In an aphorism sometimes attributed to Leo Tolstoy, sometimes to John Gardner, all literature relies on one of two plots: a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

Let me offer my own version. We might summarize the entire history of the human race in two words: people move. Everything else is just elaboration on that basic plot.

While it’s easy to imagine that colonialism is part of our past, think again.

Some of history’s worst atrocities can be attributed to certain people trying to control other people’s movements, whether by capturing them, herding them into prison camps (concentration camps, strategic hamlets, model villages), enslaving and transporting them, or warehousing them in besieged countries or regions while barricading the borders of anyplace to which they might want to flee, often consigning them to death in treacherous deserts or seas for trying to exercise the basic human right of freedom of movement.

European Freedom and Colonial Domination

In February, President Trump astonished the world by proclaiming that the United States should “take over” Gaza and rid it entirely of its Palestinian population. Yet in many ways, as startling as that might have seemed, his proposal fit right in with his drive to remove millions of people from the United States. Both reflected a colonial arrogance that the U.S. and Israel share: the idea that some people (Americans/Europeans/Whites/colonizers) have the right to move themselves as they desire while moving others against their will. Consider it, after a fashion, a contemporary (as well as historic) version of apartheid.

Forcing people to move or prohibiting their mobility are two sides of the same colonial or neocolonial coin. Colonizers invade and drive people out or enslave, transport, enclose, and imprison them while barricading off the privileged spaces they create for themselves. In a vicious cycle, colonizers or imperial powers justify their borders and walls in the name of “security” while protecting themselves from those desperate to escape their domination. And such ideas, old as they may be, are still distinctly with us.

European imperial actors from Christopher Columbus on claimed the right to freedom of movement on this planet. Today, the flyer you get in the mail with your passport proudly insists that, “with your U.S. passport, the world is yours!”

Or consider historian and scientist Jared Diamond’s nonchalant claim that “no traditional society tolerated the relatively open access enjoyed by modern American or European citizens, most of whom can travel anywhere… merely by presenting a valid passport and visa to a passport control officer.”

Diamond argued that Americans and Europeans exemplify the freedoms of modernity, while more “traditional societies” oppress people by restricting their travel. But if Americans and Europeans enjoy the freedom to travel, it’s not because they are so much more modern than other inhabitants of this planet. It’s because other countries don’t restrict their freedom. On the other hand, it’s the U.S. and Europe, Diamond’s symbols of modernity, that tend to impose the greatest restrictions with their militarized borders and deportation regimes.

Perhaps we could better define modernity as the European drive to control mobility, forcing others to accept their intrusions while denying free mobility to the rest of the world. The United States and Israel offer a spectrum of examples of how the right to deport, the right to transport, the right to enclose, and the right to exclude tend to complement one another on this strange planet of ours. Both countries claim to be liberal democracies and celebrate their commitment to equal rights, while reserving those rights for some and excluding others.

Colonialism and the Postwar Order

While it’s easy to imagine that colonialism is part of our past, think again. Its structures, institutions, and ideas still haunt our world. And one of the defining powers of colonizers always was the way they reserved for themselves (and only themselves) the right to move freely, while also reserving the right to move those they had colonized around like so many chess pieces.

Moving (and moving others) has been inherent in every colonial project. The roots of today’s deportation regimes — particularly in the United States, Europe, and Israel — lie in the determination of colonializing countries to wrest wealth from the lands and labor of those they colonized and enjoy that wealth in their own privileged spaces from which the colonized are largely excluded.

The “rules-based world order” that emerged after World War II created institutions for international cooperation and international law, ended colonial empires (as the former colonies gained independence), and dismantled segregation in the United States and, eventually, apartheid in South Africa. But none of that truly or totally erased what had existed before. Global postwar decolonization and the struggle for equality proved to be lengthy and sometimes extremely bloody processes.

In the U.S., people of color are full citizens and can no longer, as a group, be legally enclosed or removed against their will. Europe, too, has dismantled its colonial empires. But the post-colonial world has developed a new form of global apartheid, where the racialized drive to enclose and remove is now directed at immigrants, the vast majority of them escaping the ongoing ravages left by colonialism (and more recently climate change) in their own countries.

Israel is in some ways an anachronism in that twentieth-century trajectory. Its colonizing project was carried out just as other colonized peoples were throwing off their rulers. Its expulsions of Palestinians, which began in the 1940s, have only accelerated in our own time. Meanwhile, Israel created its own legal version of apartheid (even as South Africa’s was dismantled), with those Palestinians who were not expelled increasingly surrounded by prisons and walls.

The Right to Deport: Israel

Zionists began to assert the right to expel well before the state of Israel was created in 1948.

In 1895, in an often-quoted passage, Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, proposed that “we shall try to spirit the penniless [Arab] population across the border… The removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” During the post-World War I British Mandate in Palestine, Zionist, Arab, and British officials agreed that “there could be no viable Jewish state in all or part of Palestine unless there was a mass displacement of Arab inhabitants.”

Palestine’s British colonial authorities advocated such a displacement in their 1937 Peel Commission Report. It was then enthusiastically endorsed by Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion, later Israel’s first prime minister (“The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us… an opportunity which we never dared to dream in our wildest imaginings”) and Chaim Weizmann (“If half a million Arabs could be transferred, two million Jews could be put in their place”).

Israel compounded its right to deport with the right to imprison, enclose, and kill. A plethora of laws and walls continue to restrict the return, movement, and residence of Palestinians. Israeli historian Ilan Pappé described the Israeli occupation regime in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 as having created “the biggest prison on earth.”

In the older settler colonial countries, the days of Trails of Tears, imprisonment on reservations, the forced removal of children to boarding schools, and wars of extermination are mostly in the past. But in Israel, we are witnessing such a project happening before our very eyes. The eliminationist project there is proceeding apace with the tens of thousands killed in Gaza, and in President Trump’s and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bald proposals for the complete removal of the Palestinian population from that strip of land, as well as in the restrictions on mobility and the thousands of home demolitions and displacements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The Right to Deport: The United States

In the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this country ended slavery and enclosure and granted previously enslaved Africans and their descendants, as well as Native Americans, the right to citizenship.

Until after the Civil War, however, “immigrants” meant White Europeans — the only people then allowed to become citizens. Citizenship by birth, mandated by the 14th Amendment after the Civil War, complicated that picture because non-Whites born in U.S. territories also became citizens. To avoid this, the country quickly began to racially restrict immigration. By the late twentieth century, the right to immigrate and more equal rights inside the country were extended to non-Whites. But those rights were always fragile and accompanied by anti-immigrant and deportation campaigns, increasingly justified with the concept of “illegality.”

Developments in the twenty-first century clearly suggest that the arc of history does not necessarily bend toward justice, as a racial deportation regime resurges in a major fashion under President Donald Trump. He, of course, has long distinguished between “shithole countries” and “countries like Norway” as he continues to tighten the screws around most immigrants........

© Common Dreams