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President Donald Trump announced his call to relocate Gazans to Egypt on February 5, 2025, but his plan is actually 72 years old.
In 1953, Egypt and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) signed onto a plan to resettle 120,000 Arab refugees from Gaza.
In 1955, the two sides presented their findings: At the cost of $200 million ($2.4 billion in 2025 dollars), the Egyptian town of Qantara, east of Suez and 130 miles southwest of Gaza, would become the refugees' new home. Egypt would divert water from the Nile to allow agriculture and a self-sustaining economy.
But in retribution to the refusal of the United States and United Kingdom to fund the Aswan Dam's construction, Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser pulled the plug on the Gaza-Sinai plan.
Since then, the plan has been largely forgotten, except in the annals of revisionist Palestinian history, which anachronistically projects the "right of return" back into history. In the revisionist approach, the Gazans thwarted the Sinai resettlement conspiracy with their "1955 March Intifada."
In 1953, Egypt and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) signed onto a plan to resettle 120,000 Arab refugees from Gaza.
The root of that uprising—what contemporaries called the 1955 Outburst—laid with "communists, Muslim Brotherhood members, and independents" who held their meetings "at the UNRWA Teachers' Syndicate headquarters." Their demands included "the cancelation of the Sinai relocation project; [and] the training and arming of Palestinians in the camps."
Egypt, then the sovereign over the Gaza Strip, promised to "end the Sinai relocation project," but quickly broke its promise. The Nasser regime instead undertook mass arrests and threw its communist and Muslim Brotherhood leaders into prison, where they remained until July 1957. Cairo also dismantled the UNRWA Teachers' Syndicate in Gaza.
Nasser then continued with the Gaza-to-Sinai relocation project, signing the joint plan with UNRWA in July 1955. Nasser eventually pulled out of the relocation plan for two reasons:
First, he was frustrated with the Eisenhower administration for withdrawing its funding of the Aswan Dam. Second, he feared communists on the left and Islamists on the right might use the issue to outflank him. As a result of such domestic machinations, 120,000 Arabs remained stuck in a resourceless strip instead of relocating to an economically viable spot, less than 150 miles to the south.
Intra-Arab rivalry and populism has long cost the Palestinians dearly. Instead of resettling those who left Israel after 1948 in places with growth potential, different Arab factions promised them a "return" that left them in destitution for more than seven decades. It is this destitution that Trump wants to end.
Palestinians "deserve a far better life," he said in 2020. "They deserve the chance to achieve their extraordinary potential. Palestinians have been trapped in a cycle of terrorism, poverty, and violence, exploited by those seeking to use them as pawns to advance terrorism and extremism." He promised to "find a constructive path."
If the world pools some $10 billion, it can spend $2 billion to build a city in the Sinai with a modern infrastructure.
In 2025, the U.S. president recognizes he must take the wind out of the sails of those who want Gazans to be perpetual victims whose victimhood they can use against Israel. While many on the left and right in the United States reacted with fury to Trump's proposal, they do not realize how a similar plan was once the best option to end the dispute.
Had the Egypt-UNRWA plan succeeded in 1955, Arabs would have been resettled in an area with a beachfront that was 365 square miles, two and a half times the size of the Gaza Strip, with water resources and a viable economy that relied on both agriculture and services, given the proximity of Qantara to the Suez Canal and Port Said.
It is not too late to revive the plan. If the world pools some $10 billion, it can spend $2 billion to build a city in the Sinai with a modern infrastructure that includes solar-powered desalination plants and an airport under Egyptian sovereignty. It can still make use of Port Said, while international donors can use the $8 billion to lease the tiny strip from Egypt for 99 years.
Why lease? Because as Israeli thinker Micah Goodman argues in Catch-67, it is easier to arrive at a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians as long as it is not called "final." Cairo, meanwhile, could use the money to replenish its depleted foreign currency reserves.
Let Gazans relocate to a new city and let future generations worry about a "final settlement." When Palestinians have the benefit of hindsight, they may not find uncompromising nationalism and self-victimization to be their best option.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.