US President Donald Trump\u2019s proposal to \u201cclean out\u201d the Gaza Strip by moving more than a million Palestinians to neighboring countries has drawn sharp criticism, with opponents condemning it as ethnic cleansing and warning of regional chaos. <\/p>\n
Trump said on Saturday that he would like Jordan and Egypt to take in Gazans internally displaced by Israel\u2019s devastating war in the enclave. \u201cYou\u2019re talking about a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,\u201d he told reporters aboard Air Force One. <\/p>\n
The potential transfer, he said, \u201ccould be temporary\u201d or \u201ccould be long-term.\u201d Both countries swiftly rejected the idea. <\/p>\n
But, if adopted, the proposal would mark a sharp break from the Biden administration\u2019s stance that Gaza should not be depopulated and could signal a shift from a longstanding US position that Gaza should be part of a future Palestinian state. It would also align the Trump administration with Israel\u2019s most radical far-right politicians, who advocate transferring Palestinians out of the territory to make way for Jewish settlement. <\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s proposal has been embraced by extremist Israeli politicians, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich \u2013 who has sparked controversy by claiming there is \u201cno such thing as a Palestinian people\u201d\u2013 and former Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, who was once convicted for supporting terrorism and inciting anti-Arab racism. <\/p>\n
Palestinian politicians decried it as a plan to ethnically cleanse Gazans from their land. <\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know what he\u2019s talking about,\u201d Graham said, referring to Trump. <\/p>\n
Experts warn that beyond the moral and legal concerns, an influx of refugees into neighboring Arab countries could destabilize them and pose an existential threat. Agreeing to Trump\u2019s proposal, they say, would provoke widespread public anger \u2013 an untenable risk for those governments. <\/p>\n
Both the Egyptian and Jordanian governments \u201cwould be met by sweeping domestic opposition if they were seen by their publics as being complacent with a second Palestinian Nakba,\u201d said Hasan Alhasan, senior fellow for Middle East policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Bahrain, referring to 1948, when roughly 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forcibly expelled from their homes in historic Palestine, during the creation of Israel. <\/p>\n
Israel has barred them and their descendants from returning, leaving millions of refugees in neighboring countries without citizenship or prospects for permanent resettlement. <\/p>\n
\u201cGiven that the Palestinians of Gaza are highly unlikely to leave voluntarily, a forced displacement towards Egypt or Jordan would pose a variety of existential threats to these two countries,\u201d Alhasan said. <\/p>\n
For Jordan, which is already home to millions of Palestinians, an altered demographic \u201cwould threaten the Hashemite monarchy\u2019s hold on power,\u201d he said, adding that financially, \u201cneither Egypt nor Jordan can afford to host millions of additional refugees.\u201d <\/p>\n
Egypt and Jordan are two of the US\u2019 closest allies in the Middle East, and major recipients of US aid that have for decades aligned their regional policies with US interests. They were the first Arab countries to sign peace treaties with Israel and have maintained cordial relations with it, including security coordination, despite widespread public discontent. <\/p>\n
Jane Kinninmont, an expert on conflict at the European Leadership Network, a think tank, and co-host of the Disorder podcast, said that over time, Jordan and Egypt\u2019s influence in Washington, DC has been overshadowed by Gulf Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. What remains to be seen, she added, is how far those countries will go in \u201csending a clear message to Washington that mass displacement won\u2019t make the conflict go away.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cIt is important for regional countries to emphasize that the refugee issue is one of the drivers of the current conflict and making more Palestinians into refugees won\u2019t solve that. This goes right to the heart of the conflict,\u201d Kinninmont said. <\/p>\n
On Sunday, both Egypt and Jordan reaffirmed their rejection to the deportation or resettlement of Palestinians. <\/p>\n
\u201cJordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians,\u201d said Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi in a news conference in Amman Sunday. \u201cOur rejection for the deportation is steadfast and unchanging.\u201d <\/p>\n
Egypt\u2019s foreign ministry also said it rejects \u201cthe deportation or encouragement of the transfer or removal of Palestinians from their land.\u201d <\/p>\n
Throughout the war, Jordan and Egypt have brushed off domestic calls to sever ties with Israel, and Egypt has played a key mediation role between Israel and Hamas. <\/p>\n
In October 2023, protests erupted in both countries in support of Palestinians in Gaza, with many showing disgruntlement with their governments\u2019 cooperation with Israel given the high human toll Israel\u2019s war had taken. <\/p>\n
Kaldas, of the Tahrir Institute, said that accepting a Palestinian population transfer would be more costly for the two countries than losing the American aid both countries rely on. <\/p>\n
Egypt and Jordan already host a sizeable number of refugees. <\/p>\n
As of January, there were 877,000 refugees and asylum-seekers registered in Egypt, according to the UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency. In May, the Palestinian ambassador in Cairo, Diab al-Louh, has said as many as 100,000 Gazans had crossed into Egypt since the war began, according to Reuters. <\/p>\n
In Jordan, more than 2.39 million Palestine refugees are registered with UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, the agency said. <\/p>\n
Both countries may also have security concerns if their territories become staging grounds for attacks on Israel, said Alhasan. That could further strain their peace treaties with Israel, he said. <\/p>\n
\u201cBy seeking to depopulate Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants, Trump\u2026 is doing the bidding of Israel\u2019s extreme right-wing fanatics,\u201d Alhasan said. <\/p>\n
\u201cIronically, Trump\u2019s proposal, if it were to materialize, would in fact be self-defeating,\u201d he said. Destabilizing Egypt and Jordan would \u201cfavor Islamist political forces, notably the Muslim Brotherhood,\u201d and these would \u201cprove far less friendly to the US and more sympathetic to Hamas.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
US President Donald Trump\u2019s proposal to \u201cclean out\u201d the Gaza Strip by moving more than a million Palestinians to neighboring countries has drawn sharp criticism, with opponents condemning it as ethnic cleansing and warning of regional chaos. Trump said on Saturday that he would like Jordan and Egypt to take in Gazans internally displaced by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":8364,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8363\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}