In the first half of this fiscal year alone, the United States has admitted 42,000 Chinese nationals, 14,000 Russian nationals, 8,000 Turkish nationals, and 43,000 Indian nationals who crossed our southern border. On top of the 1.7 million immigrants who have already made it to the country with (often bogus) asylum claims, the White House is reportedly considering “bringing certain Palestinians to the U.S. as refugees.”
“Top U.S. officials have also discussed getting additional Palestinians out of Gaza and processing them as refugees if they have American relatives, the documents show,” CBS News reports. “The plans would require coordination with Egypt, which has so far refused to welcome large numbers of people from Gaza. Those who pass a series of eligibility, medical and security screenings would qualify to fly to the U.S. with refugee status, which offers beneficiaries permanent residency, resettlement benefits like housing assistance and a path to American citizenship.”
Even without the current record-shattering migrant influx that can only be characterized as an invasion, it would be a huge mistake for President Joe Biden to even consider accepting Gazan refugees. And to understand why, the president only needs to look at all its Middle Eastern neighbors that refuse to offer asylum to the Palestinians.
Countries like Jordan and Egypt will say they refuse to admit Palestinians as refugees because offering asylum would neutralize the live issue of Israel balancing its military operation in Gaza with human rights concerns. But the real reason is that the Middle East has opened its doors to Palestinians before, and almost every time, these host countries have been burned by the most ungracious houseguests imaginable.
When Jordan admitted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the years after the 1948 war, the refugees rewarded the country that granted them not just asylum but permanent citizenship by repeatedly attempting to assassinate Jordanian King Hussein, successfully assassinating the Jordanian prime minister, and catapulting the country into the Jordanian Civil War.
When Lebanon admitted tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees from Jordan after their failed insurrection, on top of the hundred thousand admitted after the 1948 war, the Palestinians rewarded the Lebanese by turning the Palestine Liberation Organization into a de facto state within a state, repeatedly attempting to assassinate the (disproportionately Christian) leaders of the Lebanese government and triggering the Lebanese Civil War, which wound up killing 150,000 people and putting the country on a perpetual path of decline.
While the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians within Kuwait did not themselves attempt to overthrow another government of their host country, the PLO was integral in supporting Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, leading to the expulsion of Palestinian refugees from Kuwait after Operation Desert Storm.
After the Egyptian revolution successfully overthrew Hosni Mubarak and then Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas partnered with the Muslim Brotherhood to attempt to break Morsi out of prison. President el-Sisi’s government wound up banning both organizations and deeming them terrorists.
Notice that not one of these rationales required any invocation of “Israel” or “Jews” more broadly. And while a liberal, majority-Christian democracy like ours would be difficult for most disproportionately Muslim Middle Easterners to assimilate within, Gaza’s population is uniquely unfit to thrive in a pluralistic population.
A full third of Palestinians polled in the Gaza Strip in 2019 said that honor killings should not be considered a dreadful crime or punished severely, and a fifth of Gazans said honor killings are understandable acts that should be punished lightly. That’s compared to just 5% of Palestinians in the West Bank who agreed with the latter statement. While Gazans were not polled by BBC News Arabic in a separate poll that year, only 5% of Palestinians in the West Bank reported tolerating homosexuality, which is punishable by death in Gaza.
In a 2013 poll by Pew, 9-in-10 Palestinians said that sharia should be the law of the land, and of those 89%, another 84% favored stoning as a legal punishment for adultery, a higher rate than any other Arab population other than Afghanistan. Two-thirds of Palestinians who support the legal codification of sharia favor the death penalty for leaving Islam, and another two-thirds say women should not be allowed to divorce their husbands. Over 30% of marriages in Gaza are between first cousins, and 21% involve brides younger than 18.
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And of course, recall that 71% of Gaza civilians polled in March endorsed Hamas’s slaughter of 1,200 Israelis that triggered the invasion of the strip in the first place, with the majority of Gazans calling for Hamas to continue to govern the territory after the war.
America can and should secure our Southern border, deport illegal aliens, and make way to admit more refugees and legal residents from around the world. But of all the populations we should consider welcoming, Gaza’s should probably be last on the list.
