The Sinai Solution: Revolting against resettlement in the 1950s

This article is the third installment of a three-part series on the history of Israeli efforts to re-expel Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt. Part one can be read here, and part two here. 

In early February, US President Donald Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who continues to evade an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, and announced a plan to “take over” Gaza and displace its Palestinian inhabitants into neighboring countries. In response, Arab leaders convened an emergency summit in Cairo this week to endorse a counterproposal, spearheaded by Egypt, to rebuild and govern Gaza without displacing Palestinians.

While the present moment might prove to be pivotal for the future of the Arab world, it also marks the latest chapter in a long history of Israeli efforts, often backed by Western powers, to resettle Palestinians from Gaza in Egypt.

The Gaza Strip as we know it today is a product of the Nakba. Nearly one quarter of the Palestinians who were expelled from their homes in 1947-48 — and who numbered around 200,000 refugees — clustered into a small piece of territory along the Mediterranean Sea that comprised just over one percent of historic Palestine. After the 1949 Egyptian-Israeli General Armistice Agreement, the area came under Egyptian administration, and Mohamed Naguib, leader of the Egyptian Free Officers, later renamed it the Gaza Strip. With Israel seizing much of the surrounding fertile land, the enclave quickly became overcrowded and impoverished.

Between 1949 and 1956, thousands of Palestinian refugees in Gaza (as well as in the West Bank, Syria and Lebanon) tried to return to their homes on the other side of the armistice line that demarcated Israeli-controlled territory after the 1948 war. In response, the Israeli state established a special border police force, constructed new settlements and carried out retaliatory attacks that killed thousands of Palestinians who sought to reclaim their lands and possessions. In August 1953, the Israeli military attacked the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, committing a massacre that killed at least 50 Palestinians. In the years that followed, confrontations across the armistice line became more common.

In this context, international powers sought to liquidate the Palestinian refugee question by promoting the idea of resettlement — a proposal rooted in a longer history of Zionist advocacy for the transfer of Palestinians from their homeland.

A few months after the 1949 armistice agreements, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was established to provide Palestinian refugees with humanitarian assistance, including employment, healthcare, education and social services. While it remains essential in supporting Palestinian refugees today, UNRWA was not created to address the underlying reasons behind their displacement. From its inception, the agency’s mission carried an inherent contradiction: it classified Palestinian refugees as a humanitarian category, while they themselves viewed their status as a political one. As a result, UNRWA often provided relief in ways that could undermine Palestinians’ rights to repatriation and citizenship. The agency began to work with the pre-revolutionary Egyptian government to survey land in the Sinai desert for potential agricultural reclamation and resettlement — a project it continued after the Free Officers deposed the monarchy in 1952. The following year, Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Fawzy agreed to cooperate with UNRWA on a scheme to reclaim tens of thousands feddans of agricultural land in northwestern Sinai to accommodate 60,000 Palestinian refugees from Gaza.

At the same time, Palestinians began to establish and/or reconstitute their own political organizations after their displacement. Unlike refugees expelled to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, who were absorbed into the political dynamics of those countries, Palestinians in Gaza organized on their own terms. The Muslim Brotherhood maintained an active presence, with some members later becoming key founders of the Fatah movement, while the communist party was revived in 1953. Opposing the resettlement plan quickly became a top priority on the party’s agenda.

The intensification of Israeli military incursions into Gaza, the pursuit of resettlement schemes by international powers, and the revitalization of Palestinian political life soon converged into a pivotal conjuncture. On February 28, 1955, the Israeli military launched an assault on Gaza, known as Operation Black Arrow, whereby it killed more than three dozen soldiers under Egyptian command in the strip.

Meanwhile, Palestinian communists who learned of the resettlement plan publicized its details and joined the Muslim Brotherhood in leading a two-day uprising that would prove to be consequential for the region. Known as the March Intifada, it was organized by a committee in which members of the Teachers Union played a key role, including Fathi Balawi from the Muslim Brotherhood and renowned poet and communist Mu’in Bseiso.

A first-hand account of these events appears in Bseiso’s diaries, Dafatir Filastiniyya, which were published more than two decades later. In mid-February, he obtained a draft of UNRWA’s Sinai project report, and the party proceeded to print copies and distribute them across the strip.

The rebellion began immediately after Israel’s Operation Black Arrow. The first demonstrations were led by student committees, who were soon joined by teachers, workers, shopkeepers, and peasants. “The streets of Gaza, from Shujaiyya to Rimal, were filled with refugees from every camp,” writes Bseiso. “They were on the sidewalks, under the trees, in the schoolyards, around the streetlights, and near the Teachers’ Union headquarters opposite the police station.” Knowing that the promotion of such a scheme by international powers would frustrate the right of Palestinian refugees to return, the demonstrators chanted “لا توطين ولا إسكان... يا عملاء الأمريكان” (No settlement, no relocation! Oh, you American agents).

The organizing committee that led the uprising demanded the cancellation of the resettlement plan; the training and arming of Palestinians refugees to defend themselves against Israel’s raids; the trial of police officers who shot at demonstrators; the right to assemble, publish and strike; and complete amnesty for demonstrators. On March 3, the Egyptian military governor of Gaza acquiesced to these demands, and Bseiso announced the defeat of the Sinai project from Jabalia refugee camp.

The episode marked a significant historical development that should be understood in the context of decolonization and the international rivalries of the Cold War. It happened at a moment when the United States was supplanting Britain as the leading imperial power in the world.

One of the ways that the United States sought to extend its global influence was by forming military alliances. Less than a year after taking power in Egypt, the Free Officers were courted by US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to join what would become the Baghdad Pact — an extension of NATO into the Middle East. Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser rejected the alliance, viewing it as a renewed form of Western imperialism, and actively discouraged other Arab states from joining. Two months later, he launched Sawt al-‘Arab, a regional radio service promoting pan-Arab unity, and soon published his manifesto, Falsafat al-Thawra.

In February 1955, just four days before Operation Black Arrow, the pact was officially signed by Iraq and Turkey and was soon joined by Britain, Pakistan and Iran. In response, Nasser intensified his promotion of pan-Arab solidarity, participated in the 1955 Bandung conference of Asian and African states (many of which had just achieved independence), and pursued an official policy of non-alignment (or positive neutrality) — positions for which he became widely celebrated in an age of global decolonization.

In this context, Operation Black Arrow and its aftermath represented a turning point in the Arab world. It sabotaged a secret US-British initiative known as the Alpha Plan to reach a settlement between Israel and Arab states while effectively circumventing Palestinians. Yet it failed to curb Palestinian efforts to fight for a return to their homeland. It also prompted Nasser to take a more combative stance toward Israel. Whereas he had previously avoided conflict with the young settler state, Nasser would pivot to a policy of what historian Muhammad Said Hamdan has described as “cautious confrontation.” After the raid, Nasser intensified his search for weapons to give Egypt some degree of military parity with Israel. This eventually led to his decision in October 1955 to break the Western monopoly on arms provisions to the region by purchasing Soviet weaponry through Czechoslovakia. Although Egyptian authorities imprisoned leaders of the uprising, including Bseiso who spent two years in an Egyptian jail, they still fulfilled other demands of the March Intifada. The Egyptian government abandoned the Sinai resettlement plan. Meanwhile, Nasser began to actively organize Palestinian guerilla forces under the leadership of Egyptian officers, sponsor raids across the armistice lines, and engage in preventative combat that lasted until the 1956 Tripartite Aggression, a coordinated military invasion of Egypt by Israel, Britain and France.

The history of Israeli military raids into Gaza, international resettlement schemes, and Palestinian rebellion in the 1950s has echoes in the present. It profoundly reshaped the relationship of both Palestinians and Arab countries towards the Israeli settler-colonial project, and it did so amidst a world-historic shift in the structure and locus of global hegemony. It also reveals a longer history of Western/Israeli pressure on Arab governments — through financial incentives, diplomatic coercion, and/or military force — to carry out the resettlement of Palestinians, often under humanitarian pretenses, at the expense of their repatriation. Just as those efforts were widely opposed by Palestinians 70 years ago, they continue to face stiff resistance today.