A Different Departure: A Reply to Shany’s Redrawing Maps, Manipulating Demographics: On Exchange of Populated Territories and Self-Determination

Abstract

This paper, a reply to Prof. Yuval Shany's 'Redrawing Maps, Manipulating Demographics: On Exchange of Populated Territories and Self-Determination,' continues the argument advanced in T.W.Waters, 'The Blessing of Departure: Acceptable and Unacceptable State Support for Demographic Transformation – The Lieberman Plan to Exchange Populated Territories in Cisjordan,' 2 LAW & ETHICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS 221-85 (2008), SSRN Abstract No. 958469, to which Shany was responding. It argues that Shany's objections to the idea of transferring populated territories from Israel to Palestine fail in ways which share a common defect: an assumption that a state polity has an essential, even moral, integrity. Though a given transfer might offend human rights principles, it is not clear that transfer as such violates any right. At core, Shany's objection is to the bare fact that transfer breaks any existing political community, but it is not clear that this is a rights violation or even necessarily a problem, if the members of that community no longer share common bonds. A strong defense of liberal, cosmopolitan principles ends, curiously, in a defense of the state as such.

Keywords: Israel, Palestine, population transfer, territory, self-determination, ethnic cleansing, Avigdor Lieberman, citizenship, nationalism

JEL Classification: Z00, R52, N40, N45, N30, N35, K33, J78, J70, J00