U.S. President Donald Trump might be surprised to learn that long before he proposed moving Arabs from Gaza to Jordan, Yitzhak Rabin recommended the exact same thing.
It happened in 1973. Rabin, a former chief of staff of the Israeli army, was serving as Israel’s ambassador in Washington. In an interview with the Israeli daily Ma’ariv, on Feb. 16, Rabin discussed the question of what should be done about the large number of Palestinian Arab refugees residing in the Gaza Strip. Much of Gaza’s population consisted of Arabs who had settled there during the 1948 War of Independence and their descendants.
Here’s what Rabin said: “The problem of the refugees of the Gaza Strip should not be solved in Gaza or el-Arish [in the Sinai] but mainly in the East Bank”—that is, Jordan.
Rabin continued: “I want to create conditions such that during the next 10 or 20 years, there will be a natural movement of population to the East Bank. We can achieve that, in my opinion, with [King] Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat” (Page 17).
As far as I know, he never backtracked on that comment.
The heart of the problem facing Rabin was that when Egypt illegally occupied Gaza from 1948 to 1967, it refused to absorb the refugees into the Egyptian population. The Egyptian government kept the Gazans impoverished, languishing in shanty towns and refugee camps administered by the United Nations. What’s more, Egypt sponsored Gaza-based terrorist groups, known as fedayeen, to attack Israel.
Under Egypt’s rule, the United Nations set up schools in Gaza run by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East—the same UNRWA we’ve been hearing so much about lately. In UNRWA schools, young Gazans were educated to hate Jews and Israel, and glorify Arab terrorism.
Following the 1967 war, Israel found itself saddled with all these hate-filled Gazans. So unless something was done to change the situation, Israel would continue to face constant terrorist attacks from Gaza.
And that’s exactly what happened. Nobody listened to Rabin’s advice to move the Gazans to Jordan. The Gazans stayed in Gaza, launched constant attacks on Israel and eventually voted Hamas into power in 2007. The horrors of Oct. 7, 2023, followed.
It made perfect sense for Rabin to think of Jordan as the destination for the Gazans. After all, Palestinian Arabs who settled in Gaza and those who settled in Jordan are indistinguishable. They have the same history, culture, language and religion.
The problem, though, is that Jordan’s King Hussein had lost patience with them. For years, Hussein let the PLO set up its bases on Jordanian territory. Hussein was fine with the PLO attacking Israel. But some of PLO chief Arafat’s terrorists began talking about how Jordan really was Palestine, too. Hussein became worried they would try to overthrow him.
And the PLO gangs were causing Jordan problems in the international arena by repeatedly hijacking planes, forcing them to land in Jordan and then holding the passengers hostage while demanding to trade them for imprisoned terrorists. Some things never change, it seems.
How did King Hussein solve the problem? He kicked them out. In the autumn of 1970, the King of Jordan forcibly relocated more than 2,000 PLO terrorists, including their entire leadership, to Syria. From there, they continued into Lebanon, where they soon plunged that country into years of chaos, civil war and bloodshed. It was named Black September.
So the current king, Hussein’s son Abdullah, may not be too keen on welcoming in Gazans. Or, on the other hand, he might decide to exclude terrorists while welcoming ordinary Gazans—in the same manner that Jordan took in so many refugees from the Syrian civil war.
How this will all play out remains to be seen. The public debate has just begun. But in the meantime, let’s acknowledge that the essence of the Trump plan is not a Republican or Likud proposal. It was advocated by the most famous leader of the left-wing Israeli Labor Party more than half a century ago.
