Trump insists Jordan & Egypt will come around to accept Gaza refugees, despite public rejections

After officials from Egypt and Jordan rejected the idea they would accept Gazan refugees while the enclave is being “cleared out,” U.S. President Donald Trump asserted their leaders would come around to his plan.

Talking about his earlier comments with reporters on Air Force One on Monday, Trump said he would “like to get them living in an area where they can live without disruption and revolution and violence so much.”

“When you look at the Gaza Strip, it’s been hell for so many years,” Trump said.

“There have been various civilizations on that strip. It didn’t start here. It started thousands of years before, and there’s always been violence associated with it. You could get people living in areas that are a lot safer and maybe a lot better and maybe a lot more comfortable.”

Asked about those countries rejecting his idea, Trump replied, “I wish [Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi] would take some. We helped them a lot, and I’m sure he’d help us. He’s a friend of mine. He’s in… a rough neighborhood. But I think he would do it, and I think the king of Jordan would do it too,” the president added.

All Israel News Editor-in-Chief Joel Rosenberg, speaking from Egypt’s capital of Cairo, estimated that Trump’s comments at this stage are only the starting position in a longer discussion.

“I think what he's doing is what he often does when it comes to negotiations,” Rosenberg explained. “When he's trying to make a deal, he usually makes some statement that's pretty outlandish… and then he backs into an idea that might have seemed radical if he hadn't created an outlandish initial proposal.”

His comments also highlighted a real problem with the reconstruction of the largely devastated area, Rosenberg added. “How are you going to clear all the rubble and, of course, all the weapons and all the bombs that are all still there, how do you clear all that safely and then start to rebuild?”

“It's not just who is going to do it, who's going to fund it. The question is, how are you literally, logistically going to do it when you have 2.2 million people and you've got to put them somewhere,” he said.

However, Rosenberg pointed out that the initial rejections of Trump’s idea by Egypt and Jordan were genuine. “I will say being here in Egypt and in touch with Egyptian and Jordanian sources, I can tell you flat out, neither the Egyptian government nor the Jordanian government want what Trump is suggesting.”

Egypt’s Foreign Ministry said on Sunday that it rejects the forced displacement of Palestinians, saying this would “undermine opportunities for peace and coexistence” but without directly mentioning Trump.

Ayman al-Safadi, the Foreign Minister of Jordan, whose population is already majority Palestinian said, “Our refusal of displacement is a steadfast position that will not change.”

“Jordan is for Jordanians, and Palestine is for Palestinians,” al-Safadi reiterated.

In addition, the Palestinian leadership has always rejected anything that might look like a population transfer. “Palestinians fear that this is a move by the Netanyahu government to get Trump to just ethnically cleanse Gaza of all Palestinians… this is not what Trump means. It might be what some far-right-wing radicals in Israel want. It's not what Trump means,” Rosenberg stressed.

In Trump’s 2020 “Deal of the Century,” Rosenberg said, Trump already “envisioned a better life for the Palestinians, economic opportunity, investment, and in fact he persuaded a number of Arab countries in the region, Gulf states that have oil and gas, to invest $50 billion into building a better life for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.”

Rosenberg concluded that Trump, through starting this discussion is trying to figure out: “What can Gaza look like going forward? How do we make it a decent, livable, safe society rather than a terror base camp? He's asking the right questions.”

In addition, a report by Israeli Channel 12’s analyst, Amit Segal, suggests that Trump’s move is not just a spur of the moment initiative, “but part of a much broader move than it seems, coordinated with Israel.”

In recent weeks, several ideas of where Gazan refugees could receive temporary shelter have been floated by the U.S., most recently including Albania. Its prime minister, Edi Rama, on Monday denied an Israeli report that the U.S. had reached out to ask his country to take in as many as 100,000 Gazans.