Seth Mandel: How Trump Can Get Arab States to Solve the Refugee Problem Without Relocating Gazans
That is, the Arab states made a conscious, concerted decision to make Palestinians a permanent underclass so they could be used as a cudgel against Israel. Palestinians’ statelessness is the official policy of the Arab states, with the exception of Jordan, which granted Palestinian refugees citizenship while simultaneously insisting they keep their “refugee” status as far as the UN is concerned, thus obligating UN agencies to subsidize their absorption while artificially inflating the number of claimed Palestinian “refugees” in the region. (In the real world, you can be a refugee or you can be a resettled citizen.)Jonathan Tobin: Trump plan puts an end to the Palestinian state fantasy
Lebanon has always made its position clear. In 2006, President Emile Lahoud explained: “We have today around half a million Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, their birth rate is three times higher than the Lebanese. That is a time bomb. It is the basic problem of our country, it led to the outbreak of civil war in 1975 and still remains unsolved today. Everybody today is talking about UN resolution 1559, but nobody mentions resolution 194, which recognizes the Palestinians’ right of return (to Israel). Lebanon is small and can’t integrate the Palestinians.”
That is, the Lebanese position has always been that Palestinians are a demographic threat and keep their host country constantly on the verge of civil war, so they should go to Israel.
In Lebanon, Palestinians still mostly live in camps. In addition, “Laws, decrees, and regulations of professional associations specify that members must hold Lebanese nationality for at least ten years or that there must be reciprocity of treatment for Lebanese professionals in the country of citizenship of the foreign professional applying to practice in Lebanon,” which means Palestinians cannot legally work in major industries.
In Syria, Palestinians are lucky if their camps even still stand. “The Yarmouk refugee camp outside Damascus was considered the capital of the Palestinian diaspora before the war in Syria reduced it to row after row of blasted out buildings,” reported the Associated Press in December. Bashar al-Assad’s forces flattened Yarmouk and left it abandoned, then made it nearly impossible to legally rebuild.
What’s the purpose of all this? Very simply, the point is to prevent full acceptance of Israel’s existence and prepare the ground for a perpetual cycle of wars of annihilation against the Jewish state. The Palestinians suffer most from the Arab world’s policy, not because they are the target but because they are the weapon.
Egypt receives over a billion dollars a year in U.S. aid. In Syria, Assad has fallen, potentially opening up an opportunity to renegotiate its official policy of using Palestinians as cannon fodder against Israel. In Lebanon, Hezbollah has been greatly weakened and the U.S. is currently overseeing a ceasefire agreement there.
If Trump wants to save Israeli and Palestinian lives and keep the peace in the Middle East, he should use U.S. leverage to end the permanent refugee status of Palestinians.
Chances for a stateTrump's Plan to Free Palestinians from Gaza
The notion of a two-state solution died a long time ago.
It could have easily been put into effect if only veteran terrorist and P.A. leader Yasser Arafat—newly off his title as chief of the Palestinian Liberation Organization with blood on his hands—had said “yes” to the offers of independence and statehood offered him by former President Bill Clinton and then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. But after Arafat answered that peace offer with the terrorist war of attrition known as the Second Intifada, most Israelis understood that the land for peace schemes they had been sold was nothing more than land for terror. The conversion of Gaza into a terror state and missile launching pad against Israeli civilians after 2005 only confirmed that unhappy truth.
Still, the Palestinians had more opportunities and much international support. Statehood could have happened when President George W. Bush and then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made an even sweeter offer to Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas. And the opportunity for Palestinian statehood was always a theoretical possibility during the eight years of the presidency of Barack Obama, who did everything he could to tilt the diplomatic playing field in their direction.
But after Oct. 7 and the war that followed it, it’s safe to say that Palestinian statehood stopped being anything but a tired and meaningless policy concept that had outlived its sell-by date.
What lies ahead for the Palestinians or Gaza? It’s hard to say.
Trump pushed for a ceasefire/hostage release deal that could leave Hamas in power in Gaza. But his statements about the necessity for the removal of much, if not all, of the Palestinian population for the area to be rebuilt shows he doesn’t want that to happen. And as much as he would like for there to be no wars taking place on his watch, it seems unlikely that he would oppose further Israeli efforts to finish off Hamas—as Biden and Harris did—once it’s clear that the ceasefire will not force its disarming and eviction from power. The era of “daylight” between the United States and Israel is also over.
It’s entirely possible that the Palestinians in Gaza will insist on staying in the same state of limbo that they have chosen for themselves since 1948. They may continue waiting for Israel’s destruction so the descendants of the original refugees can go “home” to a country that never actually existed as a separate Palestinian Arab nation and never will. And it’s equally possible that with or without Hamas leadership, the political culture of the Palestinians is so twisted and intransigent that few will dare to take Trump up on his offer of the resettlement they’ve been denied for all these years for fear of being killed by Hamas operatives or their neighbors.
But there should be no doubt that despite the calumnies heaped upon Trump for having the temerity to discard foreign-policy conventional wisdom, this is the best offer the Palestinians will ever likely get.
There is no rational alternative
They may get the satisfaction of seeing Trump’s idea die for lack of support from anyone but Israel. But the alternative to the problem is for the Palestinian people to remain living in squalor, where they are only considered useful by their leaders, activists, university students and others who exploit the situation, as cannon fodder to wage war against the Jewish state.
What Trump has done is to consign the idea of Palestinian statehood to the ash heap of history, where it belongs. Along with his withdrawal from UNRWA—the U.N. refugee agency that has refused to resettle the Palestinians since 1948 and that helped perpetuate the war on Israel—and his recent defunding of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), whose “humanitarian” projects similarly helped prop up Palestinian intransigence, Trump has decisively shifted U.S. policy away from fantasy to realism.
American support was always essential for Palestinian statehood. That is finished. His critics may decry this all they want, but the bitter truth they fail to acknowledge is that their alternatives to Trump’s Gaza idea are even more unrealistic and dangerous than his.
President Trump shocked the world with his proposal to resettle Gazans in nearby countries. The real disturbance is to think seriously about what it would mean to put Palestinian lives first rather than sacrificing them to the lost cause of Palestine as their leaders always do. Each major Palestinian leader has preferred his own generation to suffer rather than consent to live alongside a Jewish state on any part of the Jewish homeland.
This is the worst kind of nationalism, an eliminationist one that brings its people only misery. But Arab states have long indulged it. It relieved them of the burdens first of resettling Palestinians and then of starting and losing wars to annihilate Israel.
The world plays along. UNRWA was founded in 1949 to resettle the displaced from the defeated Arab invasion of Israel. The Arab and Soviet blocs made UNRWA into a permanent international commitment to the lost cause. Palestinians are radicalized in UNRWA schools and kept on the international dole rather than encouraged to build institutions of their own. That's the purpose of the Gaza. Trump now proposes to do the job UNRWA never would.
The scandal isn't that displaced Palestinians now could be "transferred" voluntarily out of Gaza; it's that they have been forced to stay there. When Palestinians tried to flee the war, as is their human right, Egypt forcibly closed the border - with the support of the international community. Their incarceration by UNRWA and Egypt is the brutal status quo, strangely unchallenged until now.
