Israel’s enemies have falsely accused it of genocide and ethnic cleansing, so it is necessary to discuss exactly what these mean.  Both are simply large-scale hate crimes, in which the motive consists of a dislike of the subjects’ race, religion, or ethnicity.  “Genocide is an internationally recognized crime where acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.”

A behavior or ideology is not, however, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.  Displacement of an entire population may in fact be a reasonable and necessary act of self-preservation.  The Sullivan Expedition is a prominent example.

When Are Large-Scale Actions Reasonable and Necessary Self-Defense?

There is no such thing as a justifiable murder, because murder is, by definition, without justification.  There is, however, such a thing as justifiable homicide, in which you kill somebody to prevent him from killing you or other innocent people.  When church shooter Dylann Roof gunned down black people in a church, he committed a hate crime because his motive was a dislike of black people.  Had one of Roof’s intended victims put a bullet through Roof’s head, the motive would have been self-preservation rather than hatred of white people, and thus justifiable.

You may even justifiably kill innocent bystanders, as our Air Force was ordered to do on 9/11, to stop hijackers from using airplanes as weapons.  Science fiction stories, which are models for human behavior, are full of examples in which the heroes destroy or seek to destroy entire societies for similar reasons.

• In the movie version of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, a man who is about to have his brain sucked out by an arachnid space alien tells it with profanity that, some day, somebody like him will come along and “kill you and your whole race.”  Wiping out a race would indeed be genocide by definition if the motive were a dislike of “bugs,” as humans call the arachnids.  A dislike of creatures that suck out people’s brains and drop asteroids on cities, on the other hand, is reasonable and allows for necessary self-preservation.
• Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters ends with the line, “Puppet masters!  The free men are coming to kill you!”  Heinlein’s human protagonists get along quite well with plenty of extraterrestrials, but not with parasites that enslave humans by taking over their nervous systems.
• In the Andromeda TV series starring Kevin Sorbo, the good guys use a nova bomb to exterminate an alien species known as the Magog.  The problem with the latter is their habit of laying eggs in people, with fatal results similar to those in the Alien movies.

In no case did readers or audiences take offense at the prospect of killing off entire races that were threats to humans or peaceful extraterrestrials.

If we return to the real world, the United States deters Russia from using nuclear weapons on our cities by threatening to wipe out Russia’s population.  Maybe the folks in the Middle East who keep talking about “annihilating the Jews” need to remember that the Jews in question now probably have nuclear weapons, and if another Holocaust does occur, it won’t be the Jews who go up the chimneys — or, in this case, the mushroom clouds.  This is a horrible way to talk, but it is the only language Hamas, Hezb’allah, and Iran’s ayatollahs understand.

Justifiable Population Displacement

Ethnic cleansing is, like genocide, a large-scale hate crime whose motive involves the subjects’ race, religion, ethnicity, or other protected characteristic.  The Trail of Tears was ethnic cleansing of Native Americans from their lands so the latter could be taken over by white settlers.  On the other hand, the Sullivan Expedition, whose express purpose was to drive certain Native Americans off their lands, was reasonable and necessary self-defense.  “The American destruction of the Six Nations’ homelands came as a result of the destructive raids carried out by the Indians and American loyalists [Tories, loyal to Britain] on the frontiers of New York and Pennsylvania in 1778.  The raids crippled the American Continental Army by depriving it of food and manpower, and spread terror by destroying frontier settlements and taking prisoners.”

The Natives in question had done to American settlements pretty much what Hamas did to Israel on October 7, 2023, although perhaps not to the extent of Hamas’s atrocities.  George Washington decided accordingly that the Natives in question had to go.  “The goal of the expedition would be to completely destroy the principal villages and food supplies of the Cayuga and Seneca Indian Nations.”

The Sullivan Expedition was highly successful, and nobody apologizes for it, in contrast to the Trail of Tears.  Pennsylvania Route 115 includes a historical marker for Sullivan’s Trail, whose path it follows.  Pennsylvania Route 92, which runs from Tunkhannock to Pittston along the Susquehanna River, is also known as Sullivan’s Trail.  Sullivan County, N.Y. is named for General John Sullivan, and nobody seems to be trying to “cancel” him.  His biographical entry in Wikipedia adds that he probably killed off half the Iroquois population, mainly through privation, and this might have been an even higher percentage than the Trail of Tears.  The motive was nonetheless “them or us” rather than animosity toward anybody’s race.

Relocation of Palestinians Is Reasonable and Necessary

Gaza’s genocidal attack on October 7, 2023 was preceded by a long litany of mindless terroristic violence against Israel, including rocket attacks on Israeli cities and treaties and truces broken almost before the ink was dry on them.  The Charter of Hamas calls openly for the annihilation of Jews and speaks of a time when rocks will speak and say, “There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”  Hamas has said it will repeat October 7 over and over.  Israel is under no obligation to tolerate a neighboring society of this nature.

Emigration of the Gazans might be achieved peacefully and voluntarily.  Israel could, for example, offer Gazans one-way plane tickets to European countries that sympathize with their cause, along with bilingual information about how to obtain welfare benefits from the countries in question.  Spain (al-Andalus to the terrorists), Norway, and Ireland, all of which have recognized a Palestinian state, come to mind immediately, along with Turkey, Qatar, and Iran.  It might cost Israel several billion dollars for the plane tickets, but it would fix the problem and reduce spending on costly Iron Dome interceptors.  The same comes to mind for the inhabitants of Judea and Samaria, where the Palestinian Authority gives stipends to terrorists who murder Jews.  Let them go somewhere that is nowhere near Israel or, for that matter, the United States.  Then they won’t have to live next to infidels and peaceful Muslims who do not share their depraved ideology, and the infidels and peaceful Muslims won’t need to live next to them.

The bottom line is that the Sullivan Expedition was a reasonable and necessary reaction to terroristic violence.  The same standards can and should apply to populations whose majorities support murder, rape, and violent discrimination against Jews, Christians, peaceful Muslims, women, and LGBT people and teach this depraved Dark Age culture to their children, as the Hamas-run and UNRWA-run schools in Gaza have done.

Civis Americanus is the pen name of an American Thinker contributor who remembers the lessons of history and wants to ensure that our country never needs to learn those lessons again the hard way.

Image via Pixabay.