The Palestinian expulsion from the Gulf is John Kiriakou’s account of the mass removal of Palestinian residents from Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia after the 1991 Gulf War. He treats it as the structural fact behind two later ones, the Palestinians’ inability to recover politically, and the Arab silence he sees around Israel’s later conduct.
Baker’s ask and Arafat’s answer
The sequence, in Kiriakou’s telling, ran from Baghdad’s August 2, 1990 invasion of Kuwait. “The ruling family fled to Saudi Arabia. The Iraqis came in and just started slaughtering people, killing civilians, killing government officials, killing Kuwaiti military people who had stayed back to fight.”[1]
Secretary of State James Baker went to Yasser Arafat with a direct proposition: “You need to be on the right side of this. We are going to push Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and you need to be with us.” Arafat “sided with Saddam Hussein just like the government of Yemen did and the government of Cuba.”[2]
The Security Council vote
Yemen and Cuba were sitting on the UN Security Council at the time. “The permanent members, the US, Russia, China, France and the UK all voted yes on the use of force. The only, the vote was 9 to 2. The only two that voted no were Yemen and Cuba with the support of the Palestine Liberation Organization.”[2][3]
The expulsion
When Kuwait was liberated in February 1991, “almost every Palestinian in the country was expelled. And not just from Kuwait, from Bahrain and from the United Arab Emirates as well and from Saudi Arabia and replaced with Filipinos, Indians, Pakistanis.”[3]
The Palestinians who left, in Kiriakou’s account, were not marginal labour. “The Palestinians made up the entire middle class in the Persian Gulf. It was the Palestinians who were the professors, the lawyers, the teachers, the bankers, the engineers, and all of a sudden they’re just cast out and they’ve never recovered.”[4]
The rule Kiriakou draws
He pairs the Palestinian outcome with a second one: “The Palestinians have never recovered, just like the Yemenis have never recovered. Yemen is a failed state now because of that one decision in 1990 to support Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.”[4]
He uses the same history to explain the Abraham Accords, the ease with which the Gulf states could be brought to recognise Israel without insisting on anything for the Palestinians, because the Palestinian population had already been displaced from those states thirty years earlier: “Well, there was nothing for the Palestinians. They were screwed.”[5]