Trump’s History Lesson about Refugees

Over the past week, President Donald Trump has made a repeated proposal that the population of Gaza be absorbed by Arab countries, particularly Egypt and Jordan.[1] The Arab world has united in decrying such a suggestion as has the liberal media.[2]

Perhaps it pays to review some of the refugee crises the world has faced in the last century and what the attitude has been towards resettling them.

Refugees of the 20^th Century

In 1939, President FDR predicted that “when this ghastly war ends, there may be not one million but ten million or twenty million men, women, and children… who will enter into the wide picture—the problem of the human refugee.” Unfortunately, his estimate fell short of reality. World War II created around 55 million refugees.[3] By September 1945 most of those had been able to return home but 1.2 million still remained displaced, mostly in Germany in the Allied areas. By 1951 most of the refugees had been returned to their homes. This international upheaval was what helped created the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1950.

India’s 1947 war around the creation of Pakistan and the Korean War in the early 1950s created another 20 million refugees. And again, they were all absorbed within a generation.

The general trend in dealing with refugees is negotiating with local countries to find a new safe haven for them. Despite many evils which refugees underwent, mostly not of their own doing, they need to be resettled in the best possible location even if not entirely ideal. Many Western countries adopted restricted immigration policies in the early 20th century which made the work of resettlement difficult.

The Perennial Refugees

It turns out that one group cultural group has experienced resettlement multiple times over their long history. Jews have been the perennial refugee. They have been expelled from almost every European country over the last millennia.

For example, the infamous Alhambra Decree which expelled Jews from Spain was only revoked in 1968, almost 5 centuries after its enactment.

At the Evian conference in July 1938, the delegates of 32 world powers all gave excuse why they could not accept Jewish refugees before the carnage of the holocaust began. [4]

Hundreds of thousands of those included the last million refugees of World War II were the remaining Jews of Europe, whose entire families had been consumed by the infernos of the Nazi death camps. Despite this, most countries still refused to accept Jewish refugees and it was not until Israel was established in 1948 that the ‘problem’ of Jewish refugees was resolved in short order.

And yet, despite all the upheaval, and despite not being welcomed as refugees to most countries, the Jewish people have had to resettle in new countries as immigrants. Despite not having a single sovereign state of their own for most of the last two thousand years, Jews have taken in their brethren, and helped resettle their culturally foreign cousins.

The Arab Refugees

Which brings us to the Middle East. Something changed when it came to this region of the world. Following the 1948 war of Israeli independence there were many refugees. Among them were Arab refugees from the British Mandate of Palestine. And yet, instead of resettling their brethren, the Arab countries chose not admit their brothers and sisters. To be sure, there are 22 Arab States, (23 States who national religion is Islam), covering 13.15 million square kilometers.[5] What was most remarkable about this, was that Egypt controlled Gaza and Jordan controlled Judea and Samaria (also called the West Bank). That lasted for 19 years between 1948 and the Six Day War in 1967. During that period of time, the host governments of Egypt and Jordan did little for that generation of Arab refugees under their repressive regimes. They were not given citizenship or rights of administrative representation.[6] Yet, somehow when Israel took control of those areas, it became Israel’s problem. Why? Why would the Arabs not resettle their own brothers like all other refugees of the 20^th century?

The answer is a sad one. The ‘Palestinian’ Arab has been used a political pawn by the Arab states to decry Israel’s legitimacy. As long as the Arab states could draw attention back to the ‘nakba’ – the great tragedy – then they could perpetuate the lie that Israel does not have the right to exist. Until the normalization of ties with some Arab states, the Arab countries would not even refer to Israel as a country, rather the Zionist entity. This ignoring of Israel’s right to exist could only be claimed by refusing to allow the refugees of the 1948 war the ability to move on. They would remain the perpetual grieving victim for the expedience of Arab interests.

UNRWA

The strangest part of this story is that the nations of the world accepted this ridiculous game with human life. The UN does take it as a basic responsibility to resolve refugee crises. That is why the UN has an agency called UNHCR which deals with refugee problems. In fact, this agency is tasked with assisting the resettlement of all refugees in the world except one – the Arabs refugees from Israel. For that population, the UN set up a unique agency called UNRWA. It deals with the Arab clientele and its rules are completely different to those of the rest of the refugees. The mandate of UNHCR asserts that “a refugee should not be returned to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom.”[7] Instead, the agency works in 136 countries to help resettle the refugees in a safe place so they can restart their lives. Not so with UNRWA. Instead, the agency seeks to “ to provide assistance and protection to Palestine refugees pending a just and lasting solution to their plight.”[8] This is a promise to perpetuate the state of victimhood and lack of settlement. Only Palestinian Arabs have a refugee status intergenerationally. That means that grandkids of those displaced in the war are also called refugees. This is the only refugee group in the world that continues to grow. It is no wonder that UNRWA workers were impacted in the brutal massacre of October 7^th[9] and even housed tortured hostages while denying basic medical attention to civilians.[10]

Jews from Arab countries

The final point to consider is the contrast between Arab refugees with the Jewish refugees of that same period. During the 1940s and 1950s, Jews were attacked and expelled from almost every Arab country in the Middle East. Most left with no more than the clothes on their backs, leaving their businesses, home and investments to the mobs, jealous neighbors and corrupt governments. These refugees amounted to over 850,000.[11] And yet they were all successfully absorbed into the nascent tiny Israel and some into the USA. There was no UN agency created for them and there were no permanent refugee camps established. They did not become a pawn in the hands of cruel governments and they did not spend their lives living in the injustices of the past. They did what Jews have always had to do. They got up, dusted themselves off and reestablished themselves so they and their kids would have a better future.

So, when President Trump makes the simple and logical observation, that the Arabs should look after their refugees, maybe it pays to listen. It would have saved a lot of human suffering if the Arabs did their part 77 years ago.

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[1] https://apnews.com/article/trump-biden-israel-bomb-gaza-hamas-war-023b36984c6116c128b5e47f117bba2a

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gw89x8x11o

[3] https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/last-million-eastern-european-displaced-persons-postwar-germany

[4] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-evian-conference

[5] https://www.worlddata.info/alliances/arab-league.php#:~:text=The%20Arab%20League%20is%20an,of%20the%20world’s%20inhabitable%20area).

[6] https://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine/Palestine-and-the-Palestinians-1948-67

[7] https://www.unhcr.org/us/about-unhcr/overview/1951-refugee-convention

[8] https://www.unrwa.org/what-mandate-unrwa-0

[9] https://apnews.com/article/un-unrwa-staffers-fired-oct-7-cc33d0ab25dc4bacc0af1db10705e0d6

[10] https://www.timesofisrael.com/emily-damaris-mom-my-daughter-was-held-in-unrwa-facilities-denied-medical-treatment/

[11] https://www.mena-researchcenter.org/the-emigration-and-expulsion-of-jews-from-arab-countries/