The Refugee Paradox

We are all familiar with President Donald Trump’s Gaza “Riviera” plan, which included the rather outrageous proposal of (permanently?) relocating the denizens of Gaza to Egypt and Jordan. The expected backlash from the Arab world was this will never happen. The Jordanian Foreign Minister, Ayman al-Safadi, was quoted saying that “the Palestinians must remain on their land”. Indeed, many Arab officials came to compare Trump’s proposal as a second nakba (catastrophe) of the Palestinian People. This rhetoric got me thinking – if the Gazan Palestinians don’t want to leave “their land”, then “their land” must be their home. And if they are already at home in “their land,” then why are they designated as refugees? Why are they living in refugee camps?

Let’s step back and look at the history of Israel/Palestine conflict to analyze these questions. There are two parts to this analysis: the two-state solution and the Palestinian refugees.

The Two-State Solution. In 1947, the United Nations proposed a partition of the British Mandate Palestine (an area comprising, collectively, today’s Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank) into two states: an Israeli state for the Jews, and a Palestinian state for the Arabs. This was the first attempt at a two-state solution. While the Jews accepted this partition plan, the Arabs rejected it, and went to war against the nascent Jewish State to stymie any prospect of a Jewish state in the region. Yet the Arabs failed in this military adventure; the result was a Jewish State in what is now commonly called pre-1967 Israel. A Palestinian State in the remaining territory – the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the Jordan River, did not materialize. Egypt took over the Gaza Strip and the Jordanians took over the West Bank, and the two-state solution was no longer on anyone’s agenda. What dominated the agenda of the Arab states at the time was the eradication of Israel, which would allow the Palestinian Arabs to return to their homes in Israel proper. Yet, in 1967, Israel conquered both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank during the Six Day War of that year, thereby taking control of all of the territory of Britain’s Palestinian Mandate. While Israel occupies the West Bank to this day – with limited autonomy of the Palestinian Authority in certain populated areas, Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and the Strip became a self-governed entity (but without developing into a state).

The two-state solution gained new traction starting with the Oslo Accords of 1993 and subsequent peace efforts by U.S. administrations. In broad terms, the two-state solution as envisioned from those efforts would have a Palestinian State in the West Bank and Gaza, with Israel remaining in its pre-1967 borders (with certain adjustments). While none of these efforts bore fruit, they ensconced in the international arena the notion that the two-state solution is the path forward to peace in the region, and the recognition of Palestinian political aspirations.

The Refugees. In the aftermath of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, the United Nations established an agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), to deal with the Palestinians who either fled or were driven from the nascent State of Israel. UNRWA began operations in 1950, when it was responding to the needs of about 700,000 Palestinian refugees. By 2023, some 5.9 million people were registered as eligible for UNRWA services. Of the Gaza Strip’s population of approximately 2.4 million people, some 1.6 million are Palestinian “refugees.” In the West Bank, there are approximately 900,000 registered Palestinian refugees; about one-quarter of these West Bank refugees live in UNRWA “refugee camps”, while most of the remaining Palestinian refugees reside in West Bank towns and villages.

Returning, then, to the questions posed above — if the Palestinians are already at home in “their land,” then why are they designated as refugees? Why are they living in refugee camps?  I am afraid that there can be only one reason that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank treat themselves as refugees in Gaza and the West Bank – it is because they view themselves as refugees of the land on which Israel sits. It is because they have no interest in a two-state solution; rather, their refugee status is their ticket to claim a right to return to Israel proper, to eradicate the Jews living in Israel and claim the entirety of the Jewish State as their own. While the terrorist group Hamas does not shy away from stating that this is their goal, the de facto effect of perpetuating Palestinian refugee status necessarily captures this very goal as well. What this tells me is that the perpetuation of UNWRA, and this sweeping designation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as refugees, is simply an attempt by the Palestinians and their supporters to eradicate Israel and enjoy a single-state solution of a Palestinian State on what was British mandate Palestine.