With war underway in Gaza, President el-Sissi of Egypt vows to bar the door against any Palestinian Arab refugees. He echoes the refusal of Arab states to welcome the Arabs displaced by the United Nations’ partition of Palestine in 1947 and the wars for survival of Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973. What a contrast with World War II, after which 20 million Europeans displaced by border changes were resettled in what Churchill called a “clean sweep.”

The Israel-Hamas war will not be resolved “at the expense of Egypt,” Mr. el-Sissi says, referring to what the AP calls “fears Israel may try to push Gaza’s population into the Sinai peninsula.” The Hashemite king, Abdullah II, calls this “a red line,” declaring “no refugees to Jordan and also no refugees to Egypt.” One Egyptian official asks, per the Financial Times: “You want us to take a million people? Well, I am going to send them to Europe.” 

So much for pan-Arab sentiment. The post-World War II resettlements in Europe followed the drawing of new borders as a defeated Nazi Germany ceded land that was picked up by — or returned to — Poland, and the Soviet Union’s borders moved west. Germans living in the new Polish state, and other enclaves in Central Europe, were relocated. Poles, too, retrenched to their new borders. “No more mixture of populations,” Churchill growled.

It’s not our intention here to put the gloss on the trauma of these postwar resettlements. Some cases uprooted communities that had occupied land for centuries. Wars, however, have consequences for the defeated — including the loss of territory and the displacement of populations. Yet even though Israel won its wars against the Arab nations who sought to destroy the Jewish State, Arab leaders never accepted the full implications or the responsibilities of defeat.

In 1948, on the heels of Israel’s declaration of independence, forces from Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia invaded, seeking to prevent the formation of a state that, it should be noted, was populated in part by Jews displaced by Nazi predations during the war in Europe. Yet the Arab armies were defeated by the upstart Jewish state, and Israel ended the war with more territory than it had at the outset.

In contrast with Europe, which accepted the borders redrawn after the guns went silent, the Arab world merely bided its time, refusing to acknowledge its need to find new homes for the Palestinian Arabs displaced in the fighting. Arabs call the outcome a Nakba, or catastrophe. The noble comrades on the left see “no lasting solution to the Palestinian refugee crisis until Israel respects Palestinian refugees’ right to return” — meaning Israel’s destruction.

The Arab world’s refusal to accept a Jewish state in its midst prompted another war in 1967, this time a pre-emptive attack by Israel on Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. The ensuing victory led to further expansion of Israel’s borders, and an accompanying increase in its Palestinian population. Another attack by Egypt and Syria on Israel in 1973 ended inconclusively but made clear the Jewish state would not be erased from the Middle Eastern map.

At that point, far-sighted Arab leaders would have made provision for the future of the Palestinians. Instead, the Palestinians were left as pawns, especially as the Soviet Union sought to curry favor with Arab nations in the Cold War. Even Arabs who fled to Jordan were given no option to naturalize there, Amnesty International notes. Repressive Arab regimes, in league with the United Nations, exploited the Palestinians’ fate for their own reasons. 

Consider how, after the creation of Israel, almost a million Jews in Muslim countries, including some living in places like Baghdad since the days of the Biblical “Babylonian Captivity,” were expelled. They were welcomed in Israel,  found new homes, and thrived. One can imagine how much brighter the prospects for the Palestinians Arabs would be today had Arab leaders, decades ago, taken a clear-eyed approach to the question of resettlement.

We grasp that the Palestinian Arabs have no state. They rejected compromise at every turn. Israel accepted compromise, which led to their state in the first place. Handed Gaza, Palestinian Arabs used it to make war. We once asked Ariel Sharon, then a leading hawk in exile from politics and on his farm in the Negev, how he’d respond were America to offer the Palestinian Arabs green cards. “Why don’t they live here?” he said. All Israel ever heard back was terror.