"Who Created the Israel-Palestine Conflict?"
The answer may be the U.S. Congress, which closed American borders 100 years ago this month.
One hundred years ago this month, the U.S. Congress passed a restrictive immigration law, the Johnson-Reed Act, which outlawed immigration from Eastern Europe. Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect makes the case for why closing off American borders to Jewish émigrés may have been what caused millions of Jews to leave Europe for historic Palestine instead.
The article — “Who Created the Israel-Palestine Conflict?” — is worth reading, not just for its insight into the historical antecedents of the current conflict in the Middle East, but for the obvious lesson about how the impact of restrictive U.S. immigration laws and policies can have disastrous unintended consequences for people in other countries — even 100 years later.