This is a thought that I have been tackling for quite a while now, but in the event of a country or region undergoing decolonialization, how should settler populations, especially multigenerational populations, be handled?
For example in the example of Israel, once the nation is reestablished as a one state Palestine, what would happen to the settler population? Especially those that aren’t living or participating in illegal settlements or exploitation?
This question is complicated farther by multiple generations of people who were born in a location and have no ties to any other country or location. Those people don’t have anywhere to go and can’t be “sent back” to where they came from as they have no ties. For example if a person’s grand parents immigrated decades ago to a country as settlers, and then their children and then grandchildren were born and lived their whole lives in a location, what would you do with those grandchildren? You can’t just throw them back to the country their grandparents were from. This question is made even harder when the generations start spanning back much farther.
Another problem that I am running into is that many solutions including “leftist” ones essentially boil down to ethnic cleaning even if they do not say it outright. Or they completely ignore the question or resort to some fantasy scenario where the settlers magically disappear or all agree to move.
So how should these populations and people be handled?
There is a difference between land reforms that rematriate land from Bill Gates (or some other mentionable land owner) and deporting him to a country he has no actual connection to beyond feeble grasps at genetic heritage.
What would be the point of mass deportation of all settlers anyway, besides some kind of ultra purity? Some settlers are entangled with Tribal projects and long term goals by design of Tribal leadership. You think they have to go create Israel 2.0 in Ireland for justice to be served?
This is such a strawman that the only reason that people might be displaced is because of the formation of an ethnostate. Tuck and Yang have argued quite well that the interests of settlers are incommensurate with the interests of the indigenous and that this incommensurability precludes structural solidarity. The point of mass deportations would be because the displacement process that would precede such a deportation results in mass reactionary movements by settlers against indigenous national self-direction and it ends being a choice between total war and deportation. No one is talking about an indigenous ethnostate except the right wing trying to spook everyone.
We’re not talking about the very very very very very few individual settlers who are actually working with indigenous people and supporting their project for self-determination. We’re talking about masses, we’re talking about classes, we’re talking about class war through structural racism, through structural colonial oppression.
Drop this delusion of an ethnostate and analyze the situation dialectically. Apply the theory of reaction to the context you’re examining. Read Tuck and Yang.
Decolonization is not a metaphor.