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| Secretary of State, Marco Rubio (JNS) |
Jonathan Tobin, editor-in-chief of JNS has written what I
consider to be one of the most definitive pieces of commentary on the subject of Palestinians I have ever read. Rather than paraphrase
him. I have decided to make one of my rare exceptions and publish his piece in
its entirety. It is a MUST READ and it follows:
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
United Nations Headquarters Agreement, 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 attempt
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 in which he pretends 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—that depict this fight as one that is solely between the Jewish state and
a terrorist group that has hijacked the Palestinian cause and misled their
people are all mistaken. 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 unforgiveable 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 as well as efforts by Jews to escape a death
sentence in Nazi-occupied Europe as morally equivalent to 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 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 is a long-delayed
and entirely justified reaction to a century of a Palestinian 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 peace.
For the administration to acknowledge these facts is not prejudiced, racist or Islamophobic. It is simple common sense.
