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Keeping descendants of the 1948 refugees in place is about perpetuating a futile war on Israel. They should be allowed to flee Hamas rule and seek better lives elsewhere.
By: Jonathan S. Tobin
President Donald Trump is often at his best when he discards conventional wisdom and what the experts say is the only solution to any given problem. That was clearly the case when, during a 20-minute question-and-answer session with reporters on Air Force One on the way back from his visit to the site of the California wildfires, he said that both Egypt and Jordan should admit some of the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza as refugees.
As far as the president was concerned, it was just a matter of common sense.
“I’d like Egypt to take people, and I’d like Jordan to take people,” Trump said. “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people; we just clean out that whole thing.” Trump said that he had spoken to King Abdullah II of Jordan, saying, “I said to him. I’d love for you to take on more, cause I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess. It’s a real mess.”
Trump went on to say that the Middle East has “had many, many conflicts” over centuries. He said resettling “could be temporary or long term.” What’s more, he continued, “Something has to happen. It’s literally a demolition site right now. Almost everything’s demolished, and people are dying there. So, I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations, and build housing in a different location, where they can maybe live in peace for a change.”
The only sensible solution
It’s an inherently sensible solution both because of the devastation in Gaza and the likelihood that no matter how much aid is poured into the Strip in the coming years, most of it will be used by Hamas to prepare for the next round of fighting with Israel by building more terror tunnels, fortifications and armaments. Indeed, although contrary to the normal practice of war in which a combatant, especially one like Israel which was invaded on Oct. 7, is not considered responsible for feeding and caring for a hostile, enemy population, the Jewish state has allowed convoys of aid to enter Gaza throughout the war. Most of it, however, was stolen by Hamas and various other criminal elements. That theft, coupled with the resale of vital supplies intended to go to hungry Palestinians, has helped fuel Hamas’s efforts to rebuild its military after Israel decimated its fighting power.
The claims about Palestinian casualties supplied by Hamas and mimicked by the corporate Western media are exaggerated. The same is true of the false reports about Gazans starving. The latter was also given the lie by the footage of the barbarous parades and demonstrations organized by Hamas as hostages were released.
Yet even if we assume that many of them are in a bad way, Trump’s idea of giving them shelter and new lives elsewhere is the most humanitarian approach to their plight.
His idea is more or less the opposite of what the international community, the U.S. foreign-policy establishment, the Arab and Muslim world and the Palestinian Arabs themselves have said is acceptable.
Even in the face of the massive devastation in Gaza caused by the war that Hamas started on Oct. 7, 2023, an international consensus accepted by the Biden administration takes it as a given that the Palestinians who live there must remain in place. Nothing—not the conditions there or the prospect of continued rule by the Hamas terrorist organization, something that has been made more rather than less likely by the ceasefire-hostage release deal pushed by Trump—has been allowed to shake it.
Why?
One of the accepted principles of Middle East foreign policy over the past eight decades has been the belief that the Palestinian Arabs who fled their homes in 1948 during the course of Israel’s War of Independence must stay where they are. That contrasts with the treatment of every other refugee population of that era.
Palestinian refugees
During that period, as many as 50 to 65 million people were displaced by wars and the partitions that accompanied the post-colonial era in Europe, Asia and Africa. That included 16 million German speakers who were forced out of their homes in Eastern Europe, both as a punishment for Nazi Germany’s depredations as well as to make way for Poles and others who were displaced by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s shifting of the borders of various nations as part of his imperial ambitions. It also included 14 million inhabitants of what is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh as Muslims and Hindus fled for their lives to avoid the pogroms aimed at religious minorities who found themselves on the wrong side of arbitrarily drawn borders.
Among the number of those displaced in that era were approximately 700,000 Arabs living in the British Mandate for Palestine, which had been partitioned by the United Nations in 1947 to make way for a Jewish and an Arab state. The Jews welcomed the plan, but the Arabs rejected any resolution other than the establishment of a single Arab state. When five Arab nations invaded the country on May 15, 1948, after Israel declared its independence, many Arabs fled while some were also subsequently pushed out by the Israelis during the course of the bitter fighting that ensued.
During this same time, approximately 800,00 Jews were forced to flee their homes in the Muslim and Arab world. They were eventually resettled in Israel or in the West.
In the face of this enormous refugee problem, the fledgling United Nations created two agencies to deal with the crisis.
One was established to help those 700,000 Arabs, the U.N. Relief Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
Another, the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, was tasked with dealing with everyone else.
Over time, the U.N. High Commission fulfilled its task; there are no remaining refugees from that period who have not found homes and the chance to start new lives. UNRWA, though, believed that it had a different job.
UNRWA’s purpose
Since its founding, UNRWA considered that its task was not to resettle Palestinian Arabs. Rather, it assumed the role of ensuring that they stayed in refugee camps that, all these years later, are more like run-down urban developments. Maintaining them in such conditions kept open the theoretical possibility that, unlike the tens of millions of other refugees in the 1940s, they would return to their former homes and essentially rewrite the history of the conflict with Israel.
That attitude resulted in a situation in which UNRWA was not just educating generations of Palestinians to hate Israel and demand its destruction. It also became thoroughly infiltrated by Hamas with a number of its employees taking part in the Oct. 7 atrocities and using its facilities to imprison Israeli hostages.
From the start, they were assisted in this effort by the Arab states that hosted the refugee camps. They refused to offer the Palestinians citizenship in their countries. That included Egypt, which occupied Gaza in 1948; Jordan, which occupied the territories of Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank” of the enlarged Jordanian Kingdom); and both Syria and Lebanon, where refugee camps also were found.
And that’s the way it remained for 75 years with the original refugees now largely replaced by their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who, contrary to legal precedent, are also accorded the status of refugees rather than merely as their descendants. The largest number are in Gaza, where they have sat waiting impatiently for Israel to be destroyed so they could turn back the clock to 1948 or even 1917, when the British Empire first offered its support for the creation of a Jewish National Home with the Balfour Declaration.
Were the problem of the Palestinian refugees merely one of compensation or the creation of a separate Palestinian state alongside Israel, the conflict would have ended long ago. Israel and the United States offered the Palestinians independence and statehood in the year 2000, and repeated it with advantages twice more during the next decade. Even Trump offered the Palestinians a state with his 2020 “Peace to Prosperity” Mideast plan though with less generous terms than Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Barack Obama were willing to give them.
What Palestinians want
Each time, their supposedly more moderate leaders—Yasser Arafat and then Mahmoud Abbas—said “no” to such offers. That was in part because the descendants of the original refugees weren’t willing to settle for anything less than a “right of return” and Israel’s destruction. That refusal is integral to the Hamas Charter that demands both Israel’s extinction and the genocide of its Jewish population.
Many of them are still waiting to go “home” to a place their ancestors fled 75 years ago and which is now a different country, largely inhabited by the descendants of Jewish refugees who were themselves forced to abandon their homes in countries dominated by Arabs and Muslims.
Can Trump’s idea be implemented? Under the current circumstances, it’s highly doubtful.
Both Egypt and Jordan are technically at peace with Israel, but they are unlikely to go against the age-old Arab consensus about the imperative of Palestinian refugees being allowed to swamp Israel. Jordan’s population is already mostly Palestinian, and King Abdullah is in constant fear of them conspiring to overthrow him, much as they tried to do to his grandfather Hussein in the 1970s.
Egypt has maintained a blockade of Gaza not so much to halt the flow of supplies to the Strip; Hamas got much of its armaments via smuggling from Iran across that border. But it, too, is deathly afraid of allowing thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinian supporters of Hamas into their country since the government believes that they would join forces with their Muslim Brotherhood allies who seek the overthrow of Egyptian President Abdel el-Fattah Sisi.
Palestinian leaders from Fatah, which autonomously rules West Bank areas where Jews don’t live, and Hamas and other even more extreme groups will also never go along with this idea since it contradicts their doctrine that mandates the suffering of their people so the war against Israel can continue.
But Trump is right.
The only reason why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues is because the Palestinians don’t want any solution that will force them to live in peace alongside Israelis, let alone recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state—something that will be required if true peace is ever to be reached.
Trump succeeded in brokering the Abraham Accords in 2020 with four Arab and Muslim-majority countries by essentially leaving the Palestinians out of it, which left them unable to continue to hold the rest of the region hostage to their enduring intransigence.
That’s why, despite the refusal of other Arab countries to get involved, Trump should persist in his position.
Offers a way out
The only hope for those stuck in Gaza is to break free of the cycle of violence to which Hamas and other Palestinian groups are committed as a matter of inviolable principle. Staying there means not only a difficult struggle for survival in a devastated, war-torn area. It also means continuing an existence in which their leaders believe that their only purpose is to suffer and die so that the war on Israel’s existence can go on and thereby gain sympathy from ignorant, easily manipulated or anti-Semitic onlookers elsewhere.
The foreign-policy establishment believes that the only alternative is granting the Palestinians statehood. In a world where Palestinians were not committed to Israel’s destruction, that might make sense. But we don’t live in such a world, and that’s why the overwhelming majority of Israelis, including many formerly on the left and sensible people elsewhere, oppose it. Under these circumstances, that would mean not just rewarding Hamas and its supporters for starting a brutal war with unspeakable atrocities on Oct. 7. It also guarantees that Hamas and its allies would take over Judea and Samaria from Fatah, and thereby be enabled to make good their pledge of carrying out more Oct. 7-type atrocities from that far larger and more strategic territory.
There may be no way to break the impasse with the Palestinians, and Trump should be encouraged to return to his Abraham Accords formula and cut them out of the equation. The Palestinians are, as some wags noted during his first term, akin to the owners of a rapidly depreciating property that are unwilling to budge from a high sale price that is no longer realistic. That is something that canny real estate owners like Trump can smell a mile away. Which is to say that there is no way that the intransigent Palestinians will ever get a state—or at least, not until at some point in the far-off future when they find a way to move away from a national identity inextricably linked to the war to destroy Israel.
In the meantime, the truly humanitarian thing to do would be to start the process of resettling Gaza civilians who want a better life elsewhere, an option they have always been denied until now. That’s what the president has embraced, and he’s right to do so. Perhaps only an outlier like Trump, who never listens to what the “experts” say is possible, would even consider such a plan. Those who consider themselves to be sympathetic to the Palestinian people or desirous of peace in the Middle East ought to support that stand.
(JNS.org)
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
