Half of All Palestinians Are Expats

And Many of Their Brethren Have No Interest To Go Back

About half of all Palestinians – six million - voluntarily live outside of Gaza and the West Bank. This inconvenient fact is ignored when we discuss where Palestinians call home. Some choose to live in the Palestinian territories, but at least half have shunned these lands - and for a very long time.

Up to 300,000 Palestinians currently reside in Europe. A half million live in Chile and hundreds of thousands more live throughout South America. More than 200,000 are in the U.S. and influenced the 2004 election of Donald Trump.

In the Middle East, more than 2 million live in Israel as full fledged citizens who can vote and have representation in the Israeli Knesset, the country’s parliament. Others have found successful livelihoods in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, and Lebanon and Jordan.

Having established themselves for half a century or more in their adopted homes, few consider going back to the West Bank or Gaza. So living outside of the Gaza Strip isn’t unthinkable. In fact, it has been thinkable for quite some time.

And there is another special kind of Palestinian expat that has been a well-kept secret. This group consists of fabulously wealthy Palestinians who are derisively called by the Palestinian man-on-the-street as the “exiled bourgeoise of Palestine.”

Pamela Ann Smith, writing for the progressive Middle East Research and Information Project in 1986 first described this group of wealthy Palestinians as the exile Bourgeoisie of Palestine.

Smith wrote then that the rise of the Palestinian’s Black September terror organization and the radicalization of its population “led to the emigration of substantial numbers of the Palestinian middle class, to Cyprus, Amman, Paris and London. As the (Lebanese) war dragged on, many began to build more permanent ties in their new places of refuge. Today Palestinian firms play a leading role within the Arab community in London and, to a lesser extent, in Paris as well.”

As the Washington producer for ABC’s “Good Morning America,” I once personally met hundreds of these well-heeled Palestinians at a 1993 grand soiree in Washington, DC. I’ll never quite forget the experience. They screamed of unspeakable wealth and contrary to Muslim law, enthusiastically crowded the hotel’s well-kept bar.

These Palestinian expats didn’t reside in the dusty West Bank or in Gaza or in other parts of the Middle East. These exiles called home in places like London, Paris, Geneva, Milan, or Florence. The largest expat community outside of the Middle East was there too, from Santiago, Chile.

Far from the media’s gaze, these are wealthy and highly successful Palestinians. They are largely invisible, and many have little interest in living in Gaza or in the West Bank.

One wealthy Palestinian who did attract some media attention about his unseemly riches was the Palestinian Liberation Organization leader, Yassar Arafat. Just before his death, CBS “60 Minutes” estimated his personal wealth to be between $1 and $3 billion.

CBS reported that a large portion of Arafat’s wealth came from corruption and from secret sweetheart deals that were hidden from the Palestinian people. They reported, “part of the Palestinian leader's wealth was in a secret portfolio worth close to $1 billion -- with investments in companies like a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Ramallah, a Tunisian cell phone company and venture capital funds in the U.S. and the Cayman Islands.”

His wife, Zuha Arafat, a Palestinian Christian, married the PLO leader when he was 61 and she was 27. She was already living in Paris, where Arafat eventually died.

The average Palestinian apparently despised Zuha. The Times of Melbourne reported in 2004,” On the streets, Suha is more often condemned as a scheming minx who bewitched the leader and ripped off vast sums of public money to finance a lavish lifestyle in Paris.”

Their only child was daughter Zahwa who was born in 1995 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.Neuilly-sur-Seine is one of the most affluent areas of France and it’s the wealthiest and the most expensive suburb of Paris.

Zahwa is estimated by Israeli sources to be worth as much as $8 billion. Although highly secretive, she reportedly lives in luxury with prime real estate in London, Paris and Malta. Despite this, she is still considered a “refugee” and is eligible for UNRWA funds – welfare payments from the highly corrupt United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

In 2024, President Biden, along with a dozen other countries, halted payments to UNRWA after it was discovered that members of the relief organization enthusiastically took part in the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led slaughter, killing 1,200 and seizing 250 hostages.

Many years earlier, in 1993, I had the opportunity to meet and socialize with many of the Suha Arafat’s affluent contemporaries. In September of that year, Arafat traveled to DC to sign a peace accord with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. They did so on the South Lawn of the White House. A beaming Bill Clinton stood beside them.

To celebrate the event, thousands of the wealthy Palestinians filled a deluxe DC hotel then called the “ANA Hotel,” named after the Japanese airline.

The ANA was an exclusive, four diamond-rated hotel. When you entered, you faced a three tier Italianate fountain. The ninth floor was a secure floor, isolated from the rest of the hotel for security. There, Arafat and his PLO staff resided.

The Presidential Suite, where Arafat likely stayed featured portraits of George and Martha Washington. The hallways were decorated with portraits of previous First Ladies.

I was asked by my “Good Morning America” bosses in New York to try to book Arafat or one of his top advisors on our morning show.

So, I showed up at the hotel in DC’s affluent Foggy Bottom. The hotel was bustling with the Palestinian elite’s “beautiful people.” They mobbed the hotel’s lobby, bar and restaurant. They were elegant. The women wore sexy haute couture dresses that hugged them. The men wore custom tailored suits.

I knew Hanan Ashwari, the PLO’s central spokeswoman who resided in one of the PLO’s ninth floor suites. She was more modestly dressed than those socializing in the hotel. And she was on her game with American reporters: friendly, articulate and energetic.

As a reporter and producer, I wanted to understand: who are these well-dressed people swarming throughout the hotel? I spent several afternoons and evenings to meet as many Palestinian as possible. At first, I naively asked them where they lived in the Palestinian territories.

One well-dressed young Palestinian at the bar sneered at me when I mentioned, “The West Bank.” He retorted, “I haven’t been to the West Bank in ages.” His parents were originally from Ramallah, the West Bank’s capital. Home as it turned out was in London. He was born there.

From then on, I didn’t ask where in the Palestinian territories they called home. I simply asked where they lived.

As it turns out, they were living in Paris, Florence, Milan, Stockholm, New York, Geneva and Santiago, Chile. Santiago has the largest diaspora community with today more than a half million Palestinians living there.

And while most Palestinians are regarded as leftists, in Chile the Palestinians were opposed to the socialist government of Salvadore Allende and welcomed the military coup that installed Gen. Augusto Pinochet, according to Palestine studies.org.

The idea of population transfers to other countries isn’t new. In fact, it’s what the United States has been built on. Many have added value to other countries and to their families, translating a near-disasters into success stories.

The movement of populations isn’t unique. In fact, it’s the story of our modern time.

As Sadanand Dhume, a Wall Street Journal columnist recently wrote, “Many population transfers have taken place over the past century. In the 1920s, Greece and Turkey agreed to a forced population swap: Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey moved to Greece, while Muslims in Greece moved to Turkey. After World War II, millions of Indians and Pakistanis were forced to find new homes, as were ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. In the 1970s, Uganda expelled Indians. Only in the Palestinian case has the refugee question festered endlessly.

So, I salute the exiled bourgeoise Palestinians. They are a roaring success to their expat communities and proud members of their adopted countries.