known as Revisionism (Ha-Tzohar). In the mid-1930s, Jabotinsky sent Schechtman to Poland, where Revisionism had become popular. The Revisionists tried to negotiate with the Polish government to clandestinely remove Jews from the country for migration to Palestine. Except for illegal efforts, all attempts to increase the small number of certificates that Britain dispensed failed. Britain refused to change its policy limiting Jewish emigration to Palestine in the late-1930s. Jabotinsky called for voluntary evacuation of Jews from Eastern Europe, but no country would accept more than a symbolic number. Jabotinsky’s widely-disbelieved prediction that the result would be the mass murder of European Jewry by the Nazis then proved to be fact.
In 1941, Schechtman somehow managed to escape Europe for America, where good fortune befell him. Jacob Robinson, the director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs, commissioned him to write a three-volume study on the history of population transfers, emphasizing the years 1939-42. According to Gil Rubin, a scholar of population transfers, Robinson was leading the discussions about the postwar future—what would minority rights and especially the Jewish question look like? Rubin notes that his selection of Schechtman seemed a strange appointment since, after all, Schechtman had no experience as a demographer. But “Schechtman’s study was the first and most detailed on the topic.”
Schechtman was recruited to participate in FDR’s “M” (Migration) Project, an effort to shape the postwar map through resettlement programs, which included resettling both the surviving Jews of Europe and American Jews across the globe to avoid their future concentration in any one nation-state. This effort was run by the Department of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, with the participation of leading American academics at Columbia University and the University of Chicago. In any case, scholars view Schechtman’s role in the M-Project as meaningful because his work there—despite targeting Jews for transfer—strongly reinforced his conviction that priority be given to state interests and affirmed the utility of population transfer as a national strategy.
In his writings, Schechtman maintained a level of objectivity and distance, but he was overall sympathetic to state efforts to promote ethnic uniformity. In Postwar Population Transfers in Europe, he wrote, “On the whole, the author is in favor of the transfer of ethnic groups as a solution to those nationality problems which have proved to be insoluble in any other way. He thinks, however, that not all population transfers dealt with in this study can be considered equally justifiable, and that some of them were hardly justifiable at all. He also stresses that the tremendous amount of hardship and suffering accompanying the early stages of some of the transfers could have been averted by proper organization, and that the implementation of the Potsdam decisions considerably ‘humanized’ the carrying out of the major transfers covered by these decisions.” The “Potsdam decisions” refer to the agreements of Stalin, Truman, and Churchill/Attlee that emerged from the meetings from July 17 to Aug. 2, 1945, to chart the plans for postwar Europe, which included plans for the evacuation of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia following Germany’s defeat.
Schechtman broadly shared the worldview of the Versailles-era diplomats and believed that forced population transfer solved more problems than it created. He wrote with sympathy for the postwar Soviet project: “The Soviet government had apparently endorsed the principle of transferring ethnic population groups as a means of solving intricate territorial and national problems. […] The Soviet leaders were trying to remove the very cause of the Polish-Russian border conflict by creating clear ethnic demarcation lines and by eliminating minorities, the mere existence of which would always furnish material for Irredentist propaganda and activities.” The view that ethnic minorities would be a sore that would never heal motivated many other transfers across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Schechtman maintained that efforts by states to prevent conflict by removing the causes of strife made sense. In any case, Schechtman underscored that transfer was a fact of life in the postwar years as countries attempted to define their future in a world of nation-states without significant national minorities.
When the question of Israel and Palestine came into focus, Schechtman remained consistent. His position largely paralleled the Israeli government that said that the Jews had been attacked, had won the war, and would not return to the status quo ante that had fostered a threat of annihilation. The Palestinians had to be assimilated by their brethren Arabs in those places they now found themselves. There was no going back to villages that, he acknowledged, no longer existed having been destroyed in the war or by the newly formed Israeli state. However, Schechtman went on, writing in his 1961 book On the Wings of Eagles: The Plight, Exodus, and Homecoming of Oriental Jewry, that the Jews of the Arab countries had themselves been victims of forcible eviction, so that the roughly 350,000 Jews from Arab lands that came to Israel in the early 1950s represented a standard form of population exchange.
Yet while world institutions like the U.N. and most political conversation continues to accept the post World War I order of ethnically based nation-states as a given, the foundational premises of that order have since come into question—particularly among scholars who would seek to substitute the standards of “international laws” and “human rights” for the collective “rights” of “peoples” to “self-determination” in nation-state form. Scholars today who write about Schechtman in connection with issues of migration, population transfer, and refugee studies—Mark Mazower, Laura Robson, and Geoffrey Levin, for example—express sharp criticism approaching wholesale condemnation. Columbia professor Mark Mazower contextualizes Schechtman while deploring his viewpoint. He writes, “Schechtman dreamed of eradicating the problem of minorities completely through all-encompassing compulsory population exchanges in the Middle East and South Asia. […] Although all-encompassing agreements were hard to reach—often because the states concerned did not have good enough relations—Schechtman’s dislike of minorities and his desire to make them disappear fit the mood of the postwar years better than the alternative.” Others, like Palestinian academic Nur Masalha, have portrayed Schechtman as a central ideologue of Zionist propaganda about “the demographic transformation of Palestine”:
One of the [1948] Transfer Committee’s initiatives was to invite Dr. Joseph Schechtman, a right-wing Zionist Revisionist leader and expert on ‘population transfer,’ to join its efforts. In 1952 Schechtman published a propagandistic work entitled The Arab Refugee Problem. Since then Schechtman would become the single most influential propagator of the Zionist myth of ‘voluntary’ exodus in 1948. [Emphasis mine]
Whether Schechtman really became “the single most influential propagator of the Zionist myth of ‘voluntary’exodus” is debatable. Nevertheless, scholars do attribute to him the formulation of our present-day conceptions of Israel in relation to the ethics and practice of population transfer.
His detractors have also charged that his ideas about how to treat minorities bore similarities with Nazi conceptions. However, rather than compare Schechtman with Nazi policy, it is more accurate to say that what underlay his thinking, including his sympathy with state power, was his understanding of Zionism. His convictions lay in Revisionism and its attraction to Herzl’s brand—as a national minority Jews were in danger, their persecution would not end until they acquired a land where they composed the majority. The goal for Schechtman was always a Jewish state in which Jews could defend themselves. Transfer of a hostile population that declared war on this project became a necessary means toward that end.
Certainly it did not escape Schechtman that while transfer could and did kill, it also could and did save people—including those who waged wars of aggression and lost. Examples after WWII from Czechoslovakia of Germans loaded on train cars and sent westward may appear tragic, but moving them saved them from vigilante killings and other acts of vengeance that were taking their toll. Schechtman also saw the postwar population transfers as beneficial to peace in the continent. “To have saddled the Polish state with millions of ardently nationalistic Germans,” he wrote, “would have threatened not only the existence of Poland but the peace of Europe.”
Despite subsequent occurrences, in the course of time population transfer as a tool of statecraft had become largely discredited. Schechtman’s viewpoint might have been widely seen as both practical and just in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but the state system of the World War II period and its epistemological premises had started to become less defensible by the early 1960s, even as there continued to be large-scale population transfers, such as during the French-Algerian War when French nationals and Jews left Algeria in large numbers—this time under the banner of decolonization, which posited differing and inherent group rights for the descendants of “the oppressed” and the descendants of “colonizers” and their allies.
In the world according to postcolonial theorists, Schechtman’s books, with their appeal to the crisis of war and social collapse as conditions for transfer based simply on majority and minority status, grounded in turn in a right to nationhood based on 19th-century Romantic ideas of peoplehood, were seen as obsolete. Schechtman himself recognized the shift. He wrote in 1963:
The two basic tendencies of [postwar international policy] are the protection of the rights and fundamental freedoms of the individual and the establishment and preservation of democracy. […] The new viewpoint was founded on the belief … that a universal, as opposed to a regional or group approach to the protection of the rights of the individual would remove the causes of irritation on the part of the states bound by the minorities treaties; with the implied stigma of inferiority removed, states were expected to be more ready to assume equal responsibilities toward their own citizens.
The old approach of minimizing ethnic and religious diversity was no longer de rigueur in the so-called rules-based system of states within the framework of the Cold War. Schechtman acknowledged that countries could not kick out people at will, create refugees out of its citizens even when minorities agitated majorities to exhaustion. Of course, shortly after Schechtman’s death, the conflict in Cyprus saw the transfer of Greek and Turkish Cypriots respectively to the northern and southern parts of the island. The last decade of the 20th century saw further population exchanges as a result of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. All of these wars, to say nothing of those of the 21st century, likely would have spurred Schechtman to reconsider.
What might Schechtman say about Trump’s proposal? Schechtman in 1953 would probably have responded this way: “The removal of potentially dangerous ethnic minorities by itself does not, of course, carry an absolute guarantee of peace and stability. […] But it remains true that in any future, definitive settlement that is to bring peace to Europe and the world, ethnic homogeneity of political units must be a consideration of prime importance. Population transfers are justified only when they contribute to this higher aim.” In other words, in places where peace cannot be achieved otherwise, reducing sizable national minorities can be defended as “a higher aim.”
Trump’s call for moving the population of Gaza to neighboring countries represents the winds of 20th-century history gushing back into the denatured language of 21st-century international institutions. It remains to be seen if the U.S. president’s plan will materialize. However, while it is anathema to the denizens of the U.N. and other international bodies, Trump’s proposal would have made perfect sense to Schechtman, who saw ethnic conflict and the survival of states as a zero-sum game. Certainly residents of Donbas, Ukraine, Russia, post-Oct. 7 Israel, Gaza, and the Palestinian West Bank might all agree with that perspective, even as they might argue about who should go where.
Brian Horowitz holds the Sizeler Family Chair in Jewish Studies at Tulane University.
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