Why No Arab Government Wants Gaza, the West Bank, or Palestinians

In this photograph taken near the Israeli border with the Gaza Strip, destroyed buildings of Beit Hanoun in Northern Gaza are seen from Sedorot, Israel, on Nov. 16, 2023. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Commentary

With Israel well on its way to controlling all of Gaza, talk is turning to who will control it after the fighting stops. While Israel may retain control for the foreseeable future, it wants no part of Gaza. Its government left Gaza in 2005, taking with it every Jew residing in Gaza and even every Jew buried there. And Israel isn’t alone.

Egypt also wants no part of Gaza, which it ruled until Israel took it in the 1967 Six-Day War. For Egypt, ruling Gaza once was enough. Despite pressure from the United States to take Gaza back, even temporarily after Israel rids it of Hamas terrorists, Egypt has refused. Egypt has also refused to provide refuge to Palestinians fleeing the war in Gaza.

Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab countries also want no part of ruling Gaza—attempts to include them in a peace-keeping force in Gaza after Hamas is expelled have gone nowhere due to suspicions about Palestinian intentions and a history of bloodletting.

Arab countries also want no part of the people of Gaza. While anti-Israel demonstrations have taken place in Jordan, Yemen, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, and Syria, among other Arab states, none have offered to accept Palestinian refugees.

Jordan has feared the Palestinians since Black September, the bloody 1970 attempt by Yasser Arafat’s heavily armed Palestinian fedayeen to kill Jordan’s King Hussein and seize Jordan. After the Palestinians failed to defeat the Jordanian army, they fled to Lebanon, where they seized south Lebanon, soon called Fatahland after Arafat’s Fatah organization. Lebanon, a part-Christian, part-Muslim country that had been known as the Switzerland of the Middle East, lost all chance to remain cohesive, particularly since the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) used south Lebanon as a base from which to attack Israel.

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By 1975, Lebanon was riven by a chaotic civil war, leading neighboring Syria to send troops into Lebanon to counter the PLO and then to a 1982 invasion by Israel that led Arafat and his loyalists to flee to Syria, which then expelled them to Tunisia.

A decade later, in 1991, after Saddam Hussein’s invasion and seven-month occupation of Kuwait, Kuwait’s resentment of Arafat’s allegiance to Saddam led to the expulsion of virtually all 200,000 of its Palestinian residents in a single week.

The Saudis have been antagonistic to Gazans through Hamas’s rule. The Kingdom reportedly prohibits its imans from praying for Palestinians and imprisons ordinary Saudis who express support for the Palestinian cause.

Egypt’s refusal to accept Gaza or Gazans is especially telling since many Gazans consider themselves Egyptian. “Half of the Palestinians are Egyptian,” bitterly stated Ḥamas Minister of the Interior Fathi Ḥammad a decade ago, in frustration that Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi was refusing to help Hamas in the war against Israel.

“Who are the Palestinians?” he exclaimed. “We have many families called al-Masri, whose roots are Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Dumietta, from the north, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians; we are Arabs. We are Muslims. We are part of you. Egyptians! Personally, half my family is Egyptian—and the other half are Saudis.”

“Masri” means “the Egyptian” in Arabic.

Gaza’s prominent Egyptians include Arafat, who redefined the unconnected, self-governing Arab clans living in the region as a Palestinian nation. As he himself said in his official biography, “If there is any such thing as a Palestinian people, it is I, Yasser Arafat, who created them.” Arafat was born and raised primarily in Egypt; he studied at the University of Cairo and served in the Egyptian military.

And Arafat is also a reason that Egypt’s Mr. El-Sisi wants no part of Gaza, despite its offshore energy riches. Arafat turned Gaza into a terrorist haven that later embraced Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that a decade ago seized power in Egypt and threatens to do so again.

Egypt takes its security seriously. To insulate Egypt from terror originating in Gaza, Egypt sealed its border after Hamas took over in 2007. To prevent the movement of weapons and terrorists in tunnels between Egypt and Gaza, it created a mile-wide buffer zone by razing the Sinai city of Rafah on the Egyptian side of the border, displacing some 70,000 persons. For good measure, Egypt also flooded those tunnels and built a 20-foot reinforced concrete wall reaching 16 feet below ground.

Like Israel, Arab governments view Gaza and Palestinians as existential threats. For that reason, no Arab government demands that Gaza be returned to Egypt or that the West Bank be returned to Jordan. Arab governments seek to contain Palestinians in the lands adjacent to Israel so that they remain Israel’s problem.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.