This is a thought that I have been tackling for quite a while now, but in the event of a country or region undergoing decolonialization, how should settler populations, especially multigenerational populations, be handled?
For example in the example of Israel, once the nation is reestablished as a one state Palestine, what would happen to the settler population? Especially those that aren’t living or participating in illegal settlements or exploitation?
This question is complicated farther by multiple generations of people who were born in a location and have no ties to any other country or location. Those people don’t have anywhere to go and can’t be “sent back” to where they came from as they have no ties. For example if a person’s grand parents immigrated decades ago to a country as settlers, and then their children and then grandchildren were born and lived their whole lives in a location, what would you do with those grandchildren? You can’t just throw them back to the country their grandparents were from. This question is made even harder when the generations start spanning back much farther.
Another problem that I am running into is that many solutions including “leftist” ones essentially boil down to ethnic cleaning even if they do not say it outright. Or they completely ignore the question or resort to some fantasy scenario where the settlers magically disappear or all agree to move.
So how should these populations and people be handled?
I think we should do the opposite; integrate them. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” sort of idea. New government, new economy, new rules, same people. I don’t see decolonization much different than the struggles along the lines of ethnicity and culture within the USSR and I believe a similar paradigm will take place in these cases. So decolonization by removing all hegemonic aspects of the settler state, completely dismantle it and rebuild the new state. No deportations. Trials yes assuming there are any guilty left after the inevitable war, but no deportations. Through the dialectical process of economic development, these peoples have joined. Home has a new meaning and many don’t have a place to go back to. When someone in America tells me to go back to my country, I was born here. I just go back to my house and continue as I was, it is pointless. Where would they go and where should they go? The drive for vengeance should not be hampered, the proposed target should be brushed off, lit with a very bright light, and the finest telescope must be used to improve it’s identification. Those responsible originally are long dead, but their legacy, their state, their class still lives on in their name, and therein lays the true ancestor of that responsibility.
That is an excellent analysis. Thank you for taking your time with this question, I will be saving this response.