It is hard to find anyone who has gone public with an optimistic prediction for the fate of President Trump’s Middle East peace plan. And, indeed, other than for some references to practical reasons for the U.S. to take control of Gaza, redevelop it, and relocate its current residents to Arab neighbor states, even the President has not addressed the obvious international law impediments or why the Arab world would somehow want to cut the Palestinians loose. But as the saying goes, there may be “a method to his madness.”
For one thing, there are no other untried solutions on the horizon and we are reminded of the adage (apparently misattributed to Einstein), “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” So why not think out of the box, however improbable the idea might seem?
So it is noteworthy that, as far as we can determine, the President’s default response to his skeptics questioning something novel or groundbreaking on his part is, “Let’s just see what happens” (or words to that effect). Just Google “Trump” and North Korea, tariffs, trade wars, firings, or Iran to see what we mean.
Without putting too fine a point on it, then, Donald Trump seems to believe that controversial policy proposals are really offers of solutions that ideally will trigger a deliberative process which will inform debate and hopefully lead to a meeting of the minds – albeit with a changed playing field and center of gravity. And in that context, few things proposed by a master negotiator – who also has immense purse strings and economic and military leverage – should be dismissed out of hand.
Nor would a forced redrawing of boundaries and transfer of civilians following defeat in a war be unknown to international law. In fact, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which played a major part on the losing side of World War I, led to the arbitrary demarcation of the boundaries of their ethnically similar territorial holdings, which included the modern-day Arab world. The Treaty of Versailles and other post-WWI treaties dictated territorial adjustments leading to the resettlement of huge populations.
Territorial adjustments and civilian relocations were a major part of the 1947 Paris Peace Treaties following WWII. They aimed to redraw the boundaries of Europe and adjust the territories of the defeated countries to make for peace and stability in the region. In all instances, the territorial adjustments led to the forced migration of millions of people and the displacement of ethnic minorities.
Thus the Trump relocation proposal is not all that unthinkable. Moreover, the fact that there were no material ethnic differences driving the drawing of the various Arab borders means that the transfer of Palestinians to their neighbors could be a relatively seamless fit as well. Indeed, it is the failure of the Palestinians to have long ago migrated to the neighboring Arab states is the exception rather than the rule.
As we have previously noted here, the U.N. policy on Palestinian refugees is administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which was established in 1949 to assist those Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war. A year later, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) was established and charged with assisting all refugees the world over – except for the Palestinians. But there is a crucial difference in their respective mandates.
UNRWA automatically considers all the patrilineal descendants of the 1948 refugees as refugees themselves, regardless of their status and country of residence. Thus, UNRWA does not see resettlement of Palestinian refugees to say, Jordan, Syria, or Lebanon as part of its mission, nor does it encourage it. If anything, its program militates against it. In fact, UNRWA’s original mandate included a provision declaring resettlement as an objective, but this was later deleted under pressure from Arab states in furtherance of their claim to all of Israel.
On the other hand, UNCHR seeks “permanent or durable solutions” for refugees, including “local integration” and “resettlement.” According to the UNCHR Resettlement Handbook: “Local integration is an important facet of comprehensive strategies to develop solutions to refugee situations, particularly those of a protracted nature… Overall, ethnic, cultural, or linguistic links with the local community can increase the chances of successful local integration.”
Plainly, then, President Trump is onto something real – something that takes into account that Gaza is now, and for the foreseeable future will be, largely uninhabitable. So why not wait to see how things progress?
