The suggestion by the US president, Donald Trump, that Gaza’s Palestinian population could be “cleaned out” and moved to Egypt and Jordan is an idea that has long been circulated by the Israeli right.
Over the decades since the Six Day War in 1967, when Israeli forces first captured the Gaza Strip, which had been under Egyptian military rule, Israeli officials and commentators have periodically pushed the notion that Palestinians in Gaza could be resettled in Egypt.
Most recently that notion was floated in a leaked paper by Israel’s intelligence ministry – which prepares studies and policy papers rather than representing the intelligence agencies – a few weeks into the war in Gaza.
That “concept” paper recommended that Israel “evacuate the civilian population to Sinai” then create “a sterile zone of several kilometres … within Egypt” that would prevent return.
If the idea is a non-starter, it is because Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza and Israel and has a peace treaty with Israel, has long let it be known that it absolutely rejects any efforts by Israel to subcontract the problem of Gaza to Cairo, whether through forced transfer of the population or otherwise.
Egypt’s position has long been straightforward: by virtue of its long occupation of Gaza, Israel is legally responsible for Gaza. Forced displacement of Palestinians into Egypt would be politically toxic in a country where the population has been historically more sympathetic to Palestinians than the political elites, save for the short period of Muslim brotherhood rule.
Egypt has also long been concerned that any long-term camps in the Sinai could become a new base for Palestinian fighters, risking Egypt’s relationship with Israel.
Jordan is already home to several million Palestinians, while tens of thousands live in Egypt. Both countries and other Arab nations reject the idea of Palestinians in Gaza being moved to their countries.
Egypt and Jordan are also acutely aware that when Palestinians have been displaced by Israel in the past, whether into Jordan, Lebanon, Syria or into Gaza, not least during the war that saw Israel established in 1948, there has been no return.
And while Israel did succeed in displacing some Palestinians into Sinai after the Six Day War in 1967, when this idea has been raised again, including in the period before the withdrawal of Israeli settlers and soldiers from Gaza in 2005, Egyptian governments have rejected it, not least because the most recent vocal advocates of the idea have been Israel’s far right who support forced displacement to allow Jewish settlement in Gaza.
Indeed, as Amir Tibon wrote in Haaretz on Monday, during the first Trump administration the far right pushed rumours that his administration was drawing up a plan to give Palestinians land in the Sinai peninsula – at the expense of Egypt – as some sort of compensation for allowing Israel to annex the West Bank and put an end to the dream of Palestinian statehood.
If Trump’s remarks are baffling – as well as being contrary to international humanitarian law against forcible displacement – it is because they seem to indicate he has no coherent policy for the Middle East.
In the first place, Jordan and Egypt are countries with friendly relations with the US.
Trump’s ambition for a grand deal at whose heart is the normalisation of Saudi-Israeli relations is already facing the headwind of the fact that Riyadh is insisting on significant movement towards Palestinian statehood. Anything perceived as the large scale ethnic cleansing of Gaza would be a deal-breaker.
All of which has been reflected in the immediate rejection of Trump’s comments, including by Germany on Monday where a foreign ministry spokesperson said Berlin shared the view of “the European Union, our Arab partners, the United Nations … that the Palestinian population must not be expelled from Gaza and Gaza must not be permanently occupied or recolonised by Israel”.
Domestically too Trump’s comments are also proving to be toxic. “Arab-Americans for Trump firmly rejects President Donald J Trump’s suggestion to remove – voluntarily or forcibly – Palestinians in Gaza to Egypt and Jordan,” said Dr Bishara Bahbah, the national chair of Arab Americans for Trump.
One thing is certain, whether the idea was planted in Trump’s head, or bubbled up unbidden, it is in direct conflict with anything that may pass as a credible Middle East peace plan.
