Historically And Morally Flawed

Cam Ogie ✍ concludes his disalogue with Barry Gilheany.

Your analogy between the displacement of ethnic Germans after World War II and the Palestinian right of return is both historically and morally flawed. It obscures critical differences in context, agency, and ongoing injustice.

1. False Equivalence: The Expulsion of Ethnic Germans vs. the Nakba

The expulsion of ethnic Germans occurred in the context of a global war, one initiated by a German state engaged in genocidal aggression, including in countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Those expulsions—brutal as they were—took place in response to military occupation and systemic atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. They were part of a post-war geopolitical reshuffling, and the vast majority of ethnic Germans were repatriated to a German homeland that still existed.

In contrast, the Nakba (1948) was the deliberate ethnic cleansing of over 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland by Zionist militias, with the explicit intent of preventing their return, as numerous Israeli archives and historians (including Ilan Pappé and Benny Morris) confirm. Unlike ethnic Germans, Palestinians were not the aggressors, did not have a state of their own to return to, and to this day live in refugee camps or under occupation and apartheid.

So no, this is not the same. The attempt to conflate Palestinian refugees with post-war Germans is an act of historical revisionism that trivializes the unique and ongoing violence of Zionist settler-colonialism.

2. Who Expelled the Palestinians? The Zionist Movement—Enabled by British Imperial Power

The question of who expelled the Palestinians is not ambiguous. It is a matter of historical record: Zionist militias—the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi—systematically and violently expelled over 700,000 Palestinians during and after 1947 under premeditated military operations like Plan Dalet. Entire villages were razed, civilians massacred (e.g., Deir Yassin), and the population deliberately prevented from returning, in violation of international law and UN Resolution 194. This was not wartime chaos—it was a coordinated campaign of ethnic cleansing, as even Israeli historians like Ilan Pappé and Benny Morris have documented using declassified archives.

But this violence did not emerge in a vacuum. It was made possible—and in many ways prefigured and legitimized—by the structures of British colonial rule in Palestine.

As historian Caroline Elkins demonstrates in her groundbreaking work Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (2022), the British Mandate was not a neutral or stabilizing force. It was an active colonial regime that viewed Palestinian political resistance as a threat to imperial authority and responded with a familiar blueprint of surveillance, collective punishment, extrajudicial killings, and mass detention—tactics the British would later replicate in Kenya, Malaya, and Cyprus and in the North of Ireland.

During the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt, when Palestinians rose up against Zionist immigration and British repression, the British response was brutally disproportionate: tens of thousands were imprisoned without trial, hundreds were executed, villages were bombed, and entire communities were punished. Elkins notes that the British systemized these methods under the guise of counterinsurgency, but in practice, they helped crush Palestinian political leadership, weaken civil society, and create a power vacuum that Zionist paramilitary groups were poised to fill after Britain’s withdrawal.

In short, the British Empire laid the groundwork for the Nakba—not just by issuing the Balfour Declaration and facilitating mass Jewish immigration, but by violently repressing Palestinian political organization while giving Zionist militias the space to militarize, consolidate land, and prepare for unilateral statehood.

To ask “who expelled the Palestinians?” without acknowledging the role of the British Empire is to whitewash the deeper imperial scaffolding behind the catastrophe. The Nakba was not just a moment of local conflict—it was the culmination of decades of colonial engineering, where British policy systematically prioritized one population’s aspirations over another’s right to self-determination.

As Elkins writes, British imperial violence was not a deviation from its liberal self-image—it was foundational to how the Empire ruled. And in Palestine, that rule paved the way for Zionist colonization and mass expulsion.

The expulsion of Palestinians wasn’t a regrettable consequence of war; it was the foundation of the Israeli state.

3. Jewish “Right of Return” vs. Palestinian Right of Return

Your proposal for a “mutual renunciation” of the Palestinian right of return and the Jewish right to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return pretends to be balanced, but it erases the power imbalance between colonizer and colonized. The Israeli Law of Return gives citizenship to any Jew worldwide, including those with no familial, linguistic, or cultural connection to Palestine—simply on the basis of religion or ethnicity.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian right of return—enshrined in UN Resolution 194 and reaffirmed repeatedly—is denied to those who were born in Palestine and forcibly displaced from it.

Suggesting that Palestinians must “renounce” this right—without ever having exercised it—is not reconciliation. It’s a demand to accept permanent exile and erasure.

4. Renunciation as a Cover for Injustice

Your idea of mutual renunciation doesn’t resolve the root problem: Zionism as a political project is premised on the permanent displacement and exclusion of the Indigenous population, and the maintenance of an ethnocratic regime that privileges Jews above all others.

Renunciation of the right of return does not end violence—it cements a colonial arrangement where settlers keep the land and the natives stay dispossessed. That is not peace. It is capitulation to apartheid.

5. Delegitimizing the Right to Resist

Finally, your position that armed resistance lacks legitimacy flows from the same logic: that Palestinians must endlessly defer their rights, moderate their demands, and negotiate with the very structure that has exiled, occupied, and bombed them. But under international law, occupied peoples have the right to resist by all means, especially when peaceful alternatives are denied or crushed.

You want to start with mutual renunciations. But justice begins not with equal sacrifices, but with historical accountability. Israel has never recognized the Nakba, never accepted moral or legal responsibility, and continues to displace, colonize, and kill with impunity. Asking Palestinians to renounce their rights without any restoration of justice is not reconciliation—it’s a demand for submission.

In summary, the “mutual renunciation” proposal obscures the imbalance between a powerful occupying state and a stateless, dispossessed people. It substitutes false symmetry for historical truth and justice. The right of return is not a bargaining chip—it is the unresolved moral core of the Palestinian struggle.

So when we talk about renunciation or reconciliation, let’s remember that British imperial power created the conditions for both Palestinian dispossession and Zionist empowerment. It is not enough to propose mutual renunciation without acknowledging the imperial legacy of engineered asymmetry.

⏩ Cam Ogie is a Gaelic games enthusiast.