On January 29, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah II rejected the idea of relocating Gazans, after US President Donald Trump proposed moving Palestinians from the region to the two Arab nations.
In his initial public response to Trump’s remarks, Sisi emphasized that “displacing the Palestinian people from their land is an injustice that we cannot be involved in.” Jordan’s King Abdullah II, for his part, expressed his “firm position on the need to keep the Palestinians on their land and to guarantee their legitimate rights, in accordance with the Israeli and Palestinian two-state solution.”
Referring to Trump’s idea as an “injustice” and invoking Palestinian “legitimate rights” are cynical and ironic when we consider both international law and the history of the Gaza problem.
First, to the issue of international law. Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 states that “everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” The 1951 Refugee Convention, to which both Egypt and Jordan are parties, built on this declaration by outlining the obligations of countries of destination. Among those obligations are the acceptance of refugees from war zones and their protection. By refusing to accept refugees from Gaza since the beginning of the war, both Egypt and Jordan are in direct violation of these agreements.
When we consider the history of the Palestinian refugee problem, the comments by Sisi and Abdullah become even more egregious. The simple fact is that had the Arab states accepted the UN partition plan of November 1947, there would have been a Palestinian Arab state alongside Israel, and not a single Palestinian Arab would have become a refugee. It is only due to the war initiated by numerous Arab armies that any Arab was displaced. The two largest armies were those of Egypt and Jordan.
Beyond Egypt and Jordan, without which that war could never have happened, the primary culprits in the creation of Palestinian refugee camps were the Arab leaders at the time. On March 8, 1948, the Arab Higher Committee ordered most Arabs in parts of Jerusalem to leave their homes. The order stated that “any opposition to this order is an obstacle to the holy war and will hamper the operations of the fighters in these districts.”
In the words of Khaled al-Azm, the Syrian prime minister at the time, in his memoirs, “Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return.”
While Arab leaders were calling for Arabs to evacuate, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries were streaming to Israel. Forced to flee in the wake of the creation of the Jewish state, most were prohibited from taking their possessions with them.
For 19 years, from the end of the war in 1948 to the Six Day War in 1967, Gaza, with its large population of refugees, was under Egyptian rule. During these years, while Israel successfully absorbed the Jewish refugees from Arab lands, Egypt and Jordan refused to afford Palestinian Arab refugees the same basic human right. In 1952, UNRWA set up a $200 million fund to provide homes and jobs for the refugees. The funds were never used.
From 1948 to 1967, not only were Gazan refugees prohibited from entering mainland Egypt, the Egyptians went so far as to prevent them from emigrating elsewhere. And although King Abdullah of Jordan did grant citizenship to some Palestinian refugees, he refused to accept any from Gaza.
The situation was summed up in 1952 by Sir Alexander Galloway, former head of UNRWA in Jordan, “The Arab States do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don’t give a damn whether the refugees live or die.”
Upside-down world
In this upside-down world, we now have Egyptian President Sisi wrapping himself in high moral language, declaring President Trump’s plan to be “an injustice that we cannot be involved in.” Apparently, any attempt to, in Trump’s words, “get people living in areas that are a lot safer and maybe a lot better and maybe a lot more comfortable,” is immoral to Sisi. And Abdullah’s sanctimony about protecting the “legitimate rights” of Palestinians is gaslighting of the highest order. What about the right of asylum from a war zone? What about the fact that for 19 years Jordan ruled Judea and Samaria and did not lift a finger to help the Palestinian Arabs there achieve independence?
Sisi and Abdullah have it exactly backward. Egypt and Jordan are the two states that bear the greatest responsibility, both legally and morally, for the situation that Trump seeks to rectify. Trump’s plan would correct a historic injustice while granting a basic human right that has long been denied to the civilian population of Gaza.
The writer is executive director of Israel365Action.com and host of the Shoulder to Shoulder podcast.