Did Kuwait expel 200,000 Palestinians in 1991 because they destabilised the country?

On Tuesday, popular American right-wing journalist Andy Ngo, who is the editor-in charge of Canadian news website The Post Millennial, claimed on X (formerly known as Twitter) that 200,000 Palestinians had been expelled from Kuwait in 1991 because they tried to politically destabilise Kuwait.

Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈@MrAndyNgo tweeted, “In case you didn’t know: In 1991, some 200,000 Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait within a week. This was nearly the entire Palestinian population there. They were no longer wanted for destabilizing the host country through their political organizing.”

Going by well-documented news reports and academic papers, there were 400,000 Palestinians (roughly 20% of the country’s 2 million population) in Kuwait before the start of the Iraq’s 1991 war with Kuwait. By the end of the war less than a few thousand Palestinians remained in Kuwait as many were deported or fled fearing hostile measures. But, there are no reports that the Palestinians in Kuwait engaged in any political activity or festered dissent against the Kuwaiti emirate.

The reason — the 1991 expulsion of about 200,000 Palestinians became the “largest forced displacement of Palestinians from an Arab state” — was because the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO), under the leadership of its then chairman Yasser Arafat, supported Iraq’s then leader Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. When thousands of Palestinians, who had fled during the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait sought re-entry into the country they were refused.

A majority of the Palestinians were of Jordanian descent, holding Jordanian passports, and relocated to Jordan. Many of them had no affiliation or sympathy with the PLO — which was operating out of the disputed territory of Israel-Palestine — when it sided with Iraqi president Saddan Hussein.