How Trump’s plan puts Palestinian allies in an impossible position
The president wants to ‘clean out’ the Gaza Strip and relocate 1.5m Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt. There are no good options for the reluctant countries.
When King Abdullah of Jordan took the phone call on Saturday from Donald Trump, he could have been forgiven for thinking it might have been a quick catch-up on regional events.
Instead, the new US president made a proposition that was reported to have left him stunned: that Gaza be “cleansed” of 1.5 million Palestinians, who should be relocated to Jordan and Egypt.
The controversial idea had once been floated by the Republican’s advisers - including Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who last year praised the potential value of Gaza’s real estate.
But now Trump appears to be attempting to persuade the Jordanian king and President Sisi of Egypt of the merits of the plan.
Abdullah had called the idea of more refugees moving to Jordan a “red line” around the time Israel’s retaliatory war against Hamas started in October 2023. Sisi has also warned against any “forced displacement”, saying it could jeopardise the peace treaty Egypt signed with Israel more than 40 years ago.
Both countries have refused to open their doors to refugees, fearing not only that it would destabilise them but that a forced mass migration would kill any prospect of a two-state solution.
Yet the more extreme ministers in Binyamin Netanyahu’s Israeli coalition government have long been calling for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza - to be replaced by Israeli settlers.
An analyst for the local network Channel 12 News reported on Sunday that Trump’s comments were not a slip of the tongue but part of a much broader move than it seemed, co-ordinated with Israel. Netanyahu is believed to have been privately pressing the issue for months.
For Palestinians, there will be unavoidable echoes of the Nakba, or “catastrophe” as it translates from Arabic - the mass displacement of people during the creation of Israel in 1948. More than half of historical Palestine’s Arab population of nearly 1.5 million people were expelled or fled, never to return. There was another mass departure of Palestinians during and after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
However, after 15 months of war, Gaza will take years if not decades to reconstruct and no one has advanced a plan for what to do with hundreds of thousands of homeless Gazans in the meantime.
The main obstacle for Israel’s far right has always been the territory’s Arab allies, and the widespread enmity in the region on behalf of the displaced. Yet those allies have also forged close relations with the US, hosting military bases or aligning themselves against terrorism and Iran.
For the Arab countries there are no good options. The US is Egypt’s third-largest trading partner after the UAE and China. The same applies for Jordan. Saudi Arabia, once the Palestinians’ most powerful ally, relies predominantly on US-made weapons and defence systems.
All three will have to consider how to handle Trump, who has already threatened the US’s closest trading partners with crippling tariffs.
Sisi and Abdullah are now faced with the dilemma of dooming themselves, or dooming the Palestinian dream of self-determination and statehood.
The Times
More Coverage
The ‘living library’ of diseases could prevent the next Covid
Porton Down, the government’s top-secret science and technology campus, is home to what may be the world’s deadliest freezer.
Bomb disposal veterans ‘five times as likely to get bladder cancer’
A ‘significant link’ between exposure to explosives and the often fatal disease has been found in research led by a former British Army chief.