It is evident that Israel, with the help of the United States, wishes to shunt its Palestinian refugee problem onto other states. American and Israeli officials this week leaked to the Associated Press that they had contacted the governments of Sudan, Somalia and Somaliland to propose using their countries as potential destinations to resettle Palestinians displaced from Israel. Meanwhile, the Trump administration will proceed with its plan to take over the ruined Gaza and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.

This isn’t the first time that other countries have been put forward as “solutions” to the Palestinian refugee situation. Earlier this year, Donald Trump proposed that Jordan and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula be used as a warehouse for Gazan refugees, which was treated as a red line by Egypt and the other Arab states. Additionally, from the early days of the war there have been calls from Israeli politicians that those refugees be transferred to Europe, with US pressure to get it done.

Officials from Sudan, Somalia and Somaliland have either rejected such proposals or denied that contact even took place. However, it is still plausible that they could take up the offer. Sudan has normalised relations with Israel, and in exchange America removed the African country from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, also providing a $1.2 billion loan to pay off debts. Somalia and Somaliland, meanwhile, are geopolitically weak and isolated.

While Egypt also has normalised diplomatic relations with Israel and is a US client state, it still has significant regional influence, allowing it to push back on the “Sinai solution”. Sudan and Somalia, in contrast, are very poor and unstable countries. The former is in the midst of a famine, as well as a brutal civil war which has created its own refugee crisis. There is therefore a possibility that the countries can be pushed into an agreement in return for aid, security guarantees or, in the case of Somaliland, official diplomatic recognition.

Israel and its most vocal defenders deny that the state is engaging in “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza. But these new proposals to permanently resettle Palestinian refugees make those accusations harder to shake off, and give succour to arguments that Israel’s ambition has always been to evict Gazans and seize more land. More radical members within Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition have even lobbied to make the establishment of Jewish settlements in Gaza official government policy.

As well as the threat posed to Palestinians, the plans from America and Israel exude a neocolonial arrogance. Just as rich countries exploit poorer ones as dumping grounds for toxic waste, impoverished African nations with innumerable problems of their own are regarded as rubbish bins for the “unwanted” human refuse created by Western statecraft. Their national sovereignties are treated as non-existent, only subordinated to the convenience of wealthy countries.

The likes of Sudan, Somalia and Somaliland are within their right to complain that they shouldn’t have to shoulder the human burden of a war in which they are not even involved, especially as they don’t have the resources to take in hundreds of thousands of refugees at once. Their peoples don’t want their governments to be accomplices in easing a conundrum for Israel — a country whose campaign in Gaza they consider fundamentally wrong. And they shouldn’t be coerced into doing so because they are too poor and weak to ultimately insist on saying no.

---

Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

buffsoldier_96

---