by Jonathan S. Tobin
Forget the U.N. statehood charade. A Palestinian Authority that subsidizes terror and a population indoctrinated in Islamist hate ought to be denied entry to the United States.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio invited the scorn of the world with his announcement last week that Washington was barring officials from the Palestinian Authority from entering the country to attend the meeting this month of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. The move prompted the predictable outrage from critics of President Donald Trump for not playing by the rules of international behavior the foreign-policy establishment has laid down. It’s also the subject of a more serious debate about whether the decision violates the 1947 agreement made between the United States and the headquarters of the United Nations since that accord was passed by the U.S. Senate as a treaty, and therefore, has the force of law.
But the revocation of visas to P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas and the rest of the posse of corrupt kleptocrats he brings with him every year when he engages in his annual rant from the podium of the General Assembly is only part of the story. As The New York Times reported two days later, they’re not the only ones being banned from entry to America. On Aug. 18, the U.S. State Department cabled all U.S. embassies and consulates around the world not to issue visitor visas to all persons carrying passports issued by the P.A.
Rubio’s order is, as JNS senior contributing editor Ruthie Blum wrote, a gesture aimed at undermining the effort by various Western nations to use the UNGA to promote the fiction of Palestinian statehood, for which the 89-year-old Abbas, who is currently serving the 20th year of the four-year term to which he was elected back in 2005, would be a central prop.
Another ‘Muslim ban’?
Yet by forbidding all Palestinians from coming to the United States for any other purpose than legal immigration, there’s no getting around the fact that Trump is putting in place a ban on Palestinians—and not just their feckless representatives.
That is something that will be widely denounced as an act of prejudice in much the same way enlightened liberal opinion reacted with horror to Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban.”
That executive order, which was signed in January 2017 and applied only to those from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, didn’t affect more than 80% of the global Muslim population. The initial version of the ban was successfully challenged in court and replaced with a better-written one that remained in place until overturned by former President Joe Biden on his first day in office.
Arguments over that rule proved a dialogue of the deaf. Trump and his supporters asserted that the issue was keeping out people who were more than likely to be supporters of terrorism, and therefore, a legitimate threat to the United States. Trump’s opponents, including almost all of the mainstream media, saw it as both intolerant and racist, claiming that only a bigot would single out those countries.
We can expect more of the same now with respect to the Palestinians.
As the Times story itself illustrated, any discussion about an attempt to hold Palestinians accountable or to draw conclusions about them is something that the liberal press regards as not merely prejudicial but particularly unfair to a people who have suffered so much in the last century. The last line in the piece was given to the mayor of Turmus Ayya, a village in Samaria where many dual Palestinian-American citizens live, who said that “it feels like Palestinians are always treated in an unjust way.”
But it is precisely this narrative of Palestinian suffering that is at issue in this discussion and which should not go unchallenged.
Holding Abbas accountable
What Rubio has done with this ban is not so much an effort to trip up the farcical effort by France, Britain, Canada and Australia to give a reward in the form of a sovereign state to the Palestinians for the atrocities they committed against Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, and for starting the war that followed the Hamas-led attacks on Jewish communities that took place that day. Doing everything possible to spike the renewed campaign for Palestinian statehood is, in and of itself, an important objective, since Oct. 7 is by itself glaring evidence of what the Palestinians would do if they were granted sovereignty over Judea and Samaria as well as the Gaza Strip.
The claim that Abbas is a peace-loving “moderate,” which is at the core of the statehood push, is a myth—and an insulting one at that. The P.A. continues to subsidize terrorism in the form of its “pay-for-slay” program that applies to those who committed the crimes of Oct. 7, as well as to previous bloody criminal acts. He may cooperate with Israeli security forces to keep himself alive against Hamas threats, but he, too, has refused peace offers from Israel, making it clear that he will never accept one that compels them to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders could be drawn. Abbas only belatedly condemned the Oct. 7 atrocities in equivocal language, 20 months after they occurred, and only then in a letter to French President Emmanuel Macron. He has never done so in Arabic to his own people.
The United States is right to hold him accountable and to refuse to participate in a U.N. charade, pretending to be the head of a non-existent state whose only practical impact will be to encourage Hamas to continue fighting and never release the hostages it still holds.
Yet there is more here than just that. The U.S. decision is also a much-needed rejection of the international media campaign that depicts the Palestinians as oppressed victims in a war they initiated and continue to support. Yes, they have suffered terribly, but the facts of the matter have become twisted as part of a global anti-Israel propaganda campaign.
The truth about Palestinians
Still, the harsh and unavoidable truth about them is that they are largely a population that has been indoctrinated in hatred for both Israel and America via the propaganda that they consume in Palestinian media and in their schools. That is true whether discussing those who live under the authoritarian thumb of Abbas and the P.A. in Judea and Samaria, or in Hamas-ruled Gaza. The events of the last two years demonstrate this via their support for Oct. 7, coupled with the past 78 years during which they have rejected several offers of statehood with wars and bloody terrorism.
Individual Palestinians may oppose what their leaders, and the popular organizations and terror groups that have dominated Palestinian politics for the last century, have imposed on them. It’s also true that the overwhelming majority of Palestinian-Americans who live in the United States are law-abiding citizens.
But it is hardly unreasonable for the administration to look at the political culture that has rejected every peace offer, including those of statehood alongside Israel. Add to that generations of bloody terrorism that culminated in the unspeakable crimes of Oct. 7, which have also produced a particularly noxious brand of genocidal antisemitism.
That is something that has been obscured by the mainstreaming of Hamas propaganda and blood libels against Israel about it committing “genocide” in Gaza or deliberately starving Palestinians. The proper response to this narrative in which Palestinians are the victims of the post-Oct. 7 war is to point out that it began with an orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction that was committed by ordinary Palestinians rather than just Hamas fighters. The hostages were, as we have learned from those who were rescued or released in ransom deals, mostly held captive by ordinary Palestinians, not Hamas fighters.
The assertions of Biden about the war—and even the statements about it from many Israelis and Jews who would prefer to ignore the truth—depict that this fight is not solely between the Jewish state and a terrorist group that has hijacked the Palestinian cause and misled their people. This is a war between two peoples and not solely against terrorists.
Western projections
It is axiomatic that Westerners view other cultures as mirror images of their own, no matter how much this is contradicted by reality. We project our own sensibilities and expectations on the products of belief systems that do not share the same premises. As a result, most Americans and Europeans have approached the conflict between Jews and Arabs over the land of Israel as one susceptible to compromise. Many Israelis have done the same. They have ignored the dismal fact that Arabs have always regarded the notion of sharing sovereignty over any part of the world that has been under Muslim rule as not merely inadmissible, but an unforgiven slight to their collective dignity that they will not tolerate.
That is why the late Israeli statesman Abba Eban was wrong to say that the “Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” since they thought all of the compromise peace plans that would have given them a state were not opportunities.
It also explains why peace never happened during the 30 years of peace processing that preceded Oct. 7. It also is the reason why it was that the Israeli withdrawal of every settler, soldier and Jewish community from Gaza in the summer of 2005 led to a terror state and the building of an underground fortress the size of the New York City subway system there to facilitate the continuation of a century-long war, rather than an incubator for peace.
And it is also why Americans should look at those who did this—the Palestinian leadership, including Abbas and his Fatah Party, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as well as the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian population that supports them—and acknowledge that this is not something we want more of in the United States.
There is a belief among many on the left, especially liberal Jews, that immigration to America on the part of just about anybody is somehow a fundamental right. They foolishly mistake the mass immigrations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—efforts by Jews to escape a death sentence in Nazi-occupied Europe—for what amounted to an invasion of the country by millions of illegal immigrants on Biden’s watch. They further see any effort to enforce existing immigration laws by Trump as authoritarian. His approach, however, has been a sensible response to a serious problem that has threatened the well-being and safety of many communities. It’s also seen as a justified effort to defend the interests of working-class Americans that the Democrats have abandoned.
Securing American borders
However, the effort to secure America’s borders—a feat that was largely accomplished in short order by Trump after four years of Biden’s open borders policies and negligence—also applies to the question of what sort of people ought to be legally allowed into the United States.
Seen in this light, the denial of visas to Palestinians is a long-delayed and entirely justified reaction to a century of their culture of hatred and intolerance, in which a war against the Jews became an inextricable part of their national identity. Importing a population of people to whom the rejection of the West and antisemitism is so important is madness. So, too, is allowing large numbers of people from this group to come to the United States to study, where they can assist in the transformation of our institutions of higher education into bastions of Jew-hatred and opposition to Western civilization.
Whatever one may say about the inconsistencies of the initial Trump “Muslim ban,” which did not exclude those from many countries who were just as likely to constitute an Islamist threat, a focused visa ban on Palestinian Arabs is entirely justified.
More than that, it should initiate a more honest look at the individuals being kept out by Rubio’s order.
Many Palestinians are innocent victims of the current war. Yet as a whole, the Palestinian Arab population has chosen war and terror. Hamas could not have maintained control over Gaza for 17 years while diverting the billions in aid that flowed into the Strip toward terrorism without that being the case. And if Abbas continues to refuse to hold another election in Judea and Samaria, it is because he knows that Hamas would win it.
Keeping Palestinians out of the United States isn’t just a wise decision based on an understanding that giving them a state from which they could duplicate the crimes of Oct. 7 is madness. It is also recognition of the reality of Palestinian political culture that has deliberately courted another nakba (“catastrophe”) similar to its decision in November 1947 to reject an Arab state alongside a Jewish one, and to launch a war to destroy the newborn Jewish state. It’s a rejection of the media narrative that sees the genocidal war that they began on Oct. 7 as part of their victimhood, as opposed to irrefutable evidence that they constitute a threat to the West and Israel until they undergo a sea change that will allow them to embrace.
For the administration to acknowledge these facts is not prejudiced, racist or Islamophobic. It is simple common sense.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek
and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American
political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle
East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think
Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin
Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and
YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor
and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger.
He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other
writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and
foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia
University.
Source: https://www.jns.org/trump-and-rubio-reject-the-palestinian-victimhood-narrative/
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