The Council of State ruled on Wednesday that the Netherlands must simply process asylum applications from people from the Palestinian Territories. On our response platform NUjij, readers wondered why neighboring countries are not hosting the Palestinians. The short answer: they already do.
Allereerst is het belangrijk om te weten dat het grootste deel van de Palestijnse bevolking een vluchtelingenstatus heeft. Dat is het gevolg van conflicten die kort na de Tweede Wereldoorlog ontstonden. Hierdoor raakten honderdduizenden Palestijnen hun huis kwijt. Die groep wordt door de Verenigde Naties aangemerkt als geregistreerde vluchteling. Voor deze problematiek werd eind 1949 de VN-organisatie voor Palestijnse vluchtelingen (UNRWA) opgericht.
Het gevolg van deze situatie is dat er meer Palestijnse vluchtelingen buiten de Palestijnse Gebieden (de Gazastrook en de bezette Westelijke Jordaanoever) wonen dan er inwoners zijn in die gebieden zelf: zo’n 6,7 miljoen tegenover ongeveer 5,4 miljoen. Ruim de helft van die 6,7 miljoen Palestijnse vluchtelingen woont verspreid over Jordanië, Libanon en Syrië.
Because a large number of Palestinians have been living in neighboring countries for decades, many of them are part of society. And many of the 58 refugee camps there have now grown into small towns. About one and a half million Palestinians live in such a camp
In Jordan, about three quarters of Palestinians have Jordanian citizenship. As a result, they are reasonably integrated into society and the economy. Things are different in Lebanon. Palestinians there do not have the same rights as Lebanese. There is also poverty.
In Syria, although Palestinian refugees could not obtain citizenship, they did have access to things such as education and health care. But when the Syrian civil war started in 2011, it had major consequences for the Palestinian refugees in the country. Some refugee camps were destroyed and an estimated 120,000 Palestinians were displaced again.
Many Syrians themselves have ended up in Turkey in recent years. According to the UN, 3.6 million Syrian refugees live there. More than half a million Syrians now live in a city like Istanbul. Hundreds of thousands of people from Syria also live in cities in the border area such as Gaziantep and Sanliurfa.
This huge refugee camp in Gaza has everything to be a city
Since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 and the war that followed, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled again. The big difference is that this group is stuck in the Gaza Strip. That area can best be described as an open-air prison from which Palestinians cannot or hardly get out. Let alone fleeing abroad.
Egypt occasionally allows some Palestinians to cross the border. These are often Palestinians with dual nationality or Palestinians with serious injuries. Egypt has a border crossing with the Gaza Strip at Rafah.
In the occupied West Bank, Palestinians have slightly more room to move, but only compared to Gaza. But you can’t just cross the border there either. “So many Palestinians already live in Jordan that they are reluctant to welcome any more,” Thomas van Gool of the peace organization PAX told NU.nl. He lived in the occupied West Bank for a number of years and still visits there.
Precisely because millions of Palestinians are already refugees, they often do not want to flee again, van Gool adds. Not even now that the unrest in the West Bank continues to increase. “Just like in Gaza, they don’t want to leave their country.”
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