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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, part of the peace deal between Egypt and Israel gave Israel some control over the crossing, and they seized it entirely during the war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_Border_Crossing

> The Rafah crossing was opened by Israel after the 1979 peace treaty and remained under Israeli control until 2005...

> Under a 2007 agreement between Egypt and Israel, Egypt controls the crossing but imports through the Rafah crossing require Israeli approval.

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This is to a large part to give Egypt plausible deniability. They don’t want to deal with Gaza, refugees, or a humanitarian crisis, but also don’t want the political fallout of taking action like the Israelis do.

Eh, 50/50. Israel would not respond positively to Egypt throwing the gates wide open.

That is very reductive of the whole situation. The Egyptians are not singularly focused on helping Palestinians; it is far more nuanced than that.

Bottom line, Egyptians are not interested in supporting millions of refugees inside their border. So the border stays closed to mass immigration.

All that may be true.

Also true: If Egypt opened the border and Israel objected, Israel would take swift military action.

No, why? Israel would celebrate.

But NONE of the Arab countries want to help Gaza people really.

> No, why? Israel would celebrate.

This is directly contradicted by Israel's actions in the Gaza War. Egyptian control of the crossing was not enough, so they took it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-07/israel-ra...

Israel would object to aid and weapons flows into Gaza. It would be fine with Gazans leaving the Strip. The problem is there are currently zero takers globally for a significant Palestinian refugee population, in part, as other comments have mentioned, due to the history of Palestinian refugee populations in the Middle East. (To my knowledge, Palestinian Americans have been fine and productive members of society.)

Racial theorists are out in full force today.

I do wonder if you all can hear yourself: a lot of subtle implications of genetic defects in Palestinians' character and selective understanding of geopolitics in the region, or just basic societal dynamics.

I invited another commenter to transpose their reasoning to groups it's less popular to openly discriminate, I'd suggest you do the same.

Saying that no nations want to take Palestinian refugees does not make you a racist.

The fact remains; no Middle Eastern nation wants Palestinian refugees, not for their genes, but for their politics.

"Saying that gays steal does not make you homophobic": technically true, but you're being selective with your understanding of facts.

Most states (talking about decision-makers, not populations) don't want to take in large groups of refugees, not because of their genes or politics, but because it has a cost and risks (in terms of integration, gov perception, fuelling far right parties, etc.). Nothing to do with Middle-Eastern/Palestinian.

Even though there are examples of massive refugee intakes by states, everywhere, including in the Middle-East, including of Palestinians, including voluntary.

I'm not saying anything about Palestinians themselves. Only the opinion of others about them.

I'm saying shop owners think that gays steal.

if egypt opened the border, it would mean weapons and bombs flowing from egypt into gaza.

thats not something israel would be excited about

I mean "open the border" to allow Gazans to leave to Egypt. But Egypt (and none other Arab countries) are accepting refugees from Gaza.

More like refugees flowing out, which Egypt doesn't want to deal with.

The Palestinians didn't help their cause with Yasser Arafat's Black September uprising in Jordan. Then they topped that up with strong support for Saddam when he invaded Kuwait. Like the ones in Kuwait were literally betraying Kuwaitis to the Iraqi troops.

Oh, and did I forget Lebanon? They literally fomented the civil war.

At the same time, neither would Egypt. Refugee crisises are messy.

Yes, the "refugee crisis" in Jordan and Lebanon was indeed quite messy...

https://www.thoughtco.com/black-september-jordanian-plo-civi...

https://www.historiascripta.org/post-ww2/the-palestinians-of...

The Israeli openly proposed for the Gaza Palestinians to move to Egypt (effectively ethnic cleansing Gaza, their obvious goal), not that long after 7.10.

Egypt said 'HELL NO', first, because they don't want to deal with Palestinians (both political and economic nightmare), and second because it would have been viewed as ceding to Israelis and helping them cleanse Gaza, which would be highly unpopular among their population.

> The Israeli openly proposed for the Gaza Palestinians to move to Egypt

Yeah, that's not "wide open". Israel would absolutely be happy with a one-way exit gate.

On the contrary, I believe Israel would be delighted. It would lessen the humanitarian burden on them, and force Egypt to deal with the Hamas problem more directly. It will never happen, though. No Arab country will "throw the gates wide open" for Palestinians. They have done so before, several times, and it went very badly.

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