Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – First, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet proposed ethnically cleansing Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants in the fall of 2023, following many years of such calls from the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis.
Then last year Joe Biden and Antony Blinken, dissatisfied with merely enabling an ongoing Israeli genocide, picked up the ethnic cleansing project from the Israeli extreme Right and ran with it, pressing it on Egypt’s strongman Abdelfattah al-Sisi, who firmly told them to drop dead.
Then on Sunday President Trump said, “I’d like Egypt to take people, and I’d like Jordan to take people. You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing. It is literally a demolition site right now, almost everything is demolished and people are dying there.” He said they could be moved “temporarily or could be long term.”
Not that Trump or anyone else in Washington, D.C., now cares, but the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, article 49, reads: “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.” The same language was adopted into the Rome Statute that came into force in 2002 and underpins the International Criminal Court, so for Trump to follow through on his threat (that’s what it was) would open him to indictment as a war criminal. Sanctioning the judges won’t stop such an indictment, and indeed, would form the basis for a further grave charge against him.
The thing that I have never understood is why the Israeli far right even thinks this ethnic cleansing project would be a solution to anything.
Let us say that the people of Gaza were expelled to Jordan. It is a country of 11.5 million, about 7.7 million of them citizens (about 69%). The over 3 million others are Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian refugees without Jordanian citizenship.
Jordan’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is only $53.57 billion, and its unemployment rate is 21% (Great Depression levels). Its nominal GDP per capita is a little over $4,000 a year per person, making it quite poor. It ranks 119th in the world on this measure. People in Fiji and Guatemala are richer.
The political elite of Jordan are the East Bank natives, who are loyal to the Hashemite monarchy of King Abdullah II. They make up half the citizen population. The other half of citizens are Palestinian refugees driven out of Palestine by Zionist militias in 1948 or by the Israeli army in 1967. Although they were granted citizenship on the whole, not all Palestinians were. And although they are citizens they typically are very poor and have sometimes had contentious relations with the king. In 1970-71 the East Bankers and the Palestinians fought a Civil War.
Jordan is a police state and so it is not easy to know what people actually think about their government, though all the indications are that they have low levels of trust in governmental institutions.
Jordanians are on the whole absolutely furious about Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and last spring they surrounded the Israeli embassy. If public opinion counted for anything in the country, Amman would rescind its peace treaty with Israel and unrecognize it. Unlike Americans and Israelis, remember, Jordanians have seen the war unfold daily on their televisions and smartphones and it would have made anyone angry and upset to see the mangled bodies of 17,000 children.
So if you dumped 2.2 million Palestinians from Gaza into Jordan, there would be no jobs for them. As noted above, there are no jobs and over a fifth of workers are already idled. They would be raw and angry, likely not very happy about the Jordanian army silently looking on while they were genocided. They’d join 3.4 million Palestinian-Jordanian citizens and tens of thousands more Palestinian refugee non-citizens, who are among the poorest segments of the population.
So why wouldn’t there be another Black September, another Jordanian-Palestinian Civil War? And this time, who knows if the monarchy could survive?
If Jordan’s government were overthrown by Muslim fundamentalists, they’d have every reason to seek a union with Syria, also now ruled by fundamentalists, taking us back to before WW I when the European victors carved up the Ottoman Levant into Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. There could once again be a Greater Syria.
A Sunni fundamentalist state of over 35 million people, in close alliance with economically, scientifically and militarily advanced Turkey, could emerge as a major regional power. Over time it might even pick up Sunni Iraq, as ISIL did 2014-2017. And then it might get petroleum and emerge as an economically substantial regional power..
The displaced Hamas leaders could reemerge as cabinet ministers alongside HTS figures in Damascus, and would this time have a national army at their disposal.
So tell me, how would moving Palestinians to Jordan and destabilizing it and potentially the entire Levant be good for Israel or the United States?
“Ethnic Cleansing,” Digital, Dream, Surrealism v3, 2024
Remember that Netanyahu also instructed the Bush administration to invade and occupy Iraq, promising paradise if they did so, and what we got was Shiite militias and ISIL, forcing the Pentagon into another 3-year campaign in the teens. The entire region is unstable and massive population movements would not help stabilize it, to say the least.
As for actually-existing Jordanians, all their branches of government angrily pushed back against Trump. Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said, “As His Majesty has repeatedly made clear, such proposals are categorically unacceptable. We say no to displacement and no to compromising Palestinian rights.”
There is a final consideration, of how much like Stalin’s USSR Trump really wants America to be. I wrote in late 2023:
This blatant project of ethnic cleansing recalls the ways in which the dictators of the 1930s and 1940s moved around entire ethnic groups. Stalin displaced the Soviet Koreans to Uzbekistan or Siberia. I met some of their descendants in Tashkent in the mid-1990s. The exile of the Crimean Tartars is recognized by Ukraine as a war crime. Hundreds of thousands died in these paroxysms of ethnic cleansing. Hitler ethnically cleansed millions, as well, and at the end of the war there were 11 million displaced persons in Europe, 8 million in Germany.
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