Donald Trump has ratcheted up the pressure on Egypt to take in Palestinians from Gaza, raising the prospect that the US president could use substantial aid as leverage for his idea of resettling people from the shattered enclave.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Monday, the US president repeated his call — which has sparked outrage from Palestinians and Arabs across the Middle East — for both Egypt and Jordan to take in Gazans and help “clean out” the strip. He added that he had spoken to Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
“I wish he would take some. We helped them a lot, and I’m sure he’d help us,” Trump said when asked how Sisi had responded. “He’s a friend of mine. He’s in a very rough part of the world, to be honest. As they say, it’s a rough neighbourhood. But I think he would do it, and I think the King of Jordan would do it too.”
Egyptian officials denied that a call between Trump and Sisi had taken place. Since Trump first made the suggestion over the weekend, Cairo and Amman have vehemently rejected the idea, which they fear would undermine Palestinians’ long-held hopes of establishing their own state and their own security.
Analysts said Trump’s comments, which came just days after secretary of state Marco Rubio ordered an immediate halt to work on virtually all US foreign aid programmes, underscored the potential leverage Washington had over both Egypt and Jordan, as well as the US president’s willingness to flex it.
“This a classic Trump negotiation tactic, coming in with an extreme position in order to . . . get somewhere in the middle,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and north Africa programme at Chatham House. But she said Trump’s demands touched on “real existential” questions for both Jordan and Egypt.
On Tuesday, the front page of Egypt’s state-owned Al-Ahram daily featured a large picture of displaced Palestinians streaming back to north Gaza with the headline: “Egypt [speaks] as one man: The people reject displacement and support efforts to protect national security as the Palestinians write their ‘epic of return’.”
Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, was similarly dismissive, saying on Sunday that “the solution to the Palestinian issue lies in Palestine”.
“Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians,” he said.
Arabs have for more than a year warned against any moves to push Palestinians out of Gaza, saying it would be akin to 1948, when hundreds of thousands were forced from their homes or fled in the fighting that accompanied Israel’s founding. Palestinians refer to that period as the Nakba, or catastrophe.
Michael Wahid Hanna, director of the US programme at the International Crisis Group, said that while it was not clear how far Trump would go, one pressure point on Egypt would be the $1.3bn of annual military assistance received by Cairo to buy US weapons and spare parts for US military materiel purchased in previous years.
The assistance, which started in 1978 when Cairo took the first steps towards a peace deal with Israel, signed the next year, has been “the backbone of ties”, said Hanna. It has amounted to more than $50bn over the years.
Military assistance to Egypt and Israel has been exempted from the three-month hold on international aid announced by Rubio.
Hanna added that if Trump tried to coerce Egypt into taking Palestinians displaced from Gaza, it would be a “big change to the relationship”.
“The US has worked for a very long time on the assumption that it would be dangerous for Egypt and was something to avoid,” he said. When the idea of resettling Palestinians was floated at the beginning of the Gaza war, he added, Egypt argued it could threaten domestic stability because neither the military establishment nor public opinion would approve.
“A massive influx of Palestinians would raise fears of rekindling the insurgency [by an Isis affiliate] in the Sinai because of a mixing of Palestinian and Egyptian militants,” said Hanna.
Analysts said the US could use similar pressure against Jordan, where Washington is the biggest provider of foreign aid, on which Jordan’s fragile economy is heavily dependent.
According to the US embassy in Amman, the US has provided $31bn of bilateral assistance since relations were established in 1949, and the two countries recently signed a memorandum of understanding under which Washington would provide $1.45bn a year until 2029.
Diplomats said officials in Amman were rushing to understand Trump’s intentions, and that in addition to withholding aid, the US could also apply pressure by imposing tariffs. “Given where Jordan’s economy is at the moment, any move could have a bigger impact than you might think,” said one.
A large influx of Palestinians would have significant ramifications for Jordan’s delicate political and economic situation: the 11mn-strong country is already home to more than 2mn Palestinians, while its economy has been strained by the cost of supporting hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees.
Implementing Trump’s idea would “really threaten security dynamics in both countries, and the political legitimacy of the leaders”, Vakil said.
“It will be very hard [for them] to kowtow on these issues and see a quick turnaround like we have seen in the case of Colombia or Canada [when pressured by Trump]. This is a very different dynamic.”
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