Even if you hate the idea of transfer, you should be in favour of Trump's plan for Gazans

I was in favour of it for selfish Israeli reasons and then I understood why I am in favour of it for "humanitarian reasons"

Yes, when you call it transfer, it sounds really bad. Scornful. Leans toward a situation in which you can call Israelis that thing we are afraid of being called: racists.

How dare we applaud Trump’s plan that Egypt and Jordan take in the Gazans in order to “clean up” Gaza? Isn’t that what right-wing “messianic” Jews have been praying for for decades? Arab-rein (Arab-free) land!

Now, readers who have been reading me for a while will know that I lean toward the right (precipitously, perhaps) and that I would like to see Israel extend her sovereignty to Judea-Samaria and Gaza. And that is why I was pleasantly surprised by Trump’s idea that Egypt and Jordan admit Gazan civilians. CNN reported Trump saying:

I don’t know, something has to happen, but it’s literally a demolition site right now. Almost everything’s demolished, and people are dying there, so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where I think they could maybe live in peace for a change.

The president, a former property developer, said the potential housing “could be temporary” or “could be long term.”

Of course, both Egypt and Jordan are not in favour of the idea, to put it mildly.

Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called it “forced eviction” and claimed it would cause more conflict in the region, meaning in Egypt. Egypt has serious problems with the Muslim Brotherhood, from which Hamas emerged in Gaza in 1987; President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi certainly would not like Hamas militants and their civilian supporters to add to the numbers of Muslim Brotherhood in his country, even temporarily.

Then-President Sadat did not even want Gazans in Egypt when negotiating a peace agreement with Israel in 1978. Israel was to get peace in exchange for the Sinai peninsula, a huge chunk of land Israel had captured after Egypt initiated war in 1967. Egypt refused to take Gaza regardless of how hard Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin pushed; if Egypt insisted on the evacuation and destruction of Yamit, an amazing Israeli settlement adjacent to the southern border of Gaza, Begin wanted them to take Gaza too. They refused.

Their refusal to take in Gazan war refugees makes sense in view of all of this.

CNN likewise reported Jordan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs saying:

Jordan is committed to “ensuring that Palestinians remain on their land,” …

“Our refusal of displacement is a steadfast position that will not change,” Ayman Safadi said. “Jordan is for Jordanians, and Palestine is for Palestinians.”

Of course Jordan is not enthusiastic to have more Palestinian Arabs within their borders. They are troubled by the fact that there are already too many of them and Gazans are treated even worse in Jordan than are Judea-Samaria Palestinians. A 1987 CIA report (that seems still relevant today) claims that half to two-thirds of the country’s population are Palestinian Arabs — an estimated 80% of the residents of the capital, Amman, are Palestinian Arabs.

An Egyptian student concluded her law studies masters thesis (critiqued here) examining citizenship issue in Jordan with this:

Jordan needs the laws that it has in order to separate Palestinians from Jordanians, because if all Palestinians were to be accepted as nationals of Jordan, then the Jordanian national identity is at risk of losing the battle of the identities.

The point in this is to say that regardless of the Palestinian state and the Jordanian state being two completely different entities, their national identities cannot be separated. There is too much shared history between the two populations to a point where one cannot speak about Jordan without speaking about Palestine and vice versa.

Their refusal to take in Gazan war refugees makes sense in view of this.

OK. So Gazans do not merit the same escape-from-war protection as Syrians and Ukrainians merit. And the Egyptians and Jordanians will be forgiven by the international community for not taking them in because, as everyone knows, Gaza’s dire situation is all Israel’s fault. (Read that with the sarcastic tone that is behind it.)

But here is the reason it is inhumane to oppose Trump’s plan

The key phrase Trump uttered that made me realize that his plan is the most appropriate way to think of the situation:

. . . it’s literally a demolition site right now.

And who wants to live in a demolition site?

Think of “raze and rebuild” urban renewal projects or “vacate-renovate;” in Hebrew, it is called pinui-binui.

Does anyone ever insist that residents set up tents on the plot of a building slated for demolition and wait it out there until their new apartments become available? Some families even move out of their apartments when they are only renovating a kitchen or bathroom so that they do not have to deal with the dust and debris.

To suggest that the Gazans need to remain within the demolition site that Gaza has become is inhumane and racist.

Are those who promote a two-state-solution, insisting that the Palestinian Arabs deserve to live in dignity and be masters of their own fate willfully ignoring the fact that many Gazans, even before Oct 7th, wanted to emigrate for economic, educational, and political reasons (see the survey by a Palestinian NGO on this topic). How many would say yes if offered that chance now? I would hazard a guess that it would be almost everyone who lost their homes and perhaps many who did not.

But go ahead — insist that those want to leave the demolition site, at least until the completion of the “urban renewal” projects, stay where they are because their misery can only be blamed on Israel if the world can see their misery and that’s what’s most important, right?

P.S. I hope you get what I am saying, albeit obliquely.

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