The surprising success of multi-ethnic cities

London, New York and Paris deserve more credit for how well they are holding together. Every day in these multi-ethnic cities, people of Muslim, Christian and Jewish origin share streets, buses and classrooms. Ever since the Israeli-Palestinian war began, we’ve been watching unprecedentedly graphic videos on social media of Muslims killing Jews and Jews killing Muslims. The wonder is not that there are tensions in western cities, but how calm things are. It’s a sign of progress that we get upset about a few bigots shouting racist abuse on a London bus or scrawling it on walls. Mostly, peaceable living together continues.

This is a daily miracle. The Gazan war reminds us of the fragility of any multi-ethnic space, especially one as segregated as Israelis and Palestinians were before October 7, when Hamas militants killed about 1,200 people, as counted by Israel. Multi-ethnic places through history have lived in fear of ethnic cleansing: the mass expulsion or massacre of an ethnic group.

Hamas’s attack expressed the desire to remove Jews from Israel. Now, with Israel having killed more than 25,000 Gazans (as counted by Gaza’s health ministry), leading members of Israel’s government are talking about expelling Palestinians. This is separate from the valid aim of freeing the more than 100 hostages still held by Hamas. Twelve Israeli ministers (including from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party) participated in a conference this week calling for the re-establishment of Jewish settlements in Gaza and encouraging displacement of Palestinians from the area.

Netanyahu speaks of “voluntary” migration, presumably with killing encouraging the volunteering. He has tried getting the US to lean on Egypt to accept Gazans. Last autumn, Israel’s government dismissed an intelligence document that proposed the removal of millions of Gazans to Egypt as just “a preliminary paper”. Violent settlers, protected by the Israeli state, have forced many Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank since October 7.

Both Palestinian and Israeli extremes have long nurtured their own ethnic-cleansing fantasies, egged on by their one-eyed supporters watching safely from afar, including those in big western cities. Hamas’s attack was an attempt to enact its fantasy. Now extreme nationalists in Israel’s government are enacting theirs.

Western cities may feel immune from catastrophic ethnic conflict, having achieved a multi-ethnic harmony that never existed between Israelis and Palestinians, but then so had multi-ethnic cities in Europe and the Middle East early last century: Prague, Warsaw, Constantinople, Sarajevo, Alexandria and Aleppo. Then came waves of ethnic cleansing, peaking with the Holocaust.

In 1948, the Palestinian Nakba saw the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians, and Arab states expelled Jews. Christians hung on longer in the Middle East. Into the 1970s, Arab villages in the Levant would observe Lent while Christians observed Ramadan. But today, Christianity is fading from much of the region of its birth.

Every ethnic-cleansing fantasy seeks the return to a golden age when the “intruder” wasn’t there. That means biblical times for Israel’s far right and Palestine pre-1948 for Hamas. Implementing such a fantasy requires removing the real people who live in the territory. The ethnic cleanser wants to wipe the slate blank. People in western cities chanting, “From the river to the sea”, risk endorsing that fantasy. If they are implying that this land should be Palestinian, are they advocating the removal of Israel’s Jews? If so, then American and other far-leftists should reflect that this call echoes the language of their Trumpian enemies about immigrants to the US. “Zionism is colonialism” may have been a tenable argument in 1948. But today seven million Jews live between river and sea. In practice, given that a single state in which Jews and Palestinians live together as equals now appears unthinkable, to want to “end the Zionist project” would presumably mean removing Jews.

Any humane person opposes ethnic cleansing. We can’t go back to 1947. Both Palestinians and Israelis live in this territory. History put them there. Things would have been simpler if the territory were ethnically homogenous, but the only plausible way of getting to that point now is if one side kills enough of the other that the survivors flee. The world has to find a way to let both groups live there, in two states.

This may not work. Once killing starts, multi-ethnic coexistence can become impossible. Killing can spread to other multi-ethnic cities through terrorism. Fear of violence can itself encourage ethnic cleansing. Politicians from Germany’s far-right AfD, closer than ever to power, recently held secret discussions about “remigration”, a euphemism for deportations. Let’s pray that the west’s great cities can keep holding it together.

Follow Simon @KuperSimon and email him at simon.kuper@ft.com

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