It starts off talking about how Egyptians simply do not want Palestinian Arabs to live amongst them:
Back in November, daily newspaper and staunch critic of the Brotherhood Al-Watan [announced] its “Sinai is for Egyptians” campaign.The author says that there is no reason for Egyptians to worry:
While presenting a common pan-Arab rhetoric supporting the Palestinian cause, the two-page spread was filled with the xenophobic, “not in my backyard” panic typical of tabloids everywhere in their treatment of foreigners on home soil. In the particular case of Palestine, that discourse is reminiscent of the era following the peace accords, when the Hosni Mubarak ruling regime — much like other regimes in the region — engineered and promoted the “Egypt first” line.
The Al-Watan campaign is premised on reports from tribal chiefs in Sinai, who report that they were approached by the army and asked for their opinion about the establishment of camps in North Sinai to receive Palestinian refugees.
“We will prevent Gazans from populating our land, even if blood has to be shed,” the chiefs declare in one headline. The army has denied these rumors, but the media campaign targeting Palestinians continued.
What seems to have escaped popular memory is that a Palestinian refugee camp existed in Sinai for 30 years, and that when there was a choice, the Palestinians opted to return back home.Really? Let's see the details:
Canada Camp came into existence when Israel demolished the homes of residents in Rafah in the early 1970s and relocated them to a former Canadian contingent camp in Sinai, under Israeli occupation at the time.Meaning, Egypt refused to naturalize people who lived in the Sinai simply because they have Palestinian Arab ancestry.
When Egypt and Israel signed the Camp David Accords and Israel withdrew from Sinai in 1982, the nearly 500 families living in the camp found themselves refugees once again.
Unable to work legally in Egypt, camp residents relied on United Nations aid and income from manual labor. University students had to pay tuition fees in dollars or pounds sterling.So from all evidence, the entire reason that the residents of Canada Camp were so anxious to return to Gaza had nothing to do with how much they love Gaza or "Palestine,", but it was entirely because they were abused by their Arab brethren in Egypt!
The situation worsened after the 1990 Gulf crisis, when thousands of Palestinians employed in the Gulf — some of whom had supported families in Canada Camp — lost their jobs.
Wilkinson says an anomaly caused by the large number of men who left the camp to work or study or were deported by the Egyptian authorities left many women unable to find marriage partners, providing another reason for why they were impatient to return to Gaza.
This, in a nutshell, is the root of Palestinian Arab nationalism today. The PalArabs have no real ties to the land, and if they were given a choice to be naturalized in other Arab countries they would do so in a minute. But the Arab nations - who pretend to support the cause so very much - purposefully keep them in misery so that they have no choice but to remain a separate people, purely by the accident of their grandparents having lived within certain borders drawn by Europeans less than a hundred years ago.