The idea advanced by Donald Trump on the Gaza Stripwhich aims to transfer about 2 million Palestinian Arabs In neighboring countries such as Jordan and Egypt to create a tourist “Middle East” Riviera, it does not have clear historical precedents but brings to memory several episodes of deportation and forced exodus. However, there are as many analogies as the deep differences with the cases of the past, for example the transfers imposed between Greece and Türkiye After the First World War, the exodus of Italians fromIstria After the Second World War. Over the centuries, the forced movement of a population has been seen as a “solution“To conflicts, but it is a controversial practice, absolutely prohibited by international lawin particular from Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.
In addition to the legal aspects, Trump’s proposal raises deeper questions: what is the true purpose of a similar plan? Although the geopolitical context both totally different from past cases e It is not possible to compare it slavishlyTrump’s idea for the Gaza Strip is part of this same scheme, but with implications Still more complex.
The Losanna Treaty of 1923
The Treaty of Lausanne of 1923which redefined the boundaries of the Türkiye After the First World War and the tensions that arose after the Sèvres Treaty (1920), provided for a “forced exchange” of Orthodox Greeks from Türkiye and Muslims from Greece. The measure was presented as a diplomatic solution to reduce the tensions between the two nations, but the price paid by the populations involved was very high: thousands of people were forced to abandon their homes, their cities of origin, the world in which they were grown. Suddenly they found themselves in a new and often hostile context, forced to reconstruct from scratch an identity that until then had taken for granted. This transfer of populations, although part of a international agreementrepresented one humanitarian tragedywhich marked the collective memory of both peoples.
The exodus of Italians from Istria
A more recent case than mass exodusless structured because it is not included in an international agreement, concerns the escape of Italians from Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia after the Second World War. Thousands of families suddenly found themselves faced with an impossible choice: to remain in territories now under the control of the Yugoslavia by Titorisking retaliation and discrimination, or abandoning everything and starting elsewhere. Many were forced to leave without being able to bring anything with them, leaving houses, memories, ties behind them. The trauma of this forced escape has marked entire generations And still today there remains a painful chapter of Italian history, often little told but still vivid in the memory of those who lived it.
Midhat Pasha and the plan never made of a “controlled” deportation
Also in the nineteenth century there were attempts to use the movements of populations as a political tool. Ahmed Midhat Pashaan important Ottoman statesman, proposed to solve the tensions born after the Russian-Turkish war of 1878 transferring i Muslims from the Bulgarian territories that have become independent and exchange them with the Christians Bulgari remained under Ottoman control. The idea, which was never made, represents atheoretical anticipation of the policies that would have been applied decades later, as in the case of the Losanne Treaty. The idea that forced displacement could resolve conflicts proved, once again, illusory: attempts to redesign the populations based on political needs have never led to peaceful solutions, but only to new traumas and tensions.
