On Sunday, President Donald Trump floated a fantastic idea. Arab nations, he noted, should accept Gazans as refugees, a move that “could be temporary or long term.” The accommodation would allow Israel to eliminate the remnants of Hamas, which, in turn, would allow the international community to rebuild Gaza.
Not only would such a policy enhance the prospects of Middle East peace, but it’s also humane. While Gazans shouldn’t be compelled to move from their homes, they should be allowed to escape the generational tragedy foisted on them by the Arab world and their nihilistic leaders. And Israelis should monetarily incentivize them to move to safer environs.
The Associated Press, which shared office space with Hamas for years, contends that Trump’s suggestion “openly contradict[s] Palestinian identity and deep connection to Gaza.”
Does it?
One of the prevailing myths of the Israel-Arab conflict is that most “Palestinians” have a strong historic connection to the land that goes back centuries. This claim is highly debatable, considering evidence shows that most Arabs immigrated to British Palestine from Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, in the late 19th and early 20th century, lured by the prosperity created by returning Jews.
But Gaza? There are over 2 million people in Gaza. There were perhaps 50,000 people there when Arab nations rejected the partition plan in 1947. For years after that, the Arabs of Gaza lived under Egypt, which used it as a launching site for Fedayeen terrorists into Israel. (Oct. 7 was the culmination of a long tradition.)
Even today, Gazans are always talking about how they merely bide their time to return to their homes in Jaffa or elsewhere within Israel proper. The United Nations runs an entire organization devoted wholly to the “Palestine Refugees in the Near East,” even though no such country has ever existed.
How long is a Palestinian considered a refugee in Gaza by the U.N.? As long as possible is the answer. The U.N. creates permanent “camps” — in reality, bustling cities — for the descendants of people dislocated by wars that Arabs started over 70 years ago. By contrast, there are over 2 million ethnic Arabs living in the Jewish state.
OK, then. If Gazans are just refugees, why can’t they move to other Arab nations? Because they are never going to be able to return to Israel. Convincing them otherwise, as the Western left and others like to do, creates a perpetual state of angst and war.
“Our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians, and Palestine is for Palestinians,” the nation’s foreign minister said after Trump’s comments.
The biggest problem with the statement is that it reminds us that Jordan is “Palestine.”
Jordan, with a population of over 70% Palestinians, sits principally on land set aside during the British Palestine Mandate to create a new Arab state that was to sit next to the Jewish one. We already have a two-state solution. We just choose to ignore it.
Indeed, the countries that Trump singled out as a place for refugees, Egypt and Jordan, are, along with Western leftists and the Soviet Union, primary architects of the Palestinian tragedy. From 1948 to 1967, Jordan and Egypt controlled Judea and Samaria, and the Gaza Strip and failed to either annex them or create a new state. “Palestinian” ethnicity was a cudgel against Israel and a way for Arab leaders to deflect from their own failures.
As Zuheir Mohsen, a Palestinian leader in the 1970s, put it: “There is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians; we are all members of a single nation. Solely for political reasons are we careful to stress our identity as Palestinians, since a separate State of Palestine would be an extra weapon in Arab hands to fight Palestinians.”
These days, of course, Jordan is terrified of adding more Palestinian refugees. The restive majority has been lorded over by Hashemite kings, unilaterally installed by the British. In 1970-71, Nobel Peace Prize winner Yassir Arafat famously sparked a civil war (not his last) in Jordan. King Abdullah II’s grandfather massacred over 5,000 Palestinian Fatah members, many of whom tried to escape into the “occupied” “West Bank.”
Next, the Palestinian revolutionaries set up shop in Southern Lebanon. Another violent Civil War erupted. Lebanon, once the diverse jewel of the Middle East, has never recovered.
It makes sense, as well, that Egypt has no interest in taking refugees. That nation’s economy, propped up by the United States, only narrowly averted a full-blown recession last year. It is perpetually unstable. And the last thing they need is more Hamas, which is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The answer, of course, is to disperse those who want to leave Gaza across the Arab world. Let the Qataris, who give safe haven to billionaire terror leaders, offer the poor souls who suffer a better life.
Why are Western nations the only ones who should be compelled to absorb people fleeing Middle East wars? When Muslims stream into Europe or the United States, it is celebrated as a great moral imperative. Israel is home to Jewish refugees from Asia and Africa and Europe. Arab nations should partake in this great modern moral cause by welcoming their own people. And Western powers should pressure them into doing the right thing.
There are other practical reasons to let Gazans escape their plight. Over the years, people have noted that Gaza could have been a Middle East version of Hong Kong. Unless there’s an undiscovered ocean of oil under their feet, this is wishful thinking. The Arab world does not generate prosperity. As it is, the situation is more likely to revert to form. And when you send concrete to help Gaza, they don’t build new housing or industry, they build 300 miles of reinforced terror tunnels and military bases under hospitals. If you send them necessities, they smuggle explosives and weapons. If you stop them, they tear down streetlight poles and dig up water pipes to make casements for rockets. Israel provides Gaza electricity (often for free.) Israel provides desalination plants. Palestinians are unable to provide the basic civilizational needs for their people.
Palestinian leaders—and every poll shows are supported by the preponderance of people—are unwilling to build basic infrastructure despite being handed hundreds of millions in aid.
Jews and Arabs of the Middle East both lived in relative poverty before partition. In the decades since, Israel’s GDP per capita has risen to be on par with Western European countries. Now it’s true that the average Palestinians’ per capita GDP before 2023 was only slightly lower than the average Jordanian—which is on par with the average Namibian. But at least in Jordan, parents won’t have to worry if officials have put a weapons cache under their kids’ elementary school. Progress.
Henry Kissinger once noted that Donald Trump, though he may not do it knowingly, was “one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
It is undeniable that many of Trump’s declarations, perhaps because they are unfettered by the norms of policy debate, end up making complete sense. Sometimes they haven’t been fully thought through, perhaps. Other times they change the dynamics of policy.
During Trump’s first term, normalization treaties between Israel and Gulf states were only possible because they circumvented the intractable Palestinians – something no president has done in a long time. Over the years, through revisionist histories and DC “expertise,” we have been programmed to accept that a Palestinian state is inevitable. It’s not. There are hundreds of stateless minorities in the world. Most of them have far stronger claims to nationhood. Proposing that Gazans would be better off in their historic homelands makes perfect sense.