Palestinians cross to the Egyptian side of the border crossing with the Gaza Strip in Rafah Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023. (AP Photo/Hatem Ali)
Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig: Gazans’ Resettlement: A Bad Idea (for Trump)!
President Trump’s recent “resettle Gazans” proposal is many things – but above all that, it’s bad for Trump’s own Middle East policy. In short, it’s self-defeating. To understand why, here’s some background.
When Israel was established, it immediately became embroiled in an Israeli-Arab War. There is no longer such a war because the Arab countries have either signed peace treaties with Israel (Egypt and Jordan), or have reached formal “Accords” with the Jewish State, or have become militarily and politically neutralized (Syria and Lebanon). Iran has become Israel’s greatest nemesis – but it is not, and never was, “Arab”. Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel’s only real cross-border threats, are proxies for Iran.
Which leaves us with basically an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it is here that we arrive back at the immigrant issue – although it has been “packaged” as a refugee problem. Two history aspects are relevant to understanding the situation:
1) Hundreds of thousands (now a few million, including their progeny) of Palestinians indeed left and/or were forced out of their homes during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. They settled mainly in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanese refugee camps.
2) Of the tens of millions of refugees around the world in the post-World War II era, every single one relatively soon entered the new society in which they found themselves – except for one people: the Palestinians. They have been left (s)moldering in neglected refugee camps for over seven decades – within the borders of their Arab brethren, unlike millions of other refugees around the world who had to integrate into an ethnically, religiously, or culturally foreign society. The reason for this anomaly? The Palestinians were used as a cudgel to keep the Israeli-Palestinian conflict festering through Arab promises of the refugees eventually “returning home” (many still wear the key to their former house).
Given this historical backdrop, Trump’s demand to have even more Arab refugees dumped on neighboring countries is obtuse at best – and even worse from his standpoint: counter-productive! If the president’s self-proclaimed goal is to “bring peace to the Middle East,” nothing could be more harmful to that end than to send millions more miserable refugees into these Arab countries that already suffer from poverty. Indeed, in the case of Jordan, the problem is even more acute. Unfortunately for the Hashemite Kingdom, it has the “wrong” ethnic majority in its midst: Palestinian! Adding a million more would probably tip that country into civil war (a la Syria over the last decade) or revolution (Syria a couple of months ago). Hardly a recipe for Middle East peace.
Is there a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue? Yes, but it entails the two-state solution. If a non-belligerent State of Palestine were established, and well run (attracting Arab investment), that would be a main attraction for many of those decades-long refugees to finally return – if not “home,” at least to their self-perceived “homeland.” Indeed, that would kill two birds with one stone – for such a Palestine would also run Gaza, enabling the Gazans to stay put and rebuild, while also negating Hamas’s rule.
None of this would happen overnight – and lots of difficult-to-achieve changes would have to occur: reeducation of Palestinians regarding Jewish rights to their own homeland too; demilitarization of Palestine (West Bank and Gaza); elimination of international institutions (e.g., UNWRA) whose raison d’etre is to keep the refugees relying on outside sustenance; and massive construction to enable the 1948 refugees to return.
In Washington, at his recent meeting with Bibi, Trump announced his plan for America to “take over Gaza” – but this entails a self-contradiction, going directly against his declared neo-isolationist foreign policy. But an even greater contradiction lies at the heart of the Gazans’ resettlement idea: Trump insists on deporting millions of illegal immigrants from his own rich country who are desperate to be there, but then suggests that halfway across the world two poor nations must accept a couple of million people who do not want to emigrate to those countries?!?
To conclude: beyond such an egregiously contradictory approach, throwing millions more refugees into the boiling Middle East pot would only be adding injury (destabilizing two of America’s friendly Arab nations) to insult (forcibly removing millions of people from their land).
If President Trump is really serious about starting a process that has some chance of eventually getting him awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, his approach should be subtraction, and not addition: eliminating the refugee status of millions of Palestinians – not adding to it.
