That's just one of the questions raised by the Obama administration's push to resettle in America, over the next few months, more than 1,300 Palestinians who were once among the showcase beneficiaries in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
A related question is whether there are any bounds to the hypocrisy of Arab-speaking states in the Middle East, such as Syria and Saudi Arabia, whose potentates preen themselves as defenders of Palestinians. But in the nitty-gritty matter of providing them with places to live and work, they slam their doors.
Currently housed in a refugee camp inside Iraq known as Al Waleed, near a border crossing into Syria, the Palestinians in question are right now being processed to move to the U.S. They are candidates for U.S. refugee aid packages that include $900 per person upfront, loans for travel, access to a range of publicly funded benefits once they arrive, and eligibility for U.S. citizenship.
Why? This is not a population that has paid a price for cooperation or friendship with America, such as the Hmong of Laos or the boat people who fled the communist takeover of South Vietnam. This is a group that benefited for many years as privileged guests--and to some extent welfare clients--of Saddam Hussein's regime.
A report released by Human Rights Watch in 2006 provides a history that might prompt not only sympathy, but security concerns. Iraq at the time of Saddam's overthrow in 2003 had a Palestinian population estimated at some 34,000. Some had come to Iraq in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, some after the 1967 war, and some fled to Saddam's Iraq from Kuwait, following the 1991 Gulf War.
Almost all lived in Baghdad, where Saddam's regime welcomed them and bestowed favors upon them. Their presence was part of Saddam's display of dedication to a Palestinian cause, in which he also launched scuds at Israel during the 1991 Gulf War and, later, despite United Nations sanctions, sent rewards of $25,000 each to families of Palestinian suicide bombers who attacked Israel.
Palestinians living in Iraq were not given Iraqi citizenship. But they did enjoy special dispensations for long-term residency status and big breaks on housing. In many cases, Iraqis were forced by Saddam's government to rent dwellings to the Palestinians at artificially low rates--in some cases as low as $1 per month. It was a policy that amounted to state confiscation of private property from Iraqis.
When the U.S.-led coalition overthrew Saddam in 2003, Iraqis, especially Shiites, stopped treating the Sunni Palestinians as protected guests and turned on them as reviled free-loaders, accusing them of support for Saddam and involvement in terrorism. Iraqis evicted many Palestinians from the deep-discount housing long mandated by Saddam, hit them with onerous new residency registration requirements, and targeted some for revenge. Some were murdered, tortured and kidnapped, and many were warned to leave.
This coincided with the wave of violence, kidnappings and terrorist acts that swept Iraq prior to the 2007 U.S. surge, so some of it is hard to disentangle from the broader scene.
But some of these Palestinians headed for the borders, only to find there was nowhere to go. With rare exceptions for a small number of asylum seekers, neighboring countries, such as Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Syria refused to admit them.
Some ended up in ad hoc camps along the Iraqi border with Syria, where they have been receiving aid from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and other relief outfits. A push for them to be resettled began with the UNHCR and groups such as Human Rights Watch, and was taken up by outfits such as the Palestine Solidarity Movement (which in its pro-Palestinian stance is also anti-Israeli; supporting, for example, boycotts of Israeli goods).
By 2008, small numbers of the Palestinians from these camps had begun trickling in to places such as Iceland and Sweden. Also in 2008, an international delegation of nongovernmental organizations, from places such as Malaysia, Belgium, the Netherlands and the U.S., visited the camps. They issued a joint report last November, recommending that the camps be emptied and shut down by way of resettling all the resident Palestinians elsewhere. These NGOs proposed that Canada, Australia and some European Union countries take the residents of two smaller camps, one inside Syria and another in a no man's land at the Iraq-Syria border crossing.
The delegation further urged that in the case of the biggest camp, Al Waleed, "given its location inside Iraq" the U.S. should "take the lead."
Since the beginning of this year, that is what the U.S. under President Obama has been doing. With the cooperation of the U.S. State Department, a multilateral group--one involving assorted U.N. agencies and NGOs--has been racing to deliver these Palestinians for resettlement in the U.S. According to a UNHCR report released last month, "In 2009 the USA Government moved to streamline case processing for Palestinian refugees," sending U.S. officials to interview them at Al Waleed instead of requiring them to come to Baghdad.
Since January of this year, the UNHCR says it has referred 1,300 persons in Al Waleed to the U.S., "with a significant number having already been provisionally accepted for resettlement, pending security clearance." Apparently, those security clearances aren't posing much of an obstacle, because the UNHCR also reports so many "positive indications from the USA for the bulk of the cases" that it expects the camp to be closed by the end of 2009.
Are those security clearances flowing with such ease because among these former guests of Saddam's regime there is almost no security risk for Americans? Or has the bar simply been set low enough to meet the UNHCR's wish to empty the camp? Only U.S. security agencies know for sure, and they aren't saying much.
According to U.S. officials at the departments of State and Homeland Security, interviewed recently by phone, some 1,000 Palestinians at Al Waleed have already been interviewed for admission to the U.S. They are expected to arrive by early next year. But their names and specific histories are confidential. Also confidential are the interview questions, the number of U.S. officers conducting the interviews, and the amount of time spent per interviewee.
While stressing that "National security is always at the forefront of our mind," Homeland Security officials describe the interview process preceding the final security clearance as "non-adversarial," with interpreters provided if needed, and efforts to make sure the interviewees "feel quite comfortable."
Asked if any of the Palestinians from Al Waleed have been rejected on security grounds, a Homeland Security officer replied: "I can't go into that."
It's also unclear exactly where inside the U.S. these Palestinians will be resettled. Asked about the locations inside the U.S. of some 24 Palestinians who have already arrived from Iraq over the past two years, a State Department spokesman declined to say. A July 7 dispatch in the Christian Science Monitor said that most of the 1,300 or more expected from Al Waleed would go to southern California. But a State Department spokesman claimed that was not necessarily the case, adding that he would "rather not" get into specifics. He said that the actual geographic allocation inside the U.S. hadn't been decided yet, but "They're going to go all over."
The sizable number slated to arrive from Al Waleed alone raises questions about the priorities involved. America takes a grand total worldwide of about 80,000 refugees per year. Last year that included more than 48,000 referred by the UNHCR--which was double the number resettled at the UNHCR's behest to all other major host countries combined.
Some refugee populations, however, enjoy more access than others. For example, the number of Palestinians now expected to move to the U.S. this coming year from Al Waleed in Iraq is more than 10 times the total of North Korean refugees resettled in the U.S. over the past five years--or, for that matter, the past 20. Part of that is because North Korean refugees in many cases prefer to go to South Korea. But another big part of it is that the estimated hundreds of thousands of North Koreans who have fled over the years into China have had almost no help from the U.S. or UNHCR, which--in contrast to their handling of the Palestinians in Iraq--have done pathetically little to help North Korean refugees or champion their cause.
In Iraq, meanwhile, conditions for the Palestinians have been looking up. In a report last month, the UNHCR noted "the general improvement of the security situation in Iraq," including "a marked decrease" in the number of attacks on Palestinian neighborhoods and individuals. Nonetheless, the UNHCR report went on to say that "Palestinian refugees continue to experience a deep level of uncertainty with regard to their place within the fabric of Iraqi society."
Whether these Palestinians, once the favored guests of Saddam, will meld better into the fabric and values of American society is not a question explored by the U.N., nor does the U.S. administration appear interested in supplying much in the way of illuminating detail.
The two U.S. offices most directly involved are the State Department and the office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security. At both places, officials praise the Palestinian resettlement plan as an example of U.S. good works. There's much to be said for that. But of all the humanitarian work to be done in the world, why import almost the entire population of Al Waleed? Before this mills quietly through the gears now turning within the Obama administration, surely the American public deserves to hear more?
Claudia Rosett, a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.
