During his meeting with US President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, Jordan’s King Abdullah II will tell the president that his “plan to resettle the Palestinians from Gaza in Jordan is a recipe for radicalism that will spread chaos through the Middle East, jeopardise the Kingdom’s peace with Israel, and even threaten the country’s very survival.”
That is what the Reuters news agency has quoted three senior officials in Amman as saying about this week’s meeting in Washington. It is part of a diplomatic offensive against any relocation of the Palestinians, which has been suggested repeatedly by Trump and picked up by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The same message of rejection was repeated by Egypt in the past few weeks.
The visit come ahead of an Arab Summit meeting in Cairo before the end of the month that is intended to cement a unified Arab position against any such suggestion and to reiterate Arab support for Palestinian rights, affirming that the only possible road to peace in the region is through the two-state solution.
Since Trump floated the idea of “cleaning out” the Gaza Strip, calling on Jordan and Egypt to host the relocated Palestinians, official statements from the Arab capitals have been clear in their rejection of the idea. When Netanyahu later hinted that Saudi Arabia could see Palestinians re-settled on its territory, furious reactions from almost all the countries in the region condemned the statement.
Some analysts view Netanyahu’s remarks as a rhetorical reaction to Saudi Arabia’s repeated statements that Riyadh will not normalise relations or enter into a deal with Israel unless there are concrete steps towards establishing an independent Palestinian state. Oxford University academic Andrew Hammond thinks that these suggestions “are not serious,” however, commenting of Netanyahu’s remarks that “if you are serious, you don’t insult the Saudis like that.”
But the repeated statements by Trump about kicking the Palestinians out of their homeland to develop a “Middle Eastern Riviera” on the shores of Gaza cannot be discounted. In an interview with the BBC, professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics Fawaz Gerges said that “Trump is pouring petrol on a raging fire” by his repeated statements.
“Trump said that life in Gaza is hellish. Who has made life in Gaza hellish? Netanyahu and American bombs… Trump is practising 19th-century imperialism [in talking about] Gaza, Greenland, the Panama Canal, and Canada as the 51st state of the US.”
Some commentators think that Trump will not try to expel the Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. “The proposal is mainly aimed at giving Netanyahu cover for a ceasefire deal that could bring down his government and cause trouble for Trump with his pro-Israel donors and allies. But Trump wants the ceasefire to succeed. So, there is a lot of veiled and double-talk going on,” Hammond said.
He noted that “the visits [by Arab leaders to Washington] might give Trump the impression that he can get some kind of concession out of them… They might maintain the illusion that Trump is calling the shots and that the Israeli war on Gaza was a success, but it might also open up the possibility that these leaders feel obliged to offer some concession, if not on Gaza then on the West Bank or something else,” he said.
There is a consensus among analysts and commentators that no one in the region can accept the “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza, as many describe Trump’s suggestion. In his BBC interview, Gerges said of the Arab leaders that “they won’t accept Trump’s foolish idea… it would be a second Nakba,” referring to the expulsion of the Palestinians from Palestine in 1948.
“My fear is that Trump will use hard power and the economic sword because he provides two billion dollars to Egypt and more than one billion to Jordan… In his mind, because they receive American support they should abide by America’s wishes… What Trump is doing is threatening the survival of America’s allies in the region, including Egypt and Jordan,” he said.
The calls have hardened the position of some Gulf countries towards the Palestinian issue. Trump and Netanyahu would like Saudi Arabia to normalise relations with Israel, but it has not shied away from using strong criticisms in its recent statements.
One recent announcement from the Saudi Foreign Ministry said that “this extremist occupying mentality does not understand what the Palestinian land means to the brotherly people of Palestine and their emotional, historical, and legal connection to the land. It does not think that the Palestinian people deserve to live in the first place, as it has completely destroyed the Gaza Strip and killed or injured more than 160,000 people, most of them children and women, without the slightest human feeling or moral responsibility.”
The Arab Summit in Cairo is expected to formalise Arab reactions to Trump’s proposals and Netanyahu government policies. Yet, there are still fears among many in the region that Trump as US president for a second time might carry out more than he did in his first term when he undermined the two-state solution and recognised the Israeli annexation of the Occupied Golan Heights.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 13 February, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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