DBWI: Arafat doesn't join Saddam

I wasn't even born yet, but I know that during the Gulf War as Saddam kept launching Scuds to Israel and Saudi Arabia, Arafat, a close ally of Saddam, ordered the Palestinian movements to organize an armed uprising against Israel and to help the Iraqi forces in Kuwait.


What if Arafat hadn't joined Saddam and had stayed neutral
 
For another, the large postwar Palestinian relocation to Jordan doesn't occur. Many people working in Kuwait's service and industrial sectors were Jordanians and Palestinians, who were told to leave after Saddam was defeated. Same thing happened in a number of Gulf States in sympathy with Kuwait. Jordanians still get the worst of the deal due to their country having economic ties to Iraq (a lot of Iraq's imports came in at Aqaba to bypass the embargoes), but the Palestinians may have been exempt - or not, given how a lot of Palestinians were Jordanian citizens.

But it's tricky. The PLO's biggest supporter at the time was Saddam, in an attempt to prove his self-righteous claim as leader of the Arab cause. Without his support, the PLO would be facing a considerable pinch post-Gulf War. Then again, it would have been better to have at least some global sympathy as opposed to very little due to supporting Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
 
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