OPENING THE RAFAH BORDER IS NOT A SOLUTION

 

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

Agencies, Jacob Magid, and Staff. (2023, October 15). Egypt’s Sissi says Israel’s Gaza campaign has gone ‘beyond right to self-defense’. Retrieved from https://www.timesofisrael.com/egypts-sissi-says-israeli-gaza-campaign-has-gone-beyond-right-to-self-defense/

Ahmed, M. (2023, October 11). Egypt discusses Gaza aid, rejects corridors for civilians, say sources. Retrieved from Rueters: https://www.reuters.com/world/egypt-discussing-plans-provide-aid-gaza-under-limited-ceasefire-security-sources-2023-10-11/

Al-Ahram Online. (2023, July 27). Egypt’s external debt rises nearly 5% in one year. Retrieved from Al-Ahram Online: https://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/3/12/505545/Business/Economy/Egypt%E2%80%99s-external-debt-rises-nearly--in-one-year.aspx

Al-Ahram Online. (2023, October 17). Israel renews airstrikes on Gaza as humanitarian aid remain stuck at the border- Day 10 as it happened. Retrieved from Al-Ahram Online: https://english.ahram.org.eg/News/510311.aspx

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B'Tselem. (2021, November 11). B'Tselem.org. Retrieved from List of military checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza Strip: https://www.btselem.org/freedom_of_movement/checkpoints_and_forbidden_roads

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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.