President Donald Trump is often at his best when he discards conventional wisdom and “expert” advice. That was clearly the case when, during the course of a recent 20-minute question-and-answer session with reporters on Air Force One, 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 he had spoken to King Abdullah II of Jordan: “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 the centuries. He said resettling “could be temporary or long term.” What’s more, “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.”
No matter how much aid is poured into the Strip in the coming years, most of it will be taken by Hamas. Despite Trump’s opposition to the terror group, the cease-fire he helped broker makes Hamas’ continued hold on power likely. Trump’s idea of giving Palestinians shelter and new lives elsewhere is the most humanitarian approach to their plight.
Yet even in the face of the massive devastation in Gaza caused by the war Hamas started on Oct. 7, 2023, an international consensus accepted by the Biden administration and the foreign policy establishment takes it as a given that the Palestinians who live there must remain in place.
Why?
Looking at History
One of the accepted principles of 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 is in contrast to the treatment of every other refugee population of that era.
In the years after World War II, 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. Among them 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 and others were pushed out by the Israelis during the bitter fighting that ensued.
During this same time, approximately 800,000 Jews were forced to flee their homes in the Muslim and Arab world and were eventually resettled in Israel or in the West.
In the face of the enormous global refugee problem, the fledgling United Nations created two agencies to deal with the crisis and the need for resettlement of displaced persons.
One was to help those 700,000 Arabs, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA. 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. UNRWA, though, believed that it had a different job.
Teaching Hate
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 from 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 educating generations of Palestinians to hate Israel and demand its destruction. It also later 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.
The original refugees are now largely replaced by their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who, contrary to legal precedent, are also accorded the status of refugees rather than 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.
Declined Offers of Statehood
Were the problem of the Palestinian refugees merely one of the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, the conflict would have ended long ago. Israel and the United States offered the Palestinians independence and statehood in 2000 and repeated it with advantages twice more during the course of the next decade. Even Trump offered the Palestinians a state with his 2020 “Peace to Prosperity” Middle East plan.
Each time, they said no to such offers. That was in part because the descendants of the original refugees were unwilling 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.
Trump’s Plan
Can Trump’s idea be implemented? Under the current circumstances, it’s highly doubtful.
Jordan’s population is already mostly Palestinian, and King Abdullah is in constant fear of them conspiring to overthrow him. Egypt has maintained a blockade of Gaza. It, too, is afraid of allowing 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 Fattah el-Sisi.
A majority of Palestinians might reject the option for ideological reasons. But there is also the possibility that a significant minority might embrace the possibility and would only hold back out of a reasonable fear of being targeted by Hamas.
But Trump is right.
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.
Hope
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. Their leaders believe that Palestinians’ only purpose is to suffer and die so that the war on Israel’s existence can go on and thereby gain them sympathy from ignorant, easily manipulated, or antisemitic onlookers elsewhere.
Nevertheless, starting the process by which Gaza civilians who want a better life elsewhere can be resettled will give them an option they have always been denied until now. Success is uncertain, but if it works for even a small group, it will undermine Hamas. Perhaps only an outlier like Trump, who never listens to what the “experts” say is possible, would even consider such a plan. Still, those who claim to be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause or desirous of peace in the Middle East ought to support his stand.
Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for Newsweek. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.
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