Ever since the 1948 Arab–Israeli War created a massive Palestinian refugee crisis, Arab governments have loudly championed the Palestinian cause in public forums. From fiery speeches at Arab League summits to decades of sloganeering about “liberating Palestine,” the issue has long dominated Middle Eastern politics. Yet behind the rhetoric, the actual treatment of Palestinians by their Arab “brethren” has often been harsh and cynical. In practice, many Arab states have shown little genuine concern for the welfare or rights of Palestinian people. Instead, Arab regimes frequently used the Palestinians as political pawns, exploiting their plight to score geopolitical points against Israel or to deflect internal dissent, while avoiding real solutions to the refugees’ problems. Crucially, most Arab countries refused to grant citizenship or permanent resettlement to Palestinian refugees, ostensibly to protect the refugees’ “right of return” to Palestine – but also to relieve host states of any responsibility for integrating them. This deliberate marginalization kept generations of Palestinians in legal limbo: stateless, confined to camps, and reliant on international aid. The lofty pan-Arab proclamations of solidarity often rang hollow on the ground.

From the outset, Arab leaders pursued their own interests in the land of Palestine. During the 1948 war, rather than establish a Palestinian state, neighboring Arab armies seized territory for themselves. Transjordan’s King Abdullah annexed the West Bank outright, and Egypt took control of Gaza, ruling these Arab-populated lands without granting the inhabitants independence or citizenship. In the war’s wake, roughly 700,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees scattered across the Arab world. Arab states loudly condemned Israel for this “Nakba” (catastrophe), yet did little to alleviate the refugees’ misery. With the notable exception of Jordan (which did offer citizenship to many in the West Bank), Arab governments largely kept Palestinians in refugee camps under tight restrictions. An official Arab League policy even instructed member states to deny Palestinians citizenship, precisely to avoid their permanent resettlement and to keep alive the demand for return to Palestine. Publicly, Arab rulers insisted Palestinians must one day go home; privately, they treated the refugee population as a useful bargaining chip – a problem to be managed, not solved.

From Refuge to Black September

No country hosted more Palestinian refugees than Jordan, which by 1970 had a Palestinian population comprising about two-thirds of the kingdom’s residents. After 1948, Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy absorbed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and, unique among Arab states, granted many of them Jordanian nationality. However, this ostensible generosity was coupled with an expectation of Palestinian political quiescence under Hashemite rule. Tensions mounted through the 1960s as militant Palestinian guerrilla factions (fedayeen) used Jordanian soil to launch attacks on Israel, threatening Jordan’s sovereignty in the process. By 1970, Yasser Arafat’s PLO had established a virtual “state within a state” in Jordan, openly defying King Hussein’s authority. The showdown came in Black September 1970, when Palestinian guerrillas attempted to assassinate King Hussein and hijacked international airliners, provoking a full-scale Jordanian military crackdown. In weeks of brutal fighting, the Jordanian Army relentlessly shelled Palestinian camps and PLO strongholds. Thousands of Palestinians, fighters and civilians, were killed (estimates range up to 15,000) and entire refugee districts were devastated. The PLO leadership was decimated and ultimately expelled from Jordan entirely. Black September’s carnage was so extreme that even other Arab governments accused Hussein of “overkill”. By mid-1971, Arafat and his fighters fled to Lebanon, and Jordan’s experiment as a fedayeen haven was over.

In the aftermath, King Hussein’s regime tightened its grip and grew wary of ever again allowing Palestinian political ambitions to challenge the throne. While Jordan continued to host the largest number of Palestinian refugees in the region (over 2 million today), the state became highly selective about integration. Most 1948 refugees and their descendants were indeed naturalized as Jordanians over time, but hundreds of thousands of others remained stateless, especially those who arrived from Gaza after 1967. These non-citizen Palestinians in Jordan have fewer rights and live in a precarious state of “temporary” residency decades after their displacement. The legacy of Black September made the Jordanian government deeply suspicious of Palestinian political mobilization; even as it spoke in solidarity with Palestine, Amman ensured that Palestinian refugees on its soil would not again become an independent force. Jordan’s balancing act – giving many Palestinians a home, yet forcefully suppressing Palestinian nationalism – exemplified the wider Arab contradiction between rhetorical support and repressive realpolitik.

Refugees on the Firing Line

In Lebanon, Palestinian refugees fared even worse. Lebanon never absorbed Palestinians into its sectarian social fabric; instead, they were kept apart as permanent outsiders. After the PLO’s expulsion from Jordan, Lebanon became the guerrillas’ new base – and soon slid into civil war. The presence of heavily armed Palestinian factions aggravated Lebanon’s delicate Muslim-Christian sectarian balance. Many Lebanese (especially Maronite Christian militias) viewed the PLO as a hostile army within their country, dragging Lebanon into conflict with Israel and threatening Christian political dominance. What followed was a tragic saga in which Palestinian camps became battlegrounds and Palestinians in Lebanon suffered multiple bloody betrayals.

Lebanon’s 15-year civil war from 1975–1990 saw repeated massacres of Palestinians. In the war’s first year, Christian militiamen laid siege to the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp in Beirut. After months of siege, the camp fell in August 1976; approximately 1,500 Palestinians were massacred in Tel al-Zaatar by Lebanese Christian forces, in what was openly described as a campaign to expel Palestinians from the area. Syrian troops, despite Syria’s stated support for Palestinians, tacitly aided this offensive, illustrating how Arab actors prioritized their own agendas in Lebanon’s war. Years later, in 1982, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon led to the expulsion of the PLO, but Palestinians who remained faced yet another horror: the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Over three days in September 1982, a Lebanese Phalange (Christian) militia, operating with the knowledge of occupying Israeli forces, butchered between 2,000 and 3,500 people, mostly Palestinian refugees, in the Sabra and Shatila camps of Beirut. The world watched in horror at one of the worst atrocities of the war, but for Palestinians it was a searing lesson that even on Arab soil they were horrifically vulnerable. In the mid-1980s, Palestinian refugee camps became targets yet again during the “War of the Camps,” when the Syria-backed Amal militia (a Shiite Lebanese force) besieged and bombarded camps like Sabra, Shatila, and Bourj al-Barajneh to root out Arafat loyalists. Those sieges killed and injured thousands more Palestinians caught in the crossfire of intra-Arab rivalries. And as late as 2007, the Lebanese Army outright leveled the Nahr al-Bared camp in battles against an Islamist group, displacing some 30,000 Palestinian refugees overnight. Time after time, Lebanon’s battlefield calculations treated Palestinian lives as expendable.

Even in lulls between wars, Lebanon has marginalized and restricted its Palestinian population to a remarkable degree. Some 450,000 Palestinian refugees are registered in Lebanon (about 10% of the country’s population), yet they have no civic rights or citizenship even after generations born on Lebanese soil. By law, Palestinians cannot vote or naturalize; Lebanese officials pointedly label them “foreigners” or “stateless people” in the land of their birth. Harsh legal barriers have long confined Palestinians to the margins of the economy. They are barred from working in more than 20 professions, including medicine, law, engineering, and other white-collar jobs. Until very recently, even clerical and manual labor jobs required special government permits for Palestinians. A 2001 law went so far as to ban Palestinian refugees from owning property in Lebanon – stripping even those who had purchased a home previously of the right to pass it to their children. In effect, Palestinians in Lebanon have been consigned to life in squalid refugee camps or crowded slums, with limited employment and no stake in the society around them. Not surprisingly, poverty rates are extreme: roughly two-thirds of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon live in poverty, and unemployment is endemic. As one human rights group starkly put it, Palestinians in Lebanon exist under “apartheid-like” conditions of segregation and disenfranchisement. Lebanese leaders across the spectrum profess support for the Palestinian cause in abstract – but none will risk upsetting Lebanon’s demographic balance by granting Palestinians equal status. Instead, Palestinians remain perpetually “temporary” guests, decade after decade, and any hint of political assertiveness from them has been met with violence.

Egypt: Custodian of Gaza, But No Citizenship

Egypt has played a complex role in the Palestinian saga – at once a self-declared champion of Palestinian liberation, and a frequent violator of Palestinian rights. After the 1948 war, Egypt took control of the Gaza Strip and ruled over Gaza’s 200,000 Palestinian inhabitants from 1948 to 1967. Unlike Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank, Egypt pointedly did not annex Gaza or offer Gazans Egyptian citizenship. Instead, Gaza was placed under Egyptian military administration. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during those two decades remained stateless, with severely restricted travel, and lived under the tight grip of an Egyptian governor who ruled “with an iron fist”. Conditions were harsh in the crowded enclave. President Gamal Abdel Nasser burnished his pan-Arab credentials by championing Palestinian rights in words – he even helped create the PLO in 1964 – but in practice Nasser treated Gaza’s population as a political tool. He did allow some Gazan Palestinians to work or study in Egypt proper under special arrangements, yet the fundamental reality was that Egypt kept the Palestinians at arm’s length, refusing to integrate them as equals. Cairo’s policy, like that of other Arab capitals, was that Palestinians should remain Palestinians, not become absorbed into Egypt, lest the pressure on Israel be diluted.

After Israel seized Gaza and Sinai in the 1967 war, thousands more Palestinians fled into Egypt, only to find that Egypt’s hospitality was rapidly wearing thin. Under President Anwar Sadat in the 1970s, Egypt’s posture toward Palestinians shifted from pan-Arab embrace to cold pragmatism. Sadat was eager to distinguish Egyptian identity from the Palestinian cause, especially as he moved toward a separate peace with Israel. In the late 1970s, his government revoked many privileges that Palestinians in Egypt had enjoyed under Nasser. In 1978, the same year Sadat signed the Camp David Accords with Israel, Egypt passed laws barring Palestinian children from public schools and prohibiting Palestinians from government jobs. These measures instantly downgraded the status of Palestinians who had lived in Egypt for decades. Anwar Sadat’s crackdowns intensified after a fringe Palestinian militant group (led by Abu Nidal) assassinated a prominent Egyptian minister in 1978 – an act for which Palestinian communities in Egypt collectively were blamed and punished. Palestinians came under open suspicion by Egyptian authorities, facing police harassment and new bureaucratic hurdles.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, under President Hosni Mubarak, Egypt continued to treat its Palestinian residents as a politically expendable population. When Yasser Arafat and the PLO sided with Saddam Hussein during the 1990–91 Gulf War, Egypt (which fought against Iraq) reacted by severely curtailing Palestinians’ rights. Cairo slashed funding for Palestinian welfare programs and PLO offices, and thousands of Palestinians carrying Egyptian-issued travel documents were suddenly denied re-entry to Egypt after traveling abroad. Many effectively became stranded or were forced to seek refuge elsewhere. Throughout, Egyptian officials justified their hardline by arguing that permanently settling Palestinians would undermine the goal of their return to Palestine. In reality, Egypt was protecting its own stability and leverage. Even in the 2000s, as Egypt intermittently mediated Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, it kept a tight seal on the Rafah border crossing into Gaza, frequently closing it and limiting Gaza Palestinians’ escape route to the Arab world. Especially after Hamas (an offshoot of Egypt’s banned Muslim Brotherhood) took control of Gaza, Egypt cooperated with Israel’s blockade – a policy meant to isolate Hamas but which also imprisoned 2 million Palestinians in Gaza from accessing Arab lands. Thus, while Egypt publicly supports Palestinian self-determination, it has consistently avoided bearing the humanitarian burden of the Palestinian plight. Successive Egyptian regimes have made clear that Palestine is to be fought for on Egyptian terms – not at the cost of Egypt’s own interests, and certainly not by welcoming masses of Palestinian refugees onto Egyptian soil. As a recent analysis summed up, Cairo has “a long, troubled history of hosting Palestinian refugees, welcoming them, and subsequently restricting their rights according to the political whims of the day.”

Other Arab States: Expulsions, War, and Scapegoating

Beyond the high-profile cases of Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt, many other Arab countries have also mistreated and scapegoated Palestinians when it suited their politics. The most glaring example was Kuwait’s expulsion of its entire Palestinian community in 1991. For decades, oil-rich Kuwait had been a haven for Palestinian expatriates – by 1990, about 400,000 Palestinians lived and worked in Kuwait, forming a sizable portion of its population. But when PLO leader Yasser Arafat aligned politically with Saddam Hussein after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the Kuwaiti authorities exacted a brutal revenge once the Iraqi occupation was ended. In March–September 1991, Kuwait launched a systematic campaign of terror, violence, and economic pressure to drive out Palestinians. An estimated 200,000 Palestinians were directly expelled at gunpoint or through intimidation, and roughly another 200,000 who had fled during the war were banned from returning. By the end of 1991, Kuwait’s Palestinian population had plummeted from hundreds of thousands to only about 20,000 remnants. Families who had spent generations building Kuwait’s infrastructure and teaching in its schools lost everything virtually overnight. This expulsion, which was one of the largest single displacements of Palestinians after 1948, was met with deafening silence from the international community. As Arafat bitterly observed at the time, “what Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories.” For Arafat to draw such a comparison was stunning, yet it underscored the sense of betrayal Palestinians felt at the hands of a fellow Arab nation.

Kuwait was not alone. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states quietly sent home thousands of Palestinian workers in the 1990s, partly in retaliation for the PLO’s pro-Iraq stance. In 1994–95, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi expelled some 30,000 Palestinians as a form of protest against the Oslo Accords (which Libya opposed) – essentially using innocent Palestinians as pawns in his political posturing. During Iraq’s post-2003 sectarian chaos, Palestinian refugees in Baghdad became targets of suspicion and militia violence, causing around 21,000 Palestinians to flee Iraq for exile in bleak desert camps on the Syrian border. And when Syria itself descended into civil war in the 2010s, Palestinian refugee camps like Yarmouk in Damascus were bombarded and starved by the Assad regime when some Palestinian factions backed the opposition. By 2014, Yarmouk – once home to 150,000 Palestinians – was left in ruins with its population scattered or dead, a stark reminder that authoritarian Arab governments had no qualms besieging Palestinians under the banner of “fighting terrorism.” In each of these instances, Arab leaders found it all too convenient to blame, expel, or brutalize Palestinians within their borders whenever Palestinian political aspirations or mere presence became inconvenient. These episodes seldom receive the same global attention as Israeli-Palestinian clashes, but for the victims the suffering and sense of abandonment are just as real.

The Rhetoric of Solidarity and the Reality of Neglect

The historical record leaves little doubt that many Arab states have treated Palestinian people as expendable tools rather than brothers-in-arms. The contrast between lofty proclamations and on-the-ground policies is striking. Arab regimes have often wrapped themselves in the Palestinian flag in international forums, loudly condemning Israel’s occupation and pledging support for “the sacred Palestinian cause” – only to then undercut Palestinian interests when it conflicted with their own agendas. For decades, the Palestinian issue provided a convenient populist rallying cry across the Arab world; dictators and kings alike could burnish their nationalist credentials by denouncing Israel and affirming their devotion to Palestine. But as one commentator aptly noted, Arab governments were usually “driven by their own ulterior motives” and showed scant genuine concern for Palestinian welfare or statehood. This pattern was set early: after 1948, the Arab states did practically nothing to relieve the refugee crisis – no major resettlement, no citizenship offers, and minimal investment in refugees’ well-being. Instead of helping Palestinians build new lives, leaders from Cairo to Riyadh preferred to keep the refugees in suspended misery as living propaganda against Israel. Behind closed doors, some Arab officials even admitted that integrating the Palestinians would erase a useful political pawn. As a result, generations of Palestinians remained in tents and tenements, while their supposed champions declaimed about Israeli injustice.

A telling indicator of Arab states’ priorities (or lack thereof) is financial support. The humanitarian needs of Palestinian refugees have largely been shouldered by the international community – especially Western nations – through UN agencies. Wealthy Arab petrostates, despite their rhetoric, have traditionally given only token sums. In one striking example, during a major UNRWA funding crisis in the late 1970s, the oil-rich Arab countries contributed a paltry 1.2% of UNRWA’s budget, while Western donors covered the vast majority. Internal British documents from 1979 note the “reluctance of Arab oil producers” to fund the Palestinian refugee agency, which “irritated Western donors” who were picking up the slack. Decades later, little has changed – in recent years the top ten donors to UNRWA are almost entirely Western governments, with perhaps only one Arab country making the list. In other words, the same Arab states that loudly insist on Palestinian rights have often donated less to Palestine’s refugees than countries in Europe and North America do. The discrepancy between Arab talk and Arab action is glaring.

Politically, Arab regimes have at times actively undermined Palestinian aspirations. In the 1970s and 1980s, Syria and Jordan competed with the PLO for control over the Palestinian narrative, even as they quashed any independent Palestinian political activity in their own territories. More recently, several Arab governments have pursued normalization and strategic alliances with Israel (such as the Egypt–Israel peace treaty in 1979 and the Gulf states’ accords with Israel in 2020) without securing any concessions for the Palestinians – moves that effectively sideline the Palestinian cause when it no longer aligns with regime interests. Arab leaders have proven willing to sacrifice Palestine on the altar of realpolitik, despite what their public slogans suggest. This hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed by ordinary Arabs or by Palestinians themselves. As Tunisian intellectual Larbi Sadiki wrote, “Arab regime solidarity with Palestine has mostly been a solidarity of words, not deeds, replete with broken promises.” The bitter truth is that for many in power in the Arab world, the Palestinians have been more useful as a symbol than as a population of human beings with rights and needs.

The Human Cost of Arab Hypocrisy

The Western perspective on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict often (and rightly) focuses on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Far less scrutinized, but equally telling, is how Arab states have treated the Palestinians in their midst. From Black September in Jordan to the camp wars of Lebanon, from Egyptian crackdowns to Gulf state expulsions, the record is rife with examples of Palestinians being marginalized, mistreated, and even massacred by the very neighbors who profess pan-Arab unity. These historical experiences reveal a grim irony: while Arab governments repeatedly demanded justice for Palestinians at the international level, many of those same governments were denying Palestinians basic justice on their own soil – whether by corralling them in refugee camps indefinitely, stripping them of civil rights, or turning them into scapegoats when convenient. The human cost of this betrayal is incalculable. Millions of Palestinians have lived for decades in limbo – not only exiled from their original homeland by Israel, but also ostracized and oppressed in the lands where they sought refuge.

To be sure, the reasons behind Arab states’ behavior are varied. Some feared that fully absorbing Palestinians would weaken their domestic stability or alter sectarian balances (as in Lebanon). Others argued that resettling refugees would undermine the right of return and let Israel “off the hook.” And certainly the PLO’s armed presence did pose real challenges to host states’ sovereignty at times. But none of these factors excuses the collective failure of Arab leadership to provide genuine refuge or opportunity to a dispossessed people they claimed as brethren. A half-century ago, one Arab diplomat candidly remarked that “Palestinians are useful as a cause, but no one wants them as citizens.” This cruel logic has hung like a shadow over the Arab world’s involvement in the conflict. It is a tragic commentary that, in addition to their struggle against Israeli occupation, Palestinians have often had to struggle for dignity and rights in Arab lands that view them as perennial foreigners or expendable guests.

In the final analysis, the plight of the Palestinians cannot be separated from the broader dysfunction of regional politics. The suffering of Palestinians in Jordan’s civil war, in Lebanon’s camps, in Kuwaiti exile, or under Egyptian restrictions all point to a uncomfortable conclusion: Many Arab regimes have treated Palestinians not as brothers to be saved, but as pawns to be played. The next time Arab officials loftily invoke the Palestinian cause, they might be reminded of the poignant phrase, “charity begins at home.” True solidarity would mean extending to Palestinian refugees the freedoms and respect that have long been denied. Until that happens, calls for Palestinian liberation ring hollow – mired in hypocrisy that the Palestinian people, caught between Israel’s hostility and Arab indifference, know all too well. The legacy of Arab-world mistreatment of Palestinians is a sobering testament that lofty words without action can amount to yet another betrayal of a people who have already endured far too much.

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