Former US ambassador to UN calls to resettle Gaza's population

Eliyahu Tulshinski

December 5, 2023

Former National Security Adviser and UN Ambassador John Bolton has come out in favor of ending the "hereditary refugee status" of Gaza's population by actively resettling them throughout the world.

“Hereditary refugees”

Speaking in an interview on NewsNation Prime, Bolton argued against the UN policy that has kept generations of Gazans trapped in the welfare network undermining efforts to assimilate them into viable economic communities. The majority of Gazans are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Arabs who fled the British Mandate after Egypt and other nations told them to leave temporarily to allow the carpet bombing of Jews living in the Mandate.

These descendants were born into refugee status, receiving stipends and goods so long as they remained confined to so called refugee “camps” (which are actually urban areas with high rise buildings). With little economic activity beyond collecting food and other handouts from the U.N., Bolton denies the sustainability of the model:

I think the long term issue here has to be what is the future for the people of Gaza and, in fact, Gaza for five decades now has been essentially a large refugee camp. It's not sustainable. It's not a viable economy. There's no real economic activity there. There wasn't before October the 7th and there won't be after.

If this was true before the current war, it is much more so today when Hamas has already forced the IDF to attack more than half of Gaza's residential units by embedding itself throughout the civilian population:

For the good of the people living in Gaza today, since they can't go back to where they fled [from], and many of them have been in Gaza as hereditary refugees, the best thing to do across the Middle East is to find ways to resettle them.

Bolton notes that the resettlement of Gazans would be in line with international refugee doctrine:

That’s not forcible displacement, that is standard international refugee doctrine. If you can’t go back to your place of origin, the international community finds ways to resettle you and for the people to become part of a real functioning economy to give their families, their children, a vision of the future. I think that’s best for the Palestinian residents of Gaza.

Weaponization of refugees

Frontline News previously reported that more than 90% of Gazans would voluntarily settle elsewhere if afforded the opportunity. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, nonetheless, labelled resettlement of Gaza's women and children out of a war zone a “non-starter":

This is a peculiar policy in that the White House is facilitating record economic migration of military age men into the U.S. even as it demands that women and children stay put during air strikes as Hamas fighters locate themselves in the buildings housing civilians.

Writing for The Hill, Bolton called this unique approach to the Arabs of Gaza, Judea and Samaria, refusing to resettle them under any circumstances, “the weaponization of refugees.”

[A]nti-Israel Arab governments used Palestinians as political and military weapons against Israel. Allowing resettlement elsewhere meant acknowledging Israel’s permanent existence, which was then unacceptable.

Times have changed. Israel isn’t going away. Muslim governments have recognized Israel and, before October 7, more were coming. Moreover, the two-state solution is definitively dead: Israel will never recognize a “Palestine” that could become another Hamas-stan. . . .

The real future for Gazans is to live somewhere integrated into functioning economies. That is the only way to realize the promise of a decent life and stability for a people who have been weaponized for far too long. . . .

The answer is to abolish UNRWA [The U.N. agency in charge of Gaza's refugees], and transfer its responsibilities to UNHCR, which understands that resettlement is far better humanitarian policy than permanent refugee life. If allowed to speak for themselves rather than through Hamas’s distorted prism, Gazans would likely agree in large numbers.

Bolton went on to suggest which nations should accept Gazans:

Iran, Hamas’s principal benefactor, should certainly be willing to accept large numbers of people in whom it has long shown such an interest. Most other Gazans should be resettled in the regional countries that previously weaponized them. . . . America could grant refugee status to Gazans with a proven record of opposing Hamas, which our media reports is a large number.

The regional nations referred to by Bolton may include Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, and Turkey, as each receives a large amount of U.S. foreign aid which can be used as leverage to encourage those nations to accept a share of the Gazan refugee population.

Check back for our coverage of past population transfers that led to peace and see our previous Middle East coverage: