Trump and Rubio reject the Palestinian victimhood narrative
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.
JNS
Sep 2, 2025
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President Donald Trump
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.
