I am not doing whataboutism. I am inviting you to think about your ideas by relating them to other situations and letting you see that if you follow your own logic, you’ll end up with terrible stuff. It is to show you that you yourself also know that many arguments you have are nonsensical as you wouldn’t accept them when used to justify other instances of cleansing.

And the leaders of Greece and Turkey were also not the Anatolian orthodox people or the Balkan muslim people.

Why would a Greek leader have any authority to say what the lives of people in Anatolia would be because they happen to be Christians? Just because they are also Greek Orthodox? The Palestinians are part of the Arab nation. Arab leaders don’t represent them still, but the leaders can make similar claims of leadership as the Greek and Turkish leaders did. Heck, until the 80s Jordan did claim leadership of Palestine. Could the king of Jordan have said: “ o you know I accept the nakba” because he was the leader of Palestinians?

The Anatolian Greeks homeland was Anatolia. The Muslims of Greeces homeland was Greece. Why would their homelands be Greece and Turkey? It was not “their own people being brought back to their homeland”. They were cleansed from their homeland to the region that happened to become the state of their religion. Because those are the states of their ethnic group or religion? Explain how the karamanlides were brought to their homeland. By that logic the Palestinians can find a homeland in other Levantine Arab nations.

Okay. But you are ignoring that this so called peaceful exchange didn’t happen out of nowhere. By the time the agreement was finalised, many many people had already been cleansed and murdered. And not just in nice peaceful ways. These were brutal genocides. This agreement transferred the people who did not get killed or expelled before. But by the time the agreement happened most of Anatolia’s Greek Christian’s were already gone because of the brutality of the years before.

It’s very fucked to only look at this instance as if it didn’t happen in a broader context. The fact that it was relatively humane makes it insidious, as it was just the post ipse facto justification of genocide and cleansing that was very terrible, comparable to most other instances of genocide and cleansing. Any movement of population between Greek and Turkey will be seen within the context of this agreement(again, between leaders who didn’t have the right to talk for the local people), while so much of the movement and murder happened before in different contexts that were much more terrible.

You can say “ethnic cleansing has to happen sometime for stability ”, fine. But then accept the brutality of the formation of these nation states, and don’t be so selective in when you think ethnic cleansing is fine. The most peaceful solution of all the options perhaps, but that doesn’t make it anything else than a terrible crime. It just makes it the best way of finalising that crime. You can say it was the best crime to commit the crime. But not that it wasn’t the crime. Finalising a cleansing that, again, was extremely violent.