Quote Originally Posted by Taunton Blue Genie View Post
I note that you have mentioned a couple of times about Palestinian children being brought to the UK but wouldn't they find Arabic countries less alien?
Quote Originally Posted by Gofer Blue View Post
Good question. It's a bit telling that we don't hear anything along these lines, although I may have missed it. Could it be that Palestinians are persona non grata in other Arabic speaking nations? E.g. Egypt seems to have kept their border with Gaza firmly shut apart from a few who need urgent medical care.
Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon have been resisting calls (from Israel and others) for them to take in large numbers of Gazans. Egypt has kept the border fairly tight - although they have still let almost 100,000 Gazans cross in the past 9 months - before that they didn't have a major Palestinian refugee population.

I think there are two main reasons:

Jordan already has 2.4m Palestinian refugees living in camps; Syria has 584k; Lebanon 491k; and even Saudi Arabia has 240k. They don't want to add to an already difficult situation for the refugees and host countries.

The other reason is that they don't want to collude in ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Palestine. They know that driving arabs out of the West Bank and Gaza so those territories can be fully occupied and annexed is an Israeli government aim - articulated by Netanyahu as much as Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Their demand is for a ceasefire, release of hostages, aid, power, sanitation and water, followed by urgent rebuilding - so that people can live in their homeland and not be part of another Nakba.

A 'Kinder Transport' for orphaned Palestinian children might well have different motives and might in a limited way be a good thing - whether to neighbouring countries or to 'the West'. But it might still play in to a bigger Gazan ethnic cleansing project.