Chair of Arab election campaign for Trump blasts president’s ‘wild’ call to relocate Palestinians

The chairman of a group that lobbied Arab and Muslim Americans to vote for Donald Trump in the recent election comes out strongly against the US president’s call yesterday for Jordan and Egypt to take in Palestinians from war-torn Gaza.

“We categorically reject the president’s suggestion that the Palestinians in Gaza be moved — apparently forcefully — to either Egypt or Jordan,” Arab Americans for Trump chairman Bishara Bahbah tells The Times of Israel.

“What the Palestinians need right now is a continuation of the ceasefire, more aid, a reconstruction plan, and for the Palestinian Authority to take over the Gaza Strip,” he continues.

“We don’t need wildish claims or statements relating to the fate of the Palestinians. The only resolution to the Israel-Palestine question is a two-state solution. Period,” adds Bahbah, who did not provide his organization’s size but insisted that it played a central role in electing Trump and represents a majority of the views of the 3.8 million Arab Americans.

After this story was published, Sam Yono, an Iraqi-American community activist asserted to The Times of Israel that Bahbah “only represents himself, not the Arab-Americans who worked with the Trump campaign in Michigan.”

Asked for his thoughts on Trump’s comments regarding Gaza, Yono acknowledged that he wasn’t particularly familiar with the issue but that he trusted the president’s judgement.

Trump did win a plurality of the Arab and Muslim vote in Michigan, flipping a swing state that former US president Joe Biden won in 2020.

While Trump told reporters yesterday that the relocation of Palestinians that he currently envisions could be temporary, Bahbah doesn’t buy that would be the case. “There is nothing that is temporary.”

“This is not what we voted for as Arab Americans for Trump,” he says.

“He promised us an end to the wars, a lasting peace in the Middle East, which is satisfactory to all parties,” Bahbah continues. “This might be satisfactory to Ben Gvir and Smotrich, but it’s not satisfactory to the Palestinians and the Arabs.”

Asked how the idea Trump raised may have come about, he speculates that Trump saw pictures of Gaza’s devastation and determined that it needed to be “swept from end to end.”

However, Bahbah argues the reconstruction process can be done gradually and that Palestinians need not be forced to leave the Strip in order for it to take place.

He claims that Trump’s advisers are far “more hawkish” than the president and are counseling him accordingly.

“They’re absolutely hawkish to the point where they’ve told me not to talk to them about a two-state solution and to come up with any other alternative. But there is none,” Bahbah asserts.

“The president has said to me that he supports a two-state solution. He has also said that he doesn’t care whether it’s one state or two states, but apparently, some of these advisors are getting to him and putting ideas in his mind,” he adds.

The Arab Americans for Trump chair speculates that pushback from Egypt, Jordan, the PA and the international community will lead to the shelving of that idea.

“But if he doubles down, the Arab world has money to make up for US aid,” Bahbah adds, referring to the massive amounts of aid that Washington provides to Egypt and Jordan that could well be used as leverage to coax them into taking in Palestinians.