Displacing Palestinians from their lands is an Israeli dream that the Hebrew state has not stopped thinking about since the Nakba of 1948. Every now and then, the idea is renewed, whether from within or from its ally America. The most recent attempt was President Donald Trump’s proposal to transfer residents of Gaza to Egypt and Jordan, the two Arab countries bordering the occupied Palestinian territories.

According to Asharq Al-Awsat’s monitoring, the calls varied between official statements and plans, especially American-Israeli, and usually ended in non-implementation, and some of them were accompanied by public “Egyptian-Jordanian-Arab” rejection, especially since the outbreak of the Gaza war on October 7, 2023.

Trump's proposal, which he put forward on Saturday and was met with popular and media rejection in Egypt, was considered by Palestinian historian Abdul Qader Yassin to be "not the first and will not be the last in the plans to displace the Palestinians," expecting that "unofficial rejection of these projects will increase, whether from Palestinian resistance movements or from Arab peoples."

Yassin told Asharq Al-Awsat that projects to settle Palestinians in Arab countries have had a recurring historical presence, especially since 1953, with what was known at the time as the “Sinai Plan,” as well as the “Al-Jazeera Project” in northern Syria, to settle Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, and the “Johnson Project” to settle Palestinians on the eastern and western banks around the Jordan River.

He stresses that "Washington and its ally Israel have historically repeatedly stood behind those projects that have been met with official Arab rejection, and at the popular level as well, especially the Palestinian one."

The Palestinians experienced “forced displacement” from their homeland in 1948, with the declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel, and the following year the United Nations established the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) to respond to the needs of nearly three-quarters of a million Palestinians.

The year 1953 witnessed the introduction of the “Sinai Plan,” which was supported by Washington and included the “displacement of Palestinians” to that Egyptian area, according to historian Abdel Qader Yassin. July 1967 saw the machine of producing displacement attempts continue, through the Israeli politician and military man, Yigal Allon, presenting to his country’s cabinet a plan to impose a regional settlement aimed at deporting Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt, but it did not see the light of day.

In 1970, the commander of the southern region of the Israeli army, Ariel Sharon, who later became prime minister, adopted a plan to empty the Gaza Strip of its inhabitants, and transfer hundreds of them to Sinai and the city of Al-Arish, which were under Israeli occupation at the time, but it did not succeed in continuing.

The plans continued in 2000, when the Israeli military commander, Giora Eiland, presented a project that included Cairo offering concessions on land in Sinai in favor of a proposed Palestinian state, in exchange for privileges for Egypt, but it was not destined for success... This project was repeated four years later by the former president of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Joshua Ben Arieh, and it did not come out of the discussion for implementation either.

During Trump’s first term (2017-2020), media talk began in 2018 about an American plan to displace Palestinians under the so-called “Deal of the Century.” In March 2019, Jordan’s King Abdullah II announced his rejection of the idea of an “alternative homeland” and settlement, stressing that Palestine and Jerusalem are a red line, amid repeated official and media Egyptian positions rejecting displacement plans.

Trump officially revealed the deal during his first term in 2020, under the title “Peace on the Path to Prosperity,” and it was met with explicit Arab rejection, and was not achieved when the then-US president lost the presidential elections to his rival, Joe Biden.

The “Gaza War” was a new stage in the Israeli return to the “displacement plan,” as a paper published by the Israeli “Misgav” Institute on October 17, 2023, revealed calling for the deportation of Palestinians to Egypt. On the 14th of the following month, the extremist Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, called for “voluntary immigration and absorption of the Arabs of Gaza in the countries of the world.”

In early 2024, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair denied a report by Israel’s Channel 12 about talks he was said to have held in Israel about “displacing Palestinians” from the Gaza Strip to Arab countries. In late November of the same year, Smotrich renewed his call to encourage Gazans to emigrate within two years.

On Saturday, Trump proposed an initiative for Egypt and Jordan to receive more Palestinian refugees from Gaza, amid widespread Palestinian rejection, especially from Hamas, while it received broad support from the Israeli right, led by the resigned Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich.

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