Less than a week after taking office, U.S. President Donald Trump sparked controversy by advocating the resettlement of Gaza’s Palestinian residents in neighboring Arab countries.
Trump told reporters of a Jan. 25 telephone call with Jordan’s King Abdullah.
“I said to him ‘I’d love you to take on more because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess, it’s a real mess.‘ I’d like him to take people,” Trump said, speaking to reporters on Air Force One.
“I'd like Egypt to take people,” Trump said, adding that he would be speaking to that nation’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
“You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing and say, ‘You know, it’s over.’”
Trump suggested that resettling most of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million could be temporary or long-term.
Numerous parties immediately came out against the idea.
Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, said on Jan. 26 that his country’s opposition to Trump’s idea was “firm and unwavering.”
Some Israeli officials had raised the idea early in the war. Jordan is already home to more than 2 million Palestinians.
A German foreign ministry spokesperson said on Jan. 27 that 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 recolonized by Israel.”
Trump, in making his case for such a massive population shift, said Gaza is “literally a demolition site right now.”
“I'd rather get involved with some of the Arab nations, and build housing in a different location” for those displaced from Gaza. “Where they can maybe live in peace for a change.”
Eli Sperling, a teaching fellow at the University of Georgia’s Israel Institute, told The Epoch Times that the countries in question have long-standing policies against such a move and are unlikely to change them.
“Egypt, with a long-ailing economy and policies not to absorb refugees from Gaza, will be steadfast, and Jordan, with more than half its population Palestinian, is reluctant to absorb more,” Sperling said.
“And likewise Lebanon and Syria, which have long-standing populations of Palestinian refugees unabsorbed.”
Both for economic and domestic political reasons—their populations’ opposition to Israel—they are unlikely to change, according to Sperling.
“They are deeply opposed,” and the idea could challenge ties between the United States and Arab states, he said.
Martin Sherman, founder and CEO of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies, suggested the idea in an interview with The Epoch Times a day before Trump floated it to reporters.
He said he'd been advocating it for decades. One problem currently on the table, he said, is who will govern Gaza if and when Hamas is pushed out of power.
“How would humanity benefit by Palestinian rule in Gaza?” Sherman said.
“Especially if you’re a liberal, why would a liberal advocate the establishment of a homophobic misogynistic tyranny? Why would they do that? It’s crazy. It cuts against everything liberals are supposed to cherish.”
“The only way Israel can determine who rules Gaza is to rule it itself,” he said. “And the only way to avoid the stigma of imposing its rule on other people is to remove [those] people from the confines of Gaza.”
Sherman said his idea was not “right-wing extremism, just sound political science.”
“There’s no way to find a stable position between two inherently inimical people with mutually exclusive founding narratives, the Jewish and the Palestinian,” he said.
“People are just afraid to bite the bullet.”
Sherman said he has advocated what he calls “incentivized emigration of the Palestinians” for four decades. By that, he said, he means paying them a significant sum, such as $250,000 per family.
“That’s more money than the average Palestinian could dream of having. In many places, they would be welcomed,” Sherman said.
In a Muslim nation such as Indonesia, which has a population of 283 million, the Gazans would represent less than 1 percent of the population, he said.
“Indonesia would get billions of dollars in the private sector. It’s as close as you can get to a win-win situation,” Sherman said.
