President Trump told reporters on Air Force One this weekend that he wants Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab countries to take refugees from Gaza in order to “just clean out that whole thing.” Any forced repatriation of Palestinians would constitute the war crime of ethnic cleansing, although international law has not historically governed Israel or the United States’ treatment of Palestinians.
Yet if Trump were to greenlight such a plan, the result would be extreme destabilization of neighboring states, which would contradict Trump’s stated goal of bringing peace to the Middle East.
As I wrote in a recent brief for the Quincy Institute, Jordan in particular would face a level of upheaval that could bring down King Abdullah II and the Hashemite monarchy that has long worked with the U.S. and Israel. If Trump were to facilitate the displacement of Palestinians into Jordan, Washington could lose an ally and gain an enemy, or at best a government with no interest in working with Tel Aviv or Washington.