WSJ opinion article gets heat for using partition of India to justify Trump's Gaza 'takeover'

A recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) opinion piece - "If Indians and Pakistanis Can Relocate, Why Can’t Gazans?" - has received an onslaught of criticism this week from people online who say the argument obscures the violence that ensued after India's partition. 

The piece, published on Wednesday, argues that population transfers were not invented by US President Donald Trump - who is set on "taking over" the Gaza Strip and "cleaning" it out by transferring Palestinians into nearby countries - and that "there are plenty of examples from the 20th century",  such as the 1947 partition of India.

“No one expects Pakistan to transform its religious demography by offering a ‘right of return’ to descendants of Hindu and Sikh refugees. Why should it be any different for Israel?" the piece says, referring to the Palestinians' legal argument that refugees and their descendants have a right to return to the land from which they were displaced. 

The article briefly mentions the violence that ensued after the partition of India, where 15 million people were forcibly removed from their ancestral homes, killing nearly two million people in the process.

In a sea of unhinged, narcissistic, illiterate, callous & inhumane opinion pieces on Gaza, we have an Outstanding Winner. How to dismiss decades of pain & continued suffering in one wave of a comfortable well-fed hand. pic.twitter.com/agiOUAf0Cn

— Priyamvada Gopal © (@PriyamvadaGopal) February 13, 2025

Descendants of those who lived through the impact of the partition have responded to the opinion article with collective criticism. 

"The Great Partition of 1947 where millions were displaced, murdered + traumatized b/c the British meddled w/ indigenous ppl of the lands," one social media user posted on X. "My grandparents were deeply impacted by the Partition + suffered greatly, the ramifications of this still lingers on. This is not the answer."

Neither the writer nor WSJ responded to Middle East Eye's request for comment. 

The trauma of the partition of Panjab defined my childhood even in Britain - the memories, losses, scarring, shock, anger of my grandparents who lived through the violence and saw their homeland ripped in two, and the development of reactionary nationalisms in its place. https://t.co/axvldIQfoJ

— @DefsNotAmar (@DefsNotAmar) February 13, 2025

Palestinians have also responded to the article, saying that there is a double standard when forcible displacement of a population – which is a war crime under international humanitarian law – is discussed when it comes to Palestine. 

"The Wall Street Journal would never publish someone calling for the permanent expulsion of Israelis. So why is it acceptable when its Palestinians?" journalist Humza Yusef posted on X. 

"It’s amazing that 500,000 Israelis live illegally in the West Bank (720k w East Jerusalem), and the idea of relocating them to Israel in line with the law is considered impossible and verboten to discuss," one social media user wrote. "But forcibly moving 2 million Gazans to other countries? That’s a WSJ oped." 

Palestinian-American international lawyer Noura Erakat took to X to argue that Trump's plan has emboldened people to place the presence of Palestinians as the problem, not the Israeli occupation. 

Forced population transfers were a feature of Nazi occupation & proscribed as a war crime, later as a feature of apartheid, a crime against humanity. Trump’s proposal is ludicrous but harmful for framing #Palestinians, not settler colonialism & occupation, as the problem. #Gaza pic.twitter.com/74uZgluc4L

— Noura Erakat (@4noura) February 13, 2025

Others pointed out that the article's ideas is one of many examples of how Pakistan is used to "rationalise Israel".

"Pakistan is often dragged into efforts to rationalise Israel, and of course there are parallels, but you can’t claim to be Pakistani simply by being born into a Muslim family, so it doesn’t allow constant expansionary settlement, for which it requires more and more territory," academic Arsalan Khan posted on X. 

"Jewishness is ethnicized by virtue of blood, imagined in kinship terms, and so a claim to Israeli citizenship can be made simply by virtue of being born Jewish anywhere," he continued. 

A majority of the criticism that continues to pour online focuses on the writer's use of prior instances of forced expulsion as a positive example, ignoring the traumatic effects of mass displacement and death. 

"Over the last 100-odd years, countless people have been genocided, but the Palestinians are the only genocide victims in the world to complain about it" https://t.co/PIVplskd00

— Fahad Desmukh (@desmukh) February 13, 2025

"While I was growing up, the tragedies of the 20th century were mostly mentioned as things we should struggle to avoid repeating," one social media user wrote on X.

"Now they are increasingly mentioned as our inevitable destiny, a fact of life, a result of human nature, or even as a role model for conflict solving."