Unintended consquences

Now that the evacuation of Israeli settlers from Gaza is about to be a done deal, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas is in an interesting pickle. Seems that Jordan and Lebanon want the Palestinians living in those countries to be repatriated to Gaza, now that Israel will no longer be there to impose entry restrictions, and Abbas does not. This is only part of the complicated story reported today in Ha'aretz.

Arabs who fled what was to become Israel during and after the 1948 war went in all directions to bordering Arab states; in most cases those states did not admit them but instead kept them in refugee camps, and the populations of those camps increased exponentially.

While planning and working for an orderly transfer of Gaza from Israel to Palestinian Authority control, Abbas has called for Lebanon and Jordan to grant these refugee populations citizenship status in their respective countries, in order to improve their living conditions, possibilities of employment, etc., and not to plan on relocating them to Gaza.

Since the Israeli settlers occupied about a third of the available land in Gaza, the joyful expectation in Gaza has been that the Palestinian population (over 1.3 million) would now have room to spread out, a vital development in such an overcrowded country. The promise of improvement in quality of life seems just about to be fulfilled.

That dream might vanish were the tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees and their descendants now living in refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon to be relocated to Gaza.

Yet, ironically, as reported in Ha’aretz,

Any proposal for changing the status of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, which is extremely sensitive about its ethnic structure, or in Jordan, which fears becoming a second Palestinian homeland, is regarded as a threat to the host country's very existence.

Hm.