The 3 Times Palestinians were Kicked out of other Arab Countries
On November 1, Nick Freitas, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, where he serves on Transportation and Science and Technology Committees, published a short piece on why the Middle East will not accept Palestinian refugees. Below you can find the complete script.
Why aren’t more Arab countries in the Middle East taking in Palestinian refugees? The onset of a renewed war between Israel and Hamas has led to fears that millions of Palestinian people living in the Gaza Strip may be forced to become refugees. But despite the fact that Gaza shares a border with Egypt, the Egyptian government almost immediately ruled out any possibility of accepting Palestinian refugees. In fact, Egypt is currently constructing an even larger border wall with Gaza than the one it currently has in place.
Now, many outside observers have asked why Egypt, a majority Arab and Islamic nation would turn away the Palestinian people. And of course, many have pointed out that it may serve the political interests of many Arab nations to refuse to accept Palestinian refugees because it allows them to then blame Israel for any sort of humanitarian crisis that unfolds. But the thing is, historically, many Arab nations have accepted Palestinian refugees. And that may be why Egypt doesn’t want to now.
For example, in 1991, the Kuwaiti government actually expelled nearly 300,000 Palestinians in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. And this represented an astonishing 18% of Kuwait’s entire population. So what was the reason? Well, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) had actually supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait a year earlier. And this support only grew after Iraq began attacking Israel with rockets throughout the war. After Kuwait’s liberation, the government considered much of the Palestinian community to be complicit in the Iraqi occupation of their country. And in response, nearly all Palestinians were deported in just a few months. And this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened.
Decades earlier, the Palestinian groups operating in Jordan had come to openly call for the overthrow of Jordan’s monarchy in the aftermath of the Six Day War. At the time the PLO maintained its own separate army on Jordanian soil and used that armed force to sow chaos. Armed gangs of PLO militants drove around the capital of Amman, robbing families and businesses in the name of collecting “financial assistance” for the ongoing War of Attrition against Israel. When members of the Jordanian police and army tried to defend their citizens from these attacks, they were attacked and killed. The Palestinian political network operated as a state within a state, with militants repeatedly using Jordan to launch rockets into Israel. The Marxist Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine even with so far as to hijack multiple planes, diverting the flights to a Palestinian controlled airfield in Jordan, where the passengers were held hostage. By September 1970, the Jordanian army had finally had enough. A full scale war with the PLO broke out, and after 10 months of fighting, the Palestinians were driven out of the country. Yet as a parting gift, a Palestinian terrorist group known as Black September assassinated the Jordanian Prime Minister.
Sadly, the story doesn’t end there. Because the PLO then moved into Lebanon, where they allied themselves with Marxist and Socialist movements that were seeking to overthrow Lebanon’s conservative Maronite Christian government. The presence of thousands of Palestinian militants flooding into the country completely destabilized Lebanon and plunged the entire nation into chaos. Less than four years after the PLO was expelled from Jordan, Lebanon found itself in the middle of one of the most bloody and chaotic civil wars in Middle Eastern history from which it is never fully recovered.
In short, Palestinian organizations have not just attacked Israel. They have sowed unrest in many of the neighboring Arab and Muslim countries as well. And this has led those governments to the conclusion that allowing for mass immigration or even just refugee camp resettlement within their borders would lead to domestic unrest for their own countries. And this, of course, only exacerbates the humanitarian crisis for those Palestinian noncombatants caught in the middle. The problem is, as long as terrorist organizations like Hamas and others are elected to represent the Palestinian people, their plight will most likely continue as neither Israel nor apparently the surrounding Arab nations want to see their own population threatened by terrorist groups.
