All people of good will feel anguished over the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, but those who honestly wish to help the suffering Palestinians can endorse only one potential solution: allow the desperate residents to escape from their Hamas-ruled hell-on-earth to find new homes elsewhere among their Arab brothers.

In no sense would this constitute a forced migration: normal, sane human beings hardly require force or even encouragement in order to flee from the wretched realities of today’s Gaza Strip. In nearby Iraq, some two million people have left their homes and run away from ongoing violence to reestablish themselves in Jordan, Syria and elsewhere. Why would anyone want to deny the same choice to the Palestinians – who live under far more abject and long-standing poverty (with no oil resources), and under the rule of even more demented Islamist fanatics? In fact, the surviving opponents of the malevolent crazies of Hamas have every reason to fear for their lives, and face ongoing threats of the same gruesome fates as their compatriots who’ve been dragged through the streets, or thrown from tall buildings, or gunned down in front of wives and children.

Last week, when Hamas gunmen fired indiscriminately into a non-violent, non-aligned peace demonstration pleading for reconciliation and brotherhood among Palestinian factions, they established their bona fides as bloodthirsty maniacs. Some residents of Gaza might welcome the “perfect Islamic justice” they promise to impose, but most others would no doubt prefer to find homes elsewhere in the Middle East.

America’s top priority in the area ought to be a concerted effort to help them do so.

Some Palestinian sympathizers might insist that these new Middle Eastern refugees should get the chance to relocate in only one country: Israel. After all, most Gazans claim that they once lived in the Holy Land, or that their great-great grandfathers once lived there, and they insist that the very existence of the thriving democracy to their east as the illegitimate occupation of their sacred Palestinian birthright.

It is this very refusal to accept Israel’s reality in any terms (part of a sixty year history of self-destructive Arab rejectionism) that makes it unthinkable for the Jewish state to welcome the suffering multitudes of Gaza. After all, voters in the West Bank split more evenly between Fatah and Hamas in the recent Palestinian elections, but the residents of Gaza voted overwhelmingly for Hamas: the fundamentalist terror organization that pledges in its charter to resist forever the right of Jews to even “one square inch” of their ancient homeland.

Moreover, the idea of resettling Palestinians in today’s Israel means bringing people to a society where 80% of the inhabitants practice a different religion, speak a different language, uphold different values, and exist in a different century (the 21st century as opposed to the 7th).

Since so many Gazans want desperately to leave, doesn’t it make more sense to relocate them among their fellow Arabs, who practice exactly the same religion (they’re nearly all Sunni Moslems), speak the same language, honor the same traditions, claim identical histories, and embrace the same pan-Arab nationalism? If Jordan and Syria accept hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees, why not Palestinians from Gaza, who would fit into the host societies at least as easily as the Iraqis? (Jordan already boasts a clear Palestinian majority). Meanwhile, Egypt is a nation of some 70,000,000 which actually ruled the Gaza Strip for nineteen years (1948-1967) and many of the so-called Palestinians actually originated in Egypt --including the most famous “Palestinian” of them all, Yasser Arafat who was born and raised in Cairo, and spent most of his young manhood in Kuwait.

And speaking of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States currently suffer an acute labor shortage, and import workers from all over the world to sustain their economies. Instead of bringing in more laborers from Pakistan or Rumania or the Philippines, why not invite the Palestinians to escape the enduring misery of Gaza? Continued...