In one of his latest moves to try to appease the pro-Hamas protesters, President Joe Biden recently proposed a plan to bring refugees from Gaza to live in the United States. That's clearly not going to satisfy the activists who follow him around chanting "genocide Joe," but he probably sees it as a gesture that would be better than nothing. In reality, though, it would almost certainly be worse than nothing. In fact, it could turn out to be dangerous in the long run. At the New York Post, Todd Bensman explains why a Gazan refugee plan "is a hard hell no." Other people have attempted to act charitably in this fashion in the past. Some of them wound up paying dearly for that attempted act of kindness.
As President Biden considers bringing Gaza war refugees into the United States, he would do well to recall what happened when other good-hearted people took a similar chance – and paid with their blood.
Before the October 7 Hamas attack, Israeli citizens sponsored work permits for thousands of security-vetted Palestinians to earn money working on some of their farms in towns not far from the Gaza Strip. Some of those Gazan day laborers are believed to have used their access to provide tactical information that helped Hamas terrorists kill hundreds of Israelis on October 7.
The bad apples lesson of that still developing story – and another where security-vetted Palestinian UN workers directly assisted the October 7 attackers – is central to the problem with an American plan to import Gazan war refugees. It’s an unacceptable national security risk.
That's a rather chilling example and it's one aspect of the ongoing war that I hadn't been familiar with. A group of Israeli farmers who live near the border with Gaza were offering jobs on their farms to Palestinians. That's a generous if risky thing to do. They were no doubt hoping to mend some bridges and build some goodwill. But little did they know that the Gazans were returning home after work and feeding targeting information to Hamas ahead of the October 7 attacks.
As Bensman reminds us, every Palestinian is raised being fed a toxic diet of propaganda and indoctrination. They are taught that the greatest goals they can aspire toward are suicide bombings and assassinations. They are not only trained to hate Israel. They also hate the United States. Inviting them to come to America "for a better life" and offering refuge from their war-torn nation may sound like a decent, humanitarian thing to do. But we would probably be opening the door to a ticking time bomb.
How would we possibly go about vetting these aspiring Palestinian refugees? It's not as if Hamas keeps any records that we could place our faith in. Israel has vastly better intelligence assets in Gaza than we do and even they apparently missed the fact that the temporary farm workers were acting as spies for Hamas. Even if this wasn't a terrible idea (which it is), where would we put these refugees when they arrived? We already don't have enough room to house the millions of illegal migrants that Joe Biden has allowed into the country. Does he plan to ask American families to open up their homes to people who just got off the boat from the Gaza Strip?
Bensman quotes Nayla Rush, a refugee policy expert for the Center for Immigration Studies. As she recently wrote, "resettled refugees do not necessarily leave their beliefs and biases behind." And those beliefs and biases are typically very deeply ingrained. Many children in Gaza attend "summer camps" where the camp counselors are Hamas fighters who provide them with training in the use of weapons and explosives and lead them through practice drills where they simulate terror attacks. Even if it were possible to reprogram someone who was raised in that fashion, would you really want to take the chance?
We should remember that when Egypt and other neighboring nations were given the opportunity to take in Gazans seeking to avoid the IDF attacks, they all passed. Even the Palestinian Authority didn't want them. Perhaps we should be taking a clue from some of their own neighbors. This would be far too great of a national security threat to expose ourselves to just so Joe Biden can score some quick and probably useless points with a small element of his base.
