This morning, I received the most remarkable email from Refugees International, an NGO that describes itself as “an independent humanitarian organization that advocates for lifesaving assistance, human rights, and protection for displaced people and promotes solutions to displacement crises.”
The organization claims to be unaffiliated and independent; however, former heads have served in both the Obama and Biden administrations. George Soros is a former board member, and they have received substantial donations from his Open Society Foundations. They have been staunchly anti-Israel since the outbreak of the war, including calling for an arms embargo and a restoration of UNRWA.
The organization just released a statement condemning President Trump’s call for Egypt and Jordan to take in Palestinian refugees to ease the humanitarian crisis and facilitate the reconstruction of Gaza. The statement opens with an inaccuracy and deteriorates from there.
“U.S. President Donald Trump’s suggestion to ‘clean out’ Gaza and his pressure on Jordan and Egypt to take in expelled Palestinians are deeply alarming and could threaten the fragile ceasefire that his team helped to broker earlier this month,” the statement reads. “Gaza’s Palestinians have been clear that they do not intend to leave, and countries in the region have been clear that they will not be party to ethnic cleansing. The forcible transfer of Gaza’s people would be a blatant crime under international law, and this rhetoric has no precedent across previous administrations of either party.”
This is inaccurate. Trump proposed that other Arab nations increase the number of Palestinian refugees they are accepting from the Gaza Strip. Trump was describing opening the possibility for Gazans to access the fundamental human right of fleeing a combat zone. Allowing the Gazans to relocate temporarily would solve the humanitarian crisis and facilitate reconstruction efforts.
Also, the claim that Palestinians do not want to leave is counterfactual. A poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR), a Palestinian research institute, found that one in four Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank wanted to emigrate. In Gaza, 44% of adults under the age of 30 said that they wanted to leave. This is not a new phenomenon. In 2021, 33% of Gazans and 20% of Palestinians in the West Bank wanted to emigrate, and in 2023, 31% of Gazans and 21% of Palestinians in the West Bank said the same.
The refusal of neighboring Arab countries to accept refugees from Gaza has been glaring. Some would claim that this is due to their reluctance to take part in “ethnic cleansing” should they not be allowed to return. The truth is that regional countries have rejected accepting Palestinian migrants for fear they will radicalize their populations and cause internal strife. In the early 1970s, the PFLP and Black September carried out violent attacks in Jordan, including several attempts to assassinate King Hussein and Jordanian ambassadors in Cairo and England. The PLO, led by Yasser Arafat, played a significant role in the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, targeting Christian civilians with violence.
A policy of keeping civilians in place during a conflict was tried by the United Nations in Bosnia in the 1990s in an attempt to prevent Serbians from ethnically cleansing the region. The then-UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata implemented a new principle she called “preventive protection” and “right to remain,” creating “safe areas” within the war zone. European states seized on the “right to remain” as a rationale to block asylum seekers from fleeing Bosnia, much like what is happening today in connection with Gaza. Despite (or perhaps because of) the UN policies, an estimated million people were displaced, and tens of thousands were killed.
Ironically, organizations like Refugees International and Human Rights Watch are calling for the “right to remain” to be applied to Gaza even when many Gazans want to leave. Their real motive is revealed in the HRW statement, which called for this right to be expressed by allowing the Palestinians to return to their homes…in Israel. After noting that Egypt closed its doors to Gazans, HRW wrote:
“Israeli authorities have consistently denied this right and blocked Palestinian refugees from returning. Since Oct. 7, Israeli authorities have continued to block Palestinians in Gaza from fleeing into neighboring Israel to seek even temporary refuge from the hostilities, in violation of international law.”
I responded to Refugees International by first emphasizing that neither Trump nor the Israeli government was calling for the “forcible transfer” of Palestinians, though it is interesting to note that no international organization spoke out against the forcible transfer of Jews from the same area in 2005:
“Fleeting a war zone is a fundamental human right being denied to the people of Gaza. You should be advocating for countries to take in Gazan refugees. Can it be that you hate Gazans so much that you insist they stay in danger? You are acting as an accomplice to Hamas, which needs the people to remain as human shields. You are motivated by the same hatred of Israel that motivates Hamas. Israel does not want to invade Gaza. We left Gaza in 2005, ethnically cleansing it of Jews. We did not ‘invade Gaza’ after Oct. 7th to grab the land. We responded to a horrific massacre carried out by Hamas and aided by civilians.
“You would rather see Gazans die and suffer than risk having Jews live in Gaza. Your statement reveals your belief that the only place Jews are permitted to live in this part of the world is a sliver of land surrounding Tel Aviv. In 1948, 800,000 Jews were divested of their possessions and expelled from the Arab countries in which they had lived for generations. Have you ever helped a single Jewish refugee?
“Now, you are so afraid that Jews might live in Gaza that you are willing to watch Gazans die, demanding they stay in a warzone. No one objected to Syrians leaving or Afghanis. It is only when Jews are involved that you prefer the death of innocents. You want them to die so you can blame the Jews.
“Hatred of Jews is so deeply ingrained that you can’t see it, even in yourself. Israeli soldiers have been dying so that we can eliminate Hamas without killing Gazan civilians unnecessarily. We could have simply bombed Gaza, and not a single soldier would have died. But we care more about Gazans than Hamas does.
“Tell me, why didn’t Hamas open the doors to its tunnels and allow the people to shelter in them? Not a single Gazan would have died. Hamas wants the people to die so that the world can hate Jews. And so do you.”
In their cult of victimhood, the left-wing wants the Palestinians to remain as victims, and the highest level of victimhood is martyrdom. Indeed, when the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was established in 1949 to deal exclusively with Palestinian refugees, it first redefined the term ‘refugee’ to differentiate itself from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which helped every other type of refugee. The UNHCR defines refugees as, “people who have fled war, violence, conflict or persecution and have crossed an international border to find safety in another country.” UNRWA amended this definition to include the descendants of Palestine refugee males, including adopted children, making Palestinian refugee status ancestral. It is important to note that the UNHCR definition states that if a person fleeing persecution has acquired citizenship or the rights of citizenship in a country where they have sought refuge, he or she would not be eligible to receive refugee status. Under the UNHCR definition, almost all people served by UNRWA would lose their refugee status.
Like most of Trump’s policies, relocating the Gazans is rooted in common sense and would immediately solve the problem. But it seems clear that, like UNRWA, Refugees International and Human Rights Watch want Gazans to remain in place to perpetuate the perception of Palestinians as victims and Israel as an aggressor, no matter how many Palestinians have to suffer and die.
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