By
K.R. Kamphoefner
20
October 2023
Some
people think the easy solution of Israel bombing 2.3 million civilians in Gaza
is to simply open the Rafah checkpoint, which leads to Egypt. But like most
“easy solutions,” it won’t work. In fact, it would compound humanitarian
disasters, aggravate regional tensions, and foster more violations of
international law. Here’s why:
·
Egypt is already very fragile economically. It simply cannot afford to shelter and
feed another million-plus persons.
Egypt is a developing country, with high levels of
poverty. Egypt also has an enormous foreign debt, 165.3 billion dollars (Al-Ahram Online, 2023), which means the
biggest lenders, like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank,
force economic policies on Egypt, like floating its currency and cutting
government subsidies for the poor. Now only bread is still subsidized.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian pound has been devalued two times since March 2022,
while a third devaluation is predicted. All this has made food prices skyrocket,
sometimes more than doubling in one year, which means the poor are eating less
and less nutritionally and grumbling more. The rate of poverty hovers around
70% each year (Macrotrends, 2023).
Global inflation and rising interest rates are placing
increasing pressures on the hard currency reserves Egypt needs to service and
pay back its foreign debts. Like many developing nations, debt servicing has
come to consume more of the national budget than spending available of
education and healthcare combined. Obviously, this puts enormous strains on public
services.
In his recent meeting with US Secretary of State
Anthony Blinken, Egypt’s President Sisi denounced Israel’s attack on Gaza as
collective punishment, but he did not agree to take in all the Gazans via the
Rafah border. He noted Egypt is already home to significant numbers of refugees
from Africa and the Middle East (Agencies, Jacob Magid, and Staff., 2023). Egypt does not
contribute financially to their care. That falls to the UNHCR [the United
Nations Higher Commission for Refugees], which doesn’t even have enough resources
to assist the current refugees in Egypt, especially since the recent influx of
thousands of refugees from Sudan, especially with the recent influx of thousands
of refugees from Sudan.
- So,
what if the UN or other countries guaranteed support for Gazan refugees? Could that work?
No.
That has been proposed, but Egypt does not agree. Although the Sinai is a large
desert, there is no land free to put in refugee camps in the Sinai. It is all
owned by someone, mostly by 17 different Bedouin tribes. See a map of the Sinai tribes: (Bedawi, 2023).
The
government has claimed the land bordering Gaza as a security zone, but that is
too little to house 2.3 million persons. If the government tried to confiscate Sinai
land for refugee camps, that would aggravate an already existing security
problem in the area, namely the intermittent fighting between the Egyptian
government and Bedouin in the northern Sinai with insurgents openly affiliated
with ISIS.
More
importantly, why displace other people to make room for a displaced people?
This brings us to the very crux of the Palestinian question: The people of Gaza
are already victims of several rounds of displacement, expulsion, and ethnic
cleansing since the 1948 war. (The same is true of large numbers of
Palestinians now living in the West Bank). Many new Israeli historians have
documented that the ethnic cleansing began in 1948. Perhaps the best know of
these is Ilan Pappe, who wrote The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and
argues this process has continued until now, including in Israel’s current attacks
on civilians in Gaza. It would be
criminal to subject Gazans to another round of displacement. Transferring them
to Gaza would do just that.
No
one wants to become a refugee, let alone for a second or third time. Refugee
camps are set up to provide temporary shelter, but the region’s camps have been
around for 75 years. Regardless of the lip service paid to “temporary,” Israel
is unlikely to treat the transfer that way. Testimony to this is to be found in
its lengthy record of reneging on its commitments under the Oslo Accords and
refusing to implement the dozens of UN resolutions on Palestine and Palestinian
human rights. With the US indulging the most extreme tendencies of Israeli
governments, Israel can be confident that it will enjoy Washington’s backing in
evading whatever agreements it makes now regarding the transfer of Gazans to
Egypt.
- Egypt cannot afford to employ refugees, due to its
precarious economic state.
Egypt already is home to approximately 9 million
migrants and refugees ( (UN OCHA, 2022). It is currently
illegal for refugees to work in Egypt, dooming them to the exploitive
conditions of working under the table.
The Egyptian people would probably welcome
Palestinians on humanitarian grounds, as they remain in sympathy with the
Palestinian cause. But the tide will change if Gazans are seen to be taking
jobs inside Egypt. Youth unemployment is nearly 20% in Egypt, while for young
women the rate is 35.9% (UNICEF, 2023). Unofficially, unemployment is much
larger. At least 55% of Egyptians work in the informal economy, which is a very
precarious financial situation to live in (World Bank, n.d.). When everything
shut down due to COVID-19, many of them were left with no income at all.
As
a source in Egypt’s security forces put it, opening a corridor for those
fleeing Gaza would undermine "the right of Palestinians to hold on to
their cause and their land” (Ahmed, 2023). King Abdullah of Jordan has likewise
refused to take in more refugees (Egypt Today, 2023).
- Transferring
Gazans to Egypt would be the death knoll for the Palestinian cause.
The
goal of the Palestinian cause is national self-determination. The two-state
solution, embedded in part in the Oslo Accords, was intended to resolve this
with an independent state based on Gaza and the West Bank as the land for a
Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, living side-by-side in
peace with Israel. (An agreed upon corridor to connect the two separate areas
has never been built.) Eliminating Gaza will eliminate the two-state solution.
Forcibly removing the Gazans neatly fits the Zionist
goal of claiming all the land from the “river to the sea,” i.e, from the Jordan
River to the Mediterranean. But should not be allowed. This has serious
implications under international law. First and foremost, the “forcible
population relocation of civilian populations as part of an organized offensive
against that population is a crime against humanity punishable by the
International Criminal Court (ICC) (Legal Information Institute, 2023).
As
the occupying power, Israel is obligated under international law to protect and
provide for the occupied people. Israel has failed to do so, to an appallingly
criminal degree as is clear from the horrifying conditions in the open-air
prison called Gaza which have become visible to the world. Moreover, today it
is trying, as it has tried before, to unload this burden on others. Neither
Egypt or Jordan or any other party should be made to pay for Israel’s crimes
and violations of international law.
Opening
a humanitarian corridor for assistance is urgently needed. Egypt is ready to
help send in international aid (Ahmed, 2023). Negotiations between
the UN, Egypt, Israel, and Hamas are underway for a ceasefire and how to get
the supplies in. Two planeloads of humanitarian supplies from Qatar arrived early
in the week (Al-Ahram Online, 2023). All the major
providers of humanitarian assistance are begging for access to Gaza. The UN and
other donors are preparing more supplies. As a long line of trucks waits at the
border for Israel to agree they can enter (El-Wardany, 2023). Israel prefers to invade Gaza first. In the UN Security Council, the USA had the
gall to veto a ceasefire designed to provide such humanitarian assistance.
It
is up to the international community, especially Europe, to stop Israel from
invading and stop its bombing of 2.3 million civilians by land and sea.
It
falls to Europe and other powerful countries, because the US has shown it will
not try to restrain Israel. Moving Gazans to the Sinai or any other “Band-Aid”
measures, will never bring a lasting peace. For that, the root causes the
Palestinian plight must be addressed, as a growing body of opinion in Israel recognizes.
We
know the solutions. We must implement international law—that’s the
roadmap to peace. These are the best ideas already agreed upon by most nations
of the world. A genuine solution to the plight of Gazans, not to mention
hundreds of thousands of other Palestinian refugees elsewhere, would include,
in addition to a sovereign state and the right of return, implementing the
following important precedents in international law:
·
The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, because peace with justice must be based
on human rights (United Nations, 2023);
·
The
Geneva Convention of 1949 and their additional protocols; these were agreed
after World War II to try to prevent the worst atrocities of war. These
especially require protecting civilians (ICRC, 2010);
·
The
UN General Assembly Resolution 3236 which "reaffirms also the
inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property
from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return” (United Nations, 1974), and
·
The UN Security Council Resolution 242, which reaffirms
that territory may not be acquired by war, as well as the necessity for
"achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem" (UN Security
Council, 1967).
There is no military solution—only a political one.
With so many lives at stake, we must push for a negotiated peace as soon as
possible.
References
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self-defense’. Retrieved from
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Ahmed, M. (2023, October 11). Egypt discusses
Gaza aid, rejects corridors for civilians, say sources. Retrieved from
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. . . . . . . . . .
Dr.
Kathleen R. Kamphoefner holds a PhD in Communication Studies (Intercultural
Communication, Northwestern University, 1991), with a regional specialty on the
Middle East. She is a fluent speaker of Egyptian colloquial Arabic, which was
indispensable to her 15 summers of service with Community Peace Teams
(formerly Christian Peacemaker Team, CPT). CPT conducted human rights reporting
and intervention in violence in the city of Hebron, the occupied Palestinian
territories. In 2003, Kamphoefner co-led the first training in nonviolent
resistance in Gaza at the request of a Palestinian organization. From 2003-
2007, Kamphoefner and her spouse, Paul Pierce, served as the country
representatives for American Friends Service Committee, leading conflict
resolution trainings in Israel, supporting Israeli conscientious objectors, as
well as leading a large training program for Palestinian trainers of
nonviolence, and initiating the first coalition of groups working by means of
nonviolence in the West Bank. In addition, she ran a refugee agency in Egypt
from 2007- 2010 and a mediation organization for refugees in Egypt from
2009-2013. She is now retired in Cairo, Egypt.
