WI: Saudi Arabia Accepts Palestinian Refugees

kernals12

Banned
The Israel-Palestinian conflict doesn't need an introduction. But the fundamental problem is millions of people are forced to live in perpetual statelessness and seemingly no country wants them. Saudi Arabia has an insatiable demand for labor for work in petrochemicals, for construction, and as domestic servants. IOTL India has been the main source of migrant workers. But what if it was Palestine instead?

The main problem would be that it would implicitly recognize Israel's legitimacy.
 
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The PLO assassinates a monarch and instigates a civil war. Lebanon thought it could get away with keeping them around as a class of non-citizen labourers, it didn't go so well.
 
Refugee camps would probably spring up all over Saudi Arabia. Lebanon holds up to 448,569 registered refugees with the largest camp being Rashideh, established in 1963, which holds 31,478 refugees. Jordan, the country most prominently associated with Palestinian refugees, holds up to 2,034,861 registered refugees, with the largest camp being Talbeh, established in 1968, which holds up to 7,000 refugees.

So, if Saudi Arabia is serious about introducing a subclass of exploitable workers, then they are going to find a lot of mouths that need feeding, so Saudi Arabia would probably have to work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, since there is no way Saudi Arabia is going to be able feed their own people and the influx of Palestinian refugees.

I should remind you that Saudi Arabia is mostly desert. The cities are basically islands, so the UNCHR is going to have to construct large facilities that cover a large swath of desert to accommodate the refugees, which is expensive and judging by how hot the Arabian Peninsula can get, is probably not conducive to their health.
 
Plus, there is now the problem of the Palestinian question now being Saudi Arabia's problem, which they really, really don't need or want. Indian and Pakistani workers are poor, generally unskilled and under-educated, and eager to work for a pittance, especially since the Gulf states authorities confiscate their passports on arrival at the country and only give them back when they fulfill their (very unfair and backbreaking) labor contracts. The more skilled workers come in on corporate contracts, and thus aren't covered by this question.

The Palestinians have a chip on their shoulder the size of Colorado, and at least expect polite treatment from fellow Arabs as a result of their plight. When the Saudis treat them like shit, it'll just cause the PLO to infiltrate their ranks and raise hell for the Saudis down the line. Many Palestinians would have had somewhat passable education and livelihoods prior to 1948, so treating them as migrant laborers would be even more insulting. It's why Lebanon and Jordan ran into problems. Syria and Egypt got a free pass by having far less Palestinians than either, and having a larger army and population in case the PLO tries anything.

Plus, the Palestinians - unlike the Pakis and Indians - are refugees, and their conditions would invite scrutiny by the UN. Sure, said scrutiny would be ineffectual, but it would bring a lot of unpleasantness to light and further piss off the Palestinians.
 
The PLO assassinates a monarch and instigates a civil war. Lebanon thought it could get away with keeping them around as a class of non-citizen labourers, it didn't go so well.

So basically the result likely either being Black September and Lebanese Civil War combined with a potentially successful 1969 Nasserist coup in Saudi Arabia or later the Saudi Arabian version of the Palestinian exodus from Kuwait in the aftermath of the Gulf War (especially in the event they are suspected of supporting an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia as was apparently the case in OTL Kuwait)?
 
Many Palestinians did live and work in Saudi OTL. I know some. I'm sure some still do. Like many migrant workers, their paycheques were sent home to support families in the territories. This became a problem in the Gulf War when Yasser Arafat declared support for Saddam. Saudi deported their Palestinian workers en mass, and cut off that revenue stream.
 
There was a political reason the refugee camps stayed that way, even though they are multi-generational "camps", with multi story concrete buildings. Part of what was going on was that Arafat did not want the Palestinian diaspora to get too settled in their countries of refuge, because the project was to go back "home" to the state of Palestine. I am talking now of the '60s and '70s.
 
There was a political reason the refugee camps stayed that way, even though they are multi-generational "camps", with multi story concrete buildings. Part of what was going on was that Arafat did not want the Palestinian diaspora to get too settled in their countries of refuge, because the project was to go back "home" to the state of Palestine. I am talking now of the '60s and '70s.

I'd say most of it was more along the lines of neighboring Arab countries really really not wanting to have to deal with actually integrating huge numbers of refugees and accepting they weren't going anywhere.
 
I'd say most of it was more along the lines of neighboring Arab countries really really not wanting to have to deal with actually integrating huge numbers of refugees and accepting they weren't going anywhere.
Yes, and the political Palestinians made the worst houseguests ever. In Jordan and Lebanon they made a sort of state within a state, and used the host countries as bases to attack Israel and its Western supporters. And it was rightwing Christian terrorism against Palestinian civilian refugees that kicked off the Lebanese Civil War.
 
Yes, and the political Palestinians made the worst houseguests ever. In Jordan and Lebanon they made a sort of state within a state, and used the host countries as bases to attack Israel and its Western supporters. And it was rightwing Christian terrorism against Palestinian civilian refugees that kicked off the Lebanese Civil War.
A few major complications with the Palestinians:
  • The expectation that they would return home soon. The longer their plight lasted, the more resentful and desperate they became.
  • While they were Arabs among fellow Arabs, the whole "Arab Unity" thing is tricky. Imagine if Mexico took over California and the Californians had to go in, say, Canada. Ultimately, they never really jelled with the locals, having formed their own national identity. This got more pronounced after 1967, when it became clear the other Arab nations didn't have the ability to remove Israel from Palestinian territory.
  • Lebanon was a major ethnic faultline; the Palestinians were just the latest comer to a struggling mess of ethnic distrust and enmity, basically the straw that broke the mule's back. The Lebanese didn't want a newcomer to make things worse, and the Jordanians had too many Palestinians to begin with. Neither wanted to accept the Palestinians as a new ethnic group, and forced them to live in isolation in their refugee camps. Naturally, that resulted in the camps becoming states within a state, complicating matters.
The 1970 Black September incident was a severe lapse in judgment by the PLO; they had a host state, with a large popular support base, and promptly wore out their welcome (well, they wore it out much fast than they should have), and effectively worsening things to the point of confrontation.
 
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