Trump Proposal Puts Egypt and Jordan in an Impossible Position

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The countries are among the top recipients of American military aid, but forcing Palestinians out of their remaining territory could destabilize the entire region.

A woman is seen from behind waving at a bus from which another woman looks out a window.
Patients from a hospital in Gaza City departing for Egypt to receive treatment last week. Credit…Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Vivian Yee

For decades, the question of whether and how Palestinians might build a state in their homeland has been at the center of Middle East politics — not only for the Palestinians themselves, but also for Arabs around the region, many of whom regard the Palestinian cause almost as their own. Forcing Palestinians out of their remaining territory, Arabs say, would doom that shared desire for Palestinian statehood and destabilize the entire region in the process.

So it was a nightmare for the Palestinians’ closest Arab neighbors, Egypt and Jordan, and a dream come true for Israel’s far-right-dominated government, when President Trump proposed moving everyone out of the Gaza Strip and onto Egyptian and Jordanian soil, an idea he repeated in a White House news conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Tuesday.

To the two Arab governments, it is not a matter of real estate or refugee camps, but of compromising their own long-held principles, angering their people, risking their own security and stability and perhaps paving the way for West Bank Palestinians to meet the same fate. They have responded with categorical “nos.”

That refusal has been backed up by politically independent and opposition figures in Egypt alongside mouthpieces for the country’s authoritarian government, underscoring how the Palestinian issue unifies even the bitterest political opponents in Egypt.

But Mr. Trump has shown little regard for the two countries’ concerns, their sovereignty or the idea of Palestinian statehood.

“They say they’re not going to accept,” Mr. Trump said of Egypt and Jordan during an earlier meeting with Mr. Netanyahu in the Oval Office. “I say they will.”


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