Republicans rush to reject Gaza refugees

Pushed south by pulverizing aerial bombardments, and faced with a looming ground invasion by Israeli forces, Palestinians in Gaza stand at the brink of a major refugee crisis. Hundreds of thousands of the strip's more than two million residents have already been displaced in the early days of Israel's military assault, according to United Nations estimates. Israel's standing order for more than a million Gazans to relocate within the narrow confines of the 150-square mile enclave is likely to "push people in Gaza into abyss” Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN's Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, predicted.

While the sheer scale and immediacy of the unfolding humanitarian disaster have prompted some countries to call for restraint and diplomacy to deescalate the violence already ravaging the region, many of those same world leaders have waved off calls to open their borders to the flood of Gazans desperate to escape the violent confines of the strip. From Egypt's hesitance to fully open its Rafah crossing with Gaza, to Jordanian King Abdullah's vow this week that there would be "no refugees in Jordan, no refugees in Egypt," the question of which nations should and will accept Palestinian asylum-seekers has become an increasingly urgent global concern.

Although the United States has not, to date, put forward any specific plan for accepting Gazan refugees, a number of conservative lawmakers — many of them 2024 presidential candidates — have jumpstarted any forthcoming debate on the issue by preemptively declaring their opposition to allowing any displaced Palestinians onto American soil.

'Not all of them are Hamas, but...'

Speaking at a campaign rally this weekend, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) staked out a hardline position on the prospect of the United States accepting Palestinian refugees, telling the crowd that "the Arab states should be taking them," rather than America. Acknowledging that he didn't know what, if anything, the Biden administration planned to do, DeSantis claimed without evidence that "not all of them are Hamas but they are all anti-Semitic" to justify his stance.

Pressed later by CBS's Margaret Brennan during an interview for Face The Nation, DeSantis insisted that "some of the far left" had proposed allowing Gazan refugees into the U.S., prompting him to "just put my stake in the ground" Moreover, DeSantis said, "everyone running for president on the Republican side should follow suit." In that spirit, DeSantis and his allies were quick to leap on former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley's comments to CNN's Jake Tapper that the U.S. is "sympathetic to the fact that you can separate civilians from terrorists."

Haley was simply "trying to be politically correct" and "please the media and people on the left," DeSantis claimed on Monday to NBC's Dasha Burns, just before both Fox News host Laura Ingraham and the Never Back Down PAC that supports DeSantis credited the governor for Haley's subsequent clarification that she "opposes the U.S. taking in Gazans."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, former President Donald Trump also proposed closing the country to Gazan refugees, citing his administration's banning incoming travelers "from all of the most dangerous places all over the world" during his first term.

"In my second term, we’re going to expand each and every one of those bans," Trump told rally attendees in Iowa this weekend, naming "Gaza, Syria, Somalia, Yemen or Libya or anywhere else that threatens our security."

'The last thing we ought to do is trust their identity documents'

While much of the most heated rhetoric opposing Palestinian refugees has come from high-profile presidential contenders like Trump and Haley, similar sentiments have saturated deeper into the GOP at large. Last week, Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wisc.) announced plans "to introduce The Guaranteeing Aggressors Zero Admissions – or GAZA Act" that would "stop President Biden from issuing visas or 'paroling' holders of Palestinian Authority passports into the United States." Deeming them "trustworthy partners," Tiffany concluded, "the last thing we ought to do is trust their identity documents."

Echoing Trump's call to "revoke the student visas" of foreign nationals deemed "anti-American and antisemitic," Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton (R) on Monday urged Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to "immediately deport any foreign national—including and especially any alien on a student visa—that has expressed support for Hamas and its murderous attacks on Israel."