A Palestinian boy reacts next to a burning Israeli vehicle that Palestinian gunmen brought to Gaza after they infiltrated areas of southern Israel, in the northern Gaza Strip, Oct. 7, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa

A working plan is being discussed to facilitate the departure of Palestinian families from Gaza and their reunification with relatives in Europe, according to reports from well-sourced security channels.

Though European Union officials and member states have consistently rejected mass resettlement schemes for Gazans, the reported proposal, which began taking shape around two months ago, envisions an initial framework starting in early 2027 to transfer around 40,000 Palestinians to European countries over several months. Greece, Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, and, of course, the United Kingdom are cited among the prospective destinations.

So much for “stop the boats.” No boats required. We can simply roll out the red carpet.

There is a serious humanitarian case for allowing Palestinians to leave Gaza. Indeed, there was from the very start of the war which Hamas-led Palestinians began on Oct. 7, 2023. As soon as they invaded on their murderous barbaric rampage into southern Israel, the Israeli reaction was inevitably likely to cause hardship for a population used by its own leadership as a human shield for their own weapons and terrorism.

Civilians trapped inside a complex urban warzone should have had a realistic means of escape, temporarily or permanently. Egypt’s closure of its border helped trap civilians inside that war zone, instead of letting them cross easily into mostly uninhabited land just over the border from Rafah, while the regional insistence that Gazans must remain in Gaza has too often been treated as though preventing people from leaving was itself humanitarian.

Gazans facing intense hostilities had no other safe exit than into Egypt. Egypt’s blanket refusal to let civilians flee amounted to “constructive refoulement,” a concept developed by scholars and courts as an extension of the non-refoulement principle in international law, covering situations where a state effectively forces people back into danger without formally deporting them.

Palestinian Arabs who want to emigrate should be allowed to do so. They should be able to escape war, failed government, poverty, and the peculiar system which has made refugeehood hereditary across generations. In fact, they should be encouraged to do so if it will help them build more dignified, better lives. The question is where they go.

Europe has developed the extraordinary and suicidal habit of interpreting every humanitarian emergency as an argument for settlement in Europe. Language, religion, social customs, family structure, and the absorptive capacity of the host country become secondary considerations. Apparently compassion increases with distance traveled. The proposed emphasis on “family reunification” should make Britain particularly cautious. We already have a useful preview.

In June, Britain’s immigration courts gave 18 members of one Gazan family the right to join a single British citizen relative here. The case had begun with 20 applicants. Most of the adults do not speak English. That, apparently, was no obstacle to finding that their extended family ties were compelling enough to outweigh any sense of national self-preservation.

Despite the court finding that the family members were “financially dependent on the financial support arranged and provided by the sponsor,” the judgment also records something rather awkward: She could accommodate only her parents, works part-time, receives Universal Credit (a UK state benefit), and “would not be able” to support the wider family financially. The tribunal further found that, once in Britain, “it is foreseeable that they would require access to public funds.” So, the supposed dependence on her has a curious practical meaning. In Gaza, she helped organize and channel money from several sources; in Britain, the family’s material dependence would rapidly shift to the state. They are not dependent on her; they are dependent on us and our taxes.

“Family reunification,” in this case, meant parents, siblings, spouses, nephews, and nieces, with the British taxpayer picking up a substantial part of the practical burden. And now Europe is working toward admitting 40,000 people under the same comforting phrase.

Evidence accepted by the tribunal described Palestinian family structures as unusually extensive and interdependent by Western standards. One European conception of family reunification may mean a spouse and children. Another can encompass parents, adult siblings, their spouses, and several branches of an extended family. Forty thousand may therefore prove a remarkably elastic number.

Then comes integration, usually considered seriously only after arrival. The British government recently released its almost unbelievable nine-page booklet for asylum seekers on how not to rape women. It explains concepts such as sexual consent, equality between men and women, domestic abuse, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and the age of consent — consent must be freely given, marriage does not provide permanent sexual consent, intoxicated or unconscious people cannot consent, and sex without consent is rape. Just think what kind of person needs this guidance because of their cultural background. Then think of 39,999 more of them.

The Palestinians entering the UK might well need to read the guide on how not to be sexually violent. They are, after all, coming from Gaza — the same territory from which, only a few years ago, thousands crossed into a neighboring society built on liberal norms of individual freedom, legal equality and civic life, and raped, kidnapped, and murdered civilians. Now we’re inviting them into Europe.

Even within Palestinian society itself, there are uncomfortable questions about the social norms people bring with them. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 37.5 percent of women in Gaza who were married or had previously been married reported experiencing violence by their husband in the year preceding the 2019 survey. Earlier PCBS data found that 11.8 percent of married or previously married Palestinian women across the territories reported sexual violence by a husband, rising to 14.9 percent in Gaza in the 2011 survey.

The silence surrounding such abuse is striking: 61 percent of women who experienced domestic violence told nobody, while fewer than 1 percent sought help from formal institutions. These are not statistics from some hostile outside observer. They come from Palestinian institutions themselves. Any serious discussion of integration has to reckon with the social realities people arrive from.

Those women are victims. And while the figures cannot sensibly be converted into an accusation against every Palestinian man, they do describe a social environment in which attitudes toward marriage, women, sexuality, and authority differ significantly from contemporary Britain.

Recent sexual-assault cases involving asylum seekers have made those questions harder to wave away. The rape of a vulnerable man in Harrow, the gang rape of an intoxicated woman on Brighton beach, and the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton are just a few of the many recent examples. They do not provide statistical proof about an entire migrant population, but they do demonstrate a clash of cultures and norms which makes Britain’s approach to immigration look increasingly absurd: admission first, widespread denial, a remedial instruction pamphlet afterwards, and a shrug of the shoulders when it all goes wrong.

A more rational humanitarian program would prioritize culturally and linguistically adjacent Arab countries, accompanied by something Palestinians have too often been denied there: permanent legal status, employment rights, property rights, and genuine routes to citizenship. Lebanon and Jordan demonstrate the damage caused when Palestinians are preserved indefinitely as outsiders. In this insane process, refugeehood becomes inherited, grievance becomes institutionalized, and each generation is raised inside an unresolved political condition centred around victimhood, religious grievance, and revenge.

Migration could help end that. Give Palestinians who want to leave somewhere they can build ordinary lives. Let their children inherit citizenship, homes, and professions rather than another refugee registration. Europe, meanwhile, is already struggling with housing, public services, integration, and the consequences of very large migration flows from the Middle East and wider Islamic world.

Let Gazans leave. They should have been able to leave long ago. But perhaps Europe can resist, for once, the assumption that solving a Middle Eastern crisis requires importing part of it.