It is all so much more complex than we wish to acknowledge

I love journalists with deep historical knowledge and an orientation towards numeracy and measurement.  Journalists such as Ed West.  They are a rare breed.

From Little Palestines across the Americas by Ed West.  The subheading is Being a market-dominant minority in a war zone isn’t fun.  This echoes some of the research by Thomas Sowell.  West is headed to the market-dominant minority issue (a feature of some of Sowell's research) but he starts with a numbers based overview of the recent past to provide a foundation of conceptualization and discussion.

When you do that, it allows a recognition that many, much, and/or most passionately argued positions today are simply manufactured convictions unrooted in reality.  West's discussion also highlights that nationalism and the rise of strong states has been the greatest enemy of diversity and tolerance.  That the greatest sponsors of death and terror have not been individuals and rarely movements but mostly have been states and state-backed ideologies.  Once again bringing attention to the importance of the Second Amendment as a brake on State power.

I like his opening story.

There is an apocryphal story about a Palestinian bishop who was once asked by a western cleric which missionary converted his family, to which he replied ‘Paul’. Another version of the tale has the European asking the man when his family converted to Christianity; ‘Pentecost’, he said. 

I have no idea whether it’s true – it seems a bit too much like a 19th century version of ‘and then the whole bus clapped’ – but it says something about western ignorance about Christians in the Middle East, a religious minority forgotten and abandoned for over a century.

But then he gets straight into the history and the numbers which provide the foundation and context of current events.

The conflict in the Holy Land is often framed as a struggle between east and west, an idea embraced both by Israel’s enemies and its supporters. Orthodox leftism likes to see Christianity as part of a framework of western oppression, while sympathisers to the Israeli cause portray the state as a western outpost fighting against a common civilisational enemy.

This is not really true; while a majority of Israelis descend from Middle Eastern Jews, until a century ago a large minority of Palestinians were Christian. Not only that, but contrary to the idea of the conflict as being a one between two great religious civilizations, Palestinian Christians are not very sympathetic to Israel, and neither are Middle Eastern Christians generally. 

While Christians accounted for 20 percent of the population of Mandatory Palestine, they now comprise less than 2 percent of Israel and the Palestinian territories. Christians still have a presence in towns like Bethlehem in the West Bank, and in Nazareth, which is part of Israel proper and whose residents are Israeli Arabs with full citizenship rights. But numbers continue to shrink, driven by emigration to Europe, Australia, the United States and Latin America.

This trend can be found across the Middle East, where at the start of the 20th century Christians comprised almost a third of the region’s population, and one in five of its Arabs. Starting with the 1915 genocide against Armenians, Syriacs and Greeks, that figure has declined to below 5 percent and will probably be half that by mid-century.

This was part of an even wider pattern of persecution and exodus across western Eurasia, which from the late 19th century saw minorities forced across borders as nation-states replaced empires, often driven into alien lands where the locals shared a religion but not much else.

As an example, on the Syrian-Lebanese border is the town of Al-Hamidiyah, inhabited by Greek-speaking descendants of Muslim Cretans who were expelled in the 1890s when the island became part of the kingdom of Greece. 

By the end of the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922 half a million ‘Turks’ had been forced out of what is now Greece, many of whom were not even Turks as such but Muslim Greeks whose family had at some point converted; in return a million Greeks were expelled from Asia Minor, land that had been Greek since the Iron Age. In terms of population transfers, the Greeks did worse than the Arabs following the establishment of Israel (slightly more Arabs fled Palestine than Jews fled Arab countries, but the numbers are comparable).

In the West we think of ethnic diversity as something modern, arriving with the Windrush in Britain, but the 20th century was a time of homogenisation in much of the world. On the eve of the Great War, central Europe, the Balkans and the Middle East were all a medley of different overlapping groups. These different peoples had always co-existed, even if they lived in their own quarters, and one group usually dominated and to some extent oppressed the others, with sporadic outbreaks of communal violence.

From the Balkan massacres of the 1880s to the First World War, the Holocaust and subsequent ethnic cleansing of Germans from eastern Europe, the expulsion of Iraq’s 2,500-year-old Jewish community and the flight of Armenians, Greeks and Jews from Nasser’s Egypt, this diversity was brought to an end by nationalism, and Christians in the Middle East are its most recent victims. The Islamic State’s massacre of Yazidis and Christians in 2014 was just the latest example of this pattern.

There is much more and it is well worth the read.

When you think about the catastrophic mass movements of people in the past century, they almost all of them have been facilitated and conducted by States.  Top of mind are:

The movement of 15-20 million Hindus and Muslims attendant to the independence of the countries of the Indian subcontinent with perhaps a million deaths in 1947.

The exchange of Greek and Turkish populations between Greece and Turkey after WWI, affecting 1.5-2 million.

The expulsion and genocide of half a million to two million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during WWI.

The mass movement of perhaps 1-2 million Poles across WWI and WWII as their national boundaries were massively redrawn.

The mass movement of millions of Germans west after their defeat in Prussia in WWII.

The mass movement of urbanites to the country in Cambodia in the 1970s.

The mass movement of urbanites to the country in China in the 1950s.

The mass expulsion of Jews from across the Middle East to Israel in the 1950s. 

The slow strangulation of Christian communities in Lebanon from the 1950s onwards.

The mass movement of Japanese into and then back out of China at the end of WWII.

The mass movement of Koreans in the course of the Korean War.

The ongoing purging of populations in Sudan today.

And the more you think about it the longer the list grows.  Hundreds of millions of people made refugees by Nation States and tens of millions killed directly or indirectly.  The Holocaust stands as a permanent indictment of inhumane mass killing by the State but it is worth remembering that States have been killing people in the millions all through the 20th century, via indirect policies rather than the centralized industrialized killing of the Nazis but killing in the millions none-the-less.

All these movements constituted tragedies, many remain largely unremarked in today's discourse and yet all of them are the predicate events which shape so many current-day passions.  We casually toss around terms such as genocide and racism, etc. but behind the biggest tragedies and the largest numbers of deaths there is almost always a central planning state.