Trump, Gaza and the exchange of refugees

US President Donald Trump’s plan for Gazans to be resettled outside the Strip has been greeted with predictable howls of outrage and accusations of “ethnic cleansing”.

Yet leaving Gaza has been touted as a viable option by the very same human rights officials who now decry it. “When all other human rights are denied, the right to flee is the last remaining option”, Bill Frelick of Human Rights Watch wrote in The Hill in March 2024. “That option cannot be closed.”

The Trump plan would formalise a trend that has been underway for some time. Some 100,000 Gazans have already moved to Turkey, while some 200,000 have ended up in Egypt. The Rafah border checkpoint has remained closed, but Gazans have been known to pay up to $5,000 per head to cross into Egypt.

Furthermore,  the refugee problem needs to be considered in its historical context. Trump has focused attention on the Gazans by effectively suggesting the completion of an exchange of refugee populations which began in 1948 with the first Arab-Israel war.

Arab refugees (not yet referred to as “Palestinians”) fled from Israel westwards to Gaza and eastwards to the West Bank, while thousands more left for Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

But it is often forgotten that 650,000 Jewish refugees, persecuted in Arab countries where they had been established for millennia, fled in the opposite direction.  (Another 200,000 Jewish refugees did not go to Israel, but fled to the West.) The numbers who swapped places in the Middle East  – 711,000 Arabs (according to UN figures) versus 650,000 Jews – are roughly equal.

Within a few years, the Jews were resettled and granted citizenship in Israel and the West. They are no longer refugees. But the Palestinian Arab refugees remained stateless, many of them shunted into  camps. Not  only were they not resettled, but they were weaponised as a tool of permanent conflict with Israel. Except in Jordan, they were denied citizenship, the right to own property and to work in certain jobs.

They were prevented from resettling by two factors.

In 1959 the Arab League  passed Resolution 1457, “forbidding the refugees from gaining citizenship in order to prevent their assimilation into  their host countries”.

The other gatekeeper of statelessness has been UNRWA, the UN agency set up exclusively for Palestinians. UNRWA not only provides health, food and education services in the camps, but allows the Palestinians  to pass on their refugee status to succeeding generations ad infinitum.

Today there are upwards of five million Palestinian “refugees”, although it is thought that barely 30,000 of the original refugees from Israel in 1948 are still alive.

A double standard is at work here.  Millions of Syrian refugees from the civil war were taken in by European states a decade or more ago. Faced with threats of ethnic cleansing by Azerbaijan, over 100,000 ethnic Armenians, representing 99% of the remaining population of Nagorno-Karabakh, fled in September 2023.

But the current orthodoxy dictates that only the Palestinians of Gaza are condemned to a life among the rubble, until the day comes when they and their descendants are permitted to exercise their “right of return” to their ancestral homes in pre-1948 Israel.

The Palestinian cause relies on preserving the Palestinian refugee problem in aspic as Israel’s responsibility.  Yet, at the same time as the Gazans are said to be refugees from Israel, they proclaim that they will not budge from Gaza. If Gaza is their homeland, how can they be refugees?

It has to be recognised that population exchanges have been the norm following most conflicts in the 20th century. Indeed, the principle of population exchange and thereby of resettlement was accepted in international law, as in the Treaty of Neuilly (1919) and the Lausanne Convention (1923). The latter followed the population exchange under which a million Greeks from Asia Minor and the Caucasus swapped places with 400,000 Muslims from Greece.

A vast population exchange  took place  following the Partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947.  In that case, 8,500,000 Hindus fled Pakistan to India and 6,500,000 Muslims fled to Pakistan. Millions of Germans, Poles and Russians were forced from their homes during or after World War II, most of them never to return.

Ironically enough, it was the Arab side which first mooted a population exchange in the Middle East. In 1949, Nuri al-Said took office as Iraqi Prime Minister and floated the idea that  the 160,000 Jews of Iraq should be traded for the Arab refugees created by the war in Palestine, although Jews in Arab countries were non-combatants hundreds of miles away.

The Israeli foreign minister, Moshe Sharrett, initially refused any possible linkage between the two sets of refugees. The Israeli government thought it was a cynical ploy to seize the abandoned property of Iraqi Jews. At the time the British ambassador reported that a population exchange was acceptable to Israel in principle, but that the idea of exchanging 100,000 homeless (Palestinian) refugees for 100,000 (Jewish) refugees who would leave their assets behind was seen in Israel as extortion.

As it turned out, Iraq was to legalise the dispossession of almost the entire Jewish community in March 1951. Some 140,000 Jews fled to Israel. Only 14,000 Palestinian refugees arrived in Iraq. By then foreign minister Sharrett had accepted that there had been a linkage of refugee populations. By 1970 all the Arab countries had disgorged their Jews, most of whom arrived destitute in Israel, stripped of their citizenship and assets.

In recent years, the transfer principle has only ever been applied to Jews. Apart from the 850,000 Jews displaced from Arab countries, in 2005 Israel forcibly uprooted 8,000 Jews from Gaza in the hope that peace would break out. In return,  it got rule by the Islamist radicals of Hamas, thousands of rockets, four wars, and the 7 October attacks.

One can perhaps see why Trump might think it is time to try something different.

Trump’s Gaza transfer plan breaks a decades-long taboo about resettlement of Palestinians and forces a humanitarian solution to the refugee problem. It also forces states like Egypt and Jordan to take some share of responsibility for a conflict in which they participated. Countries like the UAE might help shoulder the financial burden. Ultimately the “exchange of populations” may be the only hope for a better future in the region.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.