CBS News is reporting that the Biden administration wants to bring some refugees from Gaza to the United States. CBS says documents obtained from the White House reveal that “senior officials across several federal U.S. agencies have discussed the practicality of different options to resettle Palestinians from Gaza who have immediate family members who are American citizens or permanent residents.”
The CBS report continues, “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.”
Why would Egypt refuse to welcome “large numbers of people from Gaza”? Egypt, Jordan, and every other Middle East country claim that if large numbers of Palestinians resettle in their countries, the Palestinian “right to return” and other issues surrounding the Palestinian cause would suffer.
But the real reason can be found in history. Every nation that has “welcomed” Palestinian refugees has suffered from the experience.
After the 1948 war for Israel’s independence, Palestinians poured into Jordan. King Hussein generously granted the Palestinians citizenship, only to become the target of several assassination attempts. The Palestinian “refugees” murdered the prime minister and initiated the Jordanian civil war.
Lebanon suffered even more. After their failed insurrection in Jordan, Lebanon admitted tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees. This was in addition to the hundred thousand admitted to Lebanon after the 1948 war.
The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) moved into Lebanon and set up a state within a state, trying to take out the Christian leadership of what was, at the time, the most peaceful, the freest, the most prosperous state in the Middle East.
The PLO’s machinations resulted in the Lebanese civil war that lasted more than a decade, killing 150,000 and starting Lebanon on the road to being what is now a failed state.
Palestinians are uniquely unsuited to settling in America.
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.
Senate Republicans are trying to stop the plan to resettle Gaza refugees in the U.S. They sent a letter to Biden demanding that he cease all efforts to bring Palestinian refugees to America until he convinces them that everything possible is being done to get American hostages held by Hamas released.
“We demand that your administration cease planning for accepting Gazan refugees until you adequately answer our concerns and focus your attention instead on securing the release of U.S. hostages held by Hamas,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) wrote in a letter to Biden Wednesday evening.
Thirty-four Republican Senators signed the letter, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Minority Whip John Thune of South Dakota, Republican Conference Chairman John Barrasso of Wyoming, and National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) Chairman Steve Daines of Montana.
Fox News confirmed with a State Department official that if visas were granted to Gaza refugees who have U.S. citizen relatives, it wouldn’t be through any “new program” or amount to a shift in policy. The official further confirmed such a move would be essentially an extension of existing policy toward Palestinians in the region.
The Republican senators detailed that they “are not confident” in the Biden administration’s ability to “adequately vet this high-risk population for terrorist ties and sympathies before admitting them into the United States.”
Indeed, the vetting record of this administration leaves much to be desired. But the real problem with allowing large numbers of Palestinians into the U.S. is that, historically, they have always caused enormous problems for nations that host them.
Why should we think it would be any different for the United States?