Opinion

Palestinian resettlement would complete the 1948 exchange

Population exchanges have been the norm after conflicts in the 20th century.

Displaced Palestinians pitch tents next to the Egyptian border with the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on March 8, 2024. Photo by Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90.
Displaced Palestinians pitch tents next to the Egyptian border with the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on March 8, 2024. Photo by Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90.
Lyn Julius
Lyn Julius is the author of "Uprooted: How 3,000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2018).

President Donald Trump’s proposal that 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip be transferred to Egypt and Jordan has been met with outright rejection by said countries, in addition to howls of outrage and accusations of “ethnic cleansing.”

The refugee problem needs to be considered in its historical context. Trump has focused attention on the Gazans by effectively suggesting the completion of an exchange of refugee populations that began in 1948 with the first Arab-Israel war. Arab refugees fled from Israel to Gaza, and the areas of Judea and Samaria, while thousands of others left for Lebanon and Syria.

It is often forgotten that Jewish refugees—persecuted in Arab countries, where they had been established for millennia—fled in the opposite direction. The numbers of refugees who swapped places were 711,000 Arabs (according to U.N. figures) vs. 650,000 Jews—roughly equal. (Another 200,000 Jewish refugees fled to the West).

The Jews were granted citizenship in Israel and the West. They were quickly resettled and are no longer refugees. But the Palestinian Arabs remained stateless, many shunted into camps. Not only were they not resettled but weaponized into a tool of permanent conflict with Israel.

They were actively prevented from resettling by two factors.

The Arab League passed, in 1959, Resolution No. 1457, which forbids the countries from offering citizenship to the refugees “in order to prevent their assimilation into their host countries.”

The other gatekeeper of statelessness has been the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) set up exclusively for Palestinians. The agency not only provides health, food and education in the refugee camps but allows the Palestinians to pass on their refugee status to succeeding generations ad infinitum.

Population exchanges have been the norm after most conflicts in the 20th century. Indeed, the principle of population exchange and, therefore, of resettlement has been accepted in international law as in the Treaty of Neuilly (1919) and the Lausanne Convention (1923). More than a million Greeks from Asia Minor and the Caucasus swapped places with 400,000 Muslims from Greece.

A vast population exchange took place following the partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan. In that case, 8.5 million Hindus left Pakistan for India, and 6.5 million Muslims fled Pakistan. Millions of Germans and Russians were forced from their homes during World War II, never to return. 

Ironically enough, it was the Arab side who first mooted the idea of a population exchange in the Middle East. In 1949, Nuri Said, who served several terms as the prime minister of Iraq, floated the idea that the 160,000 Jews of Iraq should be traded for the Arab refugees created by the war in Israel. Israel’s foreign minister at the time, Moshe Sharrett, initially refused any possible linkage between the two sets of refugees. The Israeli government thought it was a cynical ploy to seize the abandoned property of Iraqi Jews. The British ambassador at the time reported that the principle of a population exchange was acceptable to Israel in principle, but that the idea of exchanging 100,000 homeless (Palestinian) refugees for 100,000 (Jewish) refugees who would leave their assets behind was read in Israel as mere extortion.

As it turned out, Iraq was to legalize the dispossession of almost the entire Jewish community in March 1951. Some 140,000 Jews fled to Israel. Only 14,000 Palestinian refugees arrived in Iraq. By then, Sharrett had accepted that there had been a linkage of refugee populations. By 1970, Arab countries had disgorged their Jews—most of whom arrived destitute in Israel—and stripped them of their citizenship and assets.

The good thing about the Trump plan is that it breaks a decades-long taboo about the resettlement of Palestinians and offers a humanitarian solution to the refugee problem. It also forces states like Egypt and Jordan to take some share of responsibility for a conflict in which they participated. Countries like the United Arab Emirates might help shoulder the financial burden. Ultimately, the “exchange of populations” is the only equitable solution.

The opinions and facts presented in this article are those of the author, and neither JNS nor its partners assume any responsibility for them.
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