Jordan, or any other country is not going to give Israel an "out" by taking in the displaced Palestinian refugees or granting citizenship to them. That would set a precedent that Israel and the West would jump on.
You're wrong. Jordan did grant citizenship to the Palestinians; it was, conspicuously, the only Arab country to do so. Jordan did so because it considered itself the same country, for good reason; the original Palestinian Mandate (the one refered to in the Balfour Declaration) included Jordan, until the British split it off and gave it to the Emir Abdullah in 1922.
The other countries not only did not give the Palestinians citizenship, they didn't even give them work permits. Moreover, they also used UNWRA as a free welfare agency, dumping their own welfare cases into the camps. No one really knows how many refugees there are now. UNWRA says 3.7 million; the PA says 5 million. Even the UNWRA number is likely to be wildly inflated as there is a financial stipend associated with being on the list so refugees very rarely die, at least officially speaking. The host countries do not permit census-taking.
BTW, did you know that in the '50s Iraq was so desperate for agricultural labor that they put out a call throughout the Arab world for laborers, saying they would give citizenship to anyone who came? Except for, you guessed it, Palestinians. |
