🧩 BND Motif Index · M1421
Ethnic cleansing
A state is said to be emptying a territory of a people, by force or by making life there impossible, so each attack, demolition and uprooted field is counted as part of one plan.
🕵️ Theories🗂️ Coercion and Intimidation🗂️ Erasing a people
- 8claims filed under it
- 4left shows it came up on
- 4center shows it came up on
- 1right show it came up on
⚠️ A story people tell, not a claim that it's true.
A motif is the shape of a story as its tellers tell it, named the way a folklorist names a tale type, so the same story told about other people, by the other side or in another year lands in the same place. Some of the claims below are true, many are false. Arguing against a story is often a story of its own, its answer (Voter fraud is answered by Voter suppression, Lawfare by No one is above the law), and we file it there; where no answer has a motif yet, the arguments against a story sit with its tellings.
🪜 Its family
what it rests on, what rests on it, and the motifs that answer it
🔗 goes with: 🧩 Driven off the land 🧩 Genocide
🎙️ Who it came up with
the shows we follow where its claims came up (4 left-leaning, 4 center, 1 right-leaning so far), colored by the show's lean; the bar is how many of its claims each one heard
- 🫏 The Young Turks (podcast) 6 claims
- 🫏 The Kyle Kulinski Show 2 claims
- 🫏 The Majority Report (podcast) 2 claims
- 🐘 The Tucker Carlson Show 2 claims
- ⚖️ 1A (WAMU/NPR) 1 claim
- ⚖️ Breaking Points 1 claim
- ⚖️ The Brian Lehrer Show (WNYC) 1 claim
- 🔀 The Jimmy Dore Show (podcast) 1 claim
- ⚖️ The Take (Al Jazeera) 1 claim
- 🫏 Today in Focus (Guardian) 1 claim
- left-leaning
- center
- right-leaning
- crossover
"Came up on" means one of its claims was heard on the show: told, reported or argued against. We don't yet mark which. Show leans are our own grouping of the shows we transcribe.
🗣️ In so many words
the words that carry it
💬 the tellers' own words: “All houses in villages near the Lebanese border will be destroyed in accordance with the model used in Rafah... 48 of the roughly 60 villages... mostly leveled” “Ethnically Cleansed Them” “I would open the borders and let them all go but no one can stay” “Israel is trying to solve the Palestinian question right in front of everyone's face with ethnic cleansing.” “that's called ethnic cleansing” “the central state project of ethnically cleansing the West Bank… the mass ethnic cleansing” “the right-wing government of Prime Minister Netanyahu keeps saying things that suggest that their goal here is ethnic cleansing.” “they moved 70% of Gaza, the Palestinians that live there, out from that land, and Israel now has 70% of Gaza.” “They say they want to do ethnic cleansing” “they're destroying the fields so they can't earn a living. And if they can't earn a living, they have to leave” “they're trying to make the West Bank uninhabitable for the Palestinians” “to ethnically cleanse them”
🧶 Its claims
what's been told in this shape, in our words, by who told it: newest first in each; a claim's dots are the shows it came up on, in their lean's color (point at them for their names)
Told on the left 6
claims heard on left-leaning shows, and no right-leaning one
- 2026-11-02 “Zionism is a foreign European settler movement that has committed genocide against others.” 2
- 2026-11-01 “The Israeli military, government, and settlers are working together to ethnically cleanse the West Bank.” 3
- 2026-11-01 “Israel is destroying olive fields in the West Bank to make the area uninhabitable for Palestinians.” 2
- 2026-10-15 “Israel is attempting to deploy a Gaza-style model of total destruction in Lebanon.” 2
- 2026-10-10 “Israel is using mass murder to force Palestinians out of Gaza to seize their land.” 2
- 2026-10-07 “Israeli politicians are openly calling for genocide and ethnic cleansing.” 2
Told on the right 1
claims heard on right-leaning shows, and no left-leaning one
- 2026-10-08 “An Israeli politician suggested that Gaza should have been destroyed like Hamburg and Nagasaki.” 2
Told on both sides 1
claims heard on left- and right-leaning shows alike
- 2026-10-29 “The Israeli government's actions in Gaza and the West Bank suggest a goal of ethnic cleansing.” 3
M1421 · first seen 2026-11-01 · last 2026-10-29 · what this is · how the index works