“Encouraging Migration” Is Not “Extreme.” Extreme Is Our Selective Amnesia

Link to the triggering article (for context, not as a moral anchor): https://www.timesofisrael.com/smotrich-next-government-should-encourage-migration-of-west-bank-palestinians/

A refinement that strengthens the argument: this is not a piece of pure rhetoric. It leans on police and security data and sorts that data into categories (criminality, “nationalistic crime,” terrorism, and the like). That matters, because these labels are not neutral descriptors. They are governance devices. They determine what counts as ordinary crime, what counts as “security,” what counts as “terror,” what triggers special powers, what justifies extraordinary measures, and what can be narrated as necessity rather than choice.

This is the point many Western critics consistently miss. They attach outrage to a sentence, while the decisive work is done by the classification regime behind the sentence. And then they do not audit the classification regime. They do not ask how the categories are produced, where the thresholds are placed, whether the categories are applied symmetrically, and what legal-political machinery is activated when a threshold flips from “crime” to “terror.”

There is a recurring asymmetry in Western commentary on Israel that is not moral sensitivity but a double evidentiary standard. When an Israeli politician uses plain language about population movement, critics often treat the sentence itself as the crime: “extreme,” “inhuman,” “unprecedented.” Yet when comparable mechanisms appear elsewhere, the same critics suddenly rediscover “context,” “complexity,” and structural causality. This microscope is not morality. It is selectivity.

This is not mind-reading about anyone’s intentions. It is an observable difference in what counts as evidence. With Israel, a phrase is frequently treated as sufficient proof. With other states, critics tend to demand instruments, procedures, and a chain of decisions before they speak with the same certainty. That is not heightened ethics. It is uneven recognition.

This is not a defense of ethnic cleansing. It is the opposite: a demand that condemnation stop being theatrical and become analytic. If you cannot translate slogans into instruments, you are not criticizing policy. You are stigmatizing speech while leaving the mechanism intact.

Start with a basic distinction. There are words. And there are devices.

Words are “encourage,” “repatriation,” “resettlement,” “normalization,” “security,” “order.” Devices are residence status, citizenship, access to work, building permits, land registration, infrastructure access, policing asymmetries, mobility constraints, selective enforcement, selective impunity, social intimidation, and the production of legal precarity. Ethnic cleansing rarely begins with trains. It begins with forms. It begins with the slow engineering of a life that can no longer be sustained, until leaving looks like the only rational move. “Voluntariness” is often the final product of deprivation.

Call the mechanism by its real name: policy-driven production of exit. It has a stable anatomy. First you narrow the conditions of life. Then you open an exit channel packaged as assistance. Finally you relabel the outcome as voluntary. Any debate that refuses this translation is not critique; it is branding disguised as judgment.

If someone wants to call it “extreme,” then at minimum they should name the defeat-conditions: the points at which the label “encouragement” becomes structurally false. Two are obvious. If “incentives” are coupled with systematic deprivation or coercive constraints, “encouragement” is a euphemism. And if exit is paired with loss of citizenship, loss of property, or inability to return, “voluntary” is no longer a description; it is a laundering term.

The point of this analysis is not to shift blame or dilute judgment. It is not whataboutism. It is calibration. If you condemn a mechanism, condemn it as a mechanism, rather than treating it as an exotic property of one country or one people.

Poland after 1945 should function as cold water on liberal self-congratulation. Mass expulsions, forced resettlements, demographic “ordering,” border closure by population movement, and then decades of manufactured departures under administrative and social pressure. 1968 is almost a textbook case: a state-driven campaign pushed Polish Jews toward emigration, frequently with the stripping of citizenship, the weaponization of institutions, and the conversion of departure into humiliation and erasure. That was not treated as “unprecedented” by many actors involved. It was narrated as a solution. The mechanism worked because it could be narrated as something other than violence.

The borderlands make the method even clearer. Identity verification, institutional labeling, language pressure, and then the opening of an exit channel to Germany as a natural choice. This is twentieth-century statecraft: states manufacture populations, and they manufacture borders by manufacturing exits.

So when someone looks at an Israeli politician saying “encourage migration” and reacts as if civilization has discovered a new moral abomination, that reaction is, at best, historical ignorance. At worst, it enforces an expectation that is politically poisonous: Jews must not only refrain from certain practices; Jews must not even be allowed to name mechanisms that others have used repeatedly, often more brutally, and often without any serious self-audit.

Here is the controversial but necessary claim. Western critics frequently treat Israel as a uniquely reactive object of moral chemistry, as if there were a separate periodic table where Jews trigger different thresholds, different indignations, and different evidentiary demands. In parallel, those same critics speak of their own expulsions and demographic ordering as painful history: to be commemorated ritually, yes, but not analyzed operationally. That is moral theater, not thinking.

Now do what should have been done from the beginning: mechanism.

The correct response to “encouraging migration” is not moral shock. It is an audit. Which residency rules change. Which land registrations accelerate. Which permits are denied. How mobility is constrained. What happens to employment access and infrastructure access. What policing asymmetries are tolerated. What appeal pathways remain real rather than ornamental. And in this specific case, add the missing audit line that the article itself forces onto the table: what exactly is being counted and how it is being classified, who controls the threshold between “crime” and “terror,” which powers and presumptions follow from that threshold, and whether the classification regime is consistent or politically selective.

The mechanism of policy-driven production of exit is stable across countries and ideologies. First, you narrow the field of life. You do not need immediate spectacular violence. You can restrict work, building, education, mobility, infrastructure, and legal security. You narrow the future. Second, you open the exit channel. You call it assistance, compensation, a migration path, a chance for a better life. The exit must look like care. Third, you name the outcome as voluntariness: they chose to leave. The result becomes a statistic of preference, not a trace of coercion.

This is not uniquely Israeli. It is structural to the modern state.

If someone wants to criticize such practices, fine. But then do it honestly. Do not pretend you discovered morality yesterday. Disarm your own record. Name what Poland did. Name what dozens of states did after wars and border changes. Name what empires and nation-states have done again and again: producing borders by producing exits. Only then return to Israel without the obscene microscope-stigmatization.

And for the professional critics who demand Israel be uniquely monstrous: look at Turkey’s long arc of minority exit manufactured by fiscal, legal, and social pressure. The mechanism is familiar: narrow life, open the door, call the result natural. The difference is rhetorical treatment: elsewhere it becomes history; with Israel it becomes essence.

Now the part many readers miss unless they pay attention to the ending. The article is not merely reporting. It is also positioning itself inside an information war. The closing appeal to support the outlet, framed explicitly against wartime distortion and rising global anti-Zionism and antisemitism, is not an innocent footer. It changes the aftertaste of the entire piece. It tells you: “Read this as factual coverage, and read us as a necessary barrier against hostile framing.” In other words, the text performs a second operation beyond description: it preemptively defends the legitimacy of its own narrating apparatus. That meta-framing is not a defect. It is a signal. It confirms that the battleground is not only what was said, but what can be said, by whom, under which pressures, and with which protective rhetoric.

A final provocation, in an old-biblical register. The Torah is often romanticized as “ethics.” But in the grammar of governance, Torah is also a fence: a system of boundaries, thresholds, and permitted passages. A fence is not automatically good or evil. A fence is a technology. It creates an inside and an outside, a permitted and a forbidden, a day when entry is possible and a day when it is not. If you want to argue about “encouraging migration,” you are already arguing inside a world of fences: legal fences, administrative fences, linguistic fences, and, yes, sacred fences. The only adult question is which fence is being built, by which instruments, for which outcome, and under what defeat-conditions.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

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