President Donald Trump recently floated a fantastic idea: Arab nations, he said, should accept large numbers of Gazans as refugees, a move that “could be temporary or long term.”
The accommodation would allow Israel to eliminate the remnants of Hamas, which, in turn, would allow the international community to rebuild Gaza.
Not only would such a policy enhance the prospects of peace, but it’s also humane.
While Gazans shouldn’t be compelled to move from their homes, they should be allowed to escape the generational tragedy foisted on them by the Arab world and their nihilistic leaders. And Israelis should monetarily incentivize them to move to safer environs.
Because one of the prevailing myths of the Israel-Arab conflict is that Palestinians have a deep historic connection to the land that goes back centuries.
It’s debatable, considering evidence shows that most Arabs immigrated to British Palestine from Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the late 19th and early 20th century, lured by the prosperity created by returning Jews.
But Gaza? There are over 2 million people in Gaza. There were perhaps 50,000 people there when Arab nations rejected the partition plan in 1947.
For years after that, the Arabs of Gaza lived under Egypt, which used it as a launching site for Fedayeen terrorists into Israel. (Oct. 7 was the culmination of a long tradition.)
Even today, you can hear Gazans talking about how they merely bide their time to return to their homes in Jaffa or elsewhere within Israel proper. The United Nations runs an entire organization devoted wholly to the “Palestine Refugees in the Near East,” even though no such country has ever existed.
How long is a Palestinian considered a refugee in Gaza by the UN? As long as possible.
The UN creates permanent “camps” — in reality, bustling cities — for the descendants of people dislocated by wars that Arabs started over 70 years ago. By contrast, there are over 2 million ethnic Arabs living as citizens in the Jewish state.
OK, then. If Gazans are just refugees, why can’t they move to other Arab nations?
Because they are never going to be able to return to Israel. Convincing them otherwise, as the Western left and others do, only creates a perpetual state of angst and war.
“Our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians, and Palestine is for Palestinians,” the nation’s foreign minister said after Trump’s comments.
Well, the biggest problem with the statement is that it reminds us that Jordan is “Palestine.”
Jordan, with a population of over 70% Palestinians, sits principally on land set aside during the British Palestine Mandate to create a new Arab state that was to sit next to the Jewish one.
We already have a two-state solution. We just choose to ignore it.
But why should Western nations be the only ones compelled to absorb people fleeing Middle East wars?
When Muslims stream into Europe or the United States, it is celebrated as a great moral imperative. Israel is home to Jewish refugees from Asia and Africa and Europe.
Arab nations should partake in this great cause by welcoming back their own people. And Western powers should pressure them into doing the right thing.
Henry Kissinger once noted that Donald Trump, though he may not do it knowingly, was “one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.”
And it is undeniable that many of Trump’s declarations, perhaps because they are unfettered by the norms of policy debate, end up changing the dynamics of policy.
Over the years, through revisionist histories and DC “expertise,” we have been programmed to accept the notion that a Palestinian state is inevitable. It’s not.
There are hundreds of stateless minorities in the world. Most of them have far stronger claims to nationhood.
So proposing that Gazans would be better off in their historic homelands makes perfect sense.
David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. Twitter @davidharsanyi
