Why Arab states hate Trump’s plan to relocate Palestinians
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. President Trump has repeatedly said he wants Palestinians in Gaza to move out of the devastated enclave and into neighboring Egypt and nearby Jordan. The Arab world is pushing back, ostensibly because it would undermine efforts to create a Palestinian state.
But Arab leaders have another reason to oppose providing safe haven to millions of Gazans forced from their homes: past experience. Palestinian refugees have been a headache for Arab governments since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The violent Palestinian nationalist movement that emerged then spread to other countries as they took in refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the Six-Day War in 1967, spawning conflicts with Israel that reverberate today.
In the decades that followed, that movement turned into a political and existential threat for the governments of Arab states hosting Palestinians—whose numbers included guerrilla fighters launching attacks on Israel. Arab states suffered Israeli reprisals for such assaults, often at the expense of native-born populations. As of mid-2022, there were 5.8 million Palestinians classified as refugees under the mandate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.
Most of them are descendants of people displaced by war decades ago. Many live in refugee camps run by Unrwa. In some Arab countries, Palestinian refugees complain they are treated as second-class citizens, largely confined to refugee camps and limited in their work opportunities.
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