There’s an old saying in politics: when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. The same holds true for migration. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, two Israeli parliamentarians — Danny Danon and Ram Ben-Barak — implored America and Europe to welcome Palestinians from Gaza. It was pitched as duty, framed as decency, marketed as morality.
For too long, that world has dodged this responsibility, outsourcing it to Europe’s suburbs and America’s cities.
But Denmark, of all places, has already believed the evidence the first time. And last month, it finally slammed the door.
In August 2025, Copenhagen refused even Palestinian cancer patients, citing the risk that medical mercy becomes migratory permanence. Cruel? That’s what the critics screamed. Clear-eyed? That’s what the Danes knew. Because they had already tried, already paid, already tallied the receipts.
The experiment began in 1992, when Denmark took in 321 Palestinians. A tiny figure by global standards. The sort of number a government could proudly point to at international conferences. A token of Nordic benevolence. But like so many tokens, it was symbolic without being thought through.
Because those 321 arrivals did not become model citizens. They became a case study in what happens when noble sentiment collides with cultural reality. By 2019, 204 of them — nearly two-thirds — had criminal convictions. Not parking tickets. Convictions. Their children, 999 in number, didn’t break the cycle — they repeated it. Roughly a third, about 330 kids, had convictions of their own.
This is not compassion at work. It is arithmetic. A trickle became a torrent: 321 → 204 criminals. 999 → 330 convicts.
And still the bill didn’t end there. A 2018 Finance Ministry report estimated that non-Western immigrants and their descendants cost Danish taxpayers €2.4 billion ($2.8 billion) annually, with Palestinians punching far above their demographic weight in welfare dependency. Denmark’s welfare state, built as a civic covenant with its own people, became a bank account for others.
So when critics demand to know why Denmark won’t even let in Gaza’s sick, the answer is written in those numbers. Compassion wasn’t denied. Compassion was already tried — and it left scars.
The lesson here is not that Palestinians are irredeemable. The lesson is that Western democracies are the wrong vessel for this burden. Europe’s fragile social contracts cannot absorb entire populations forged in a crucible of grievance and resistance. Liberal democracies fracture when stretched beyond their cultural seams. The Danish test proved it.
Which is why the future should not be decided in Copenhagen or Chicago, but in Riyadh, Doha, Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta. The Gulf monarchies, flush with oil wealth and urban megaprojects, can construct new towns in months; surely they can construct new lives for fellow Arabs. Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, and Malaysia, where Islamic tradition underpins civic life, have already signaled willingness to welcome Palestinians. Those initiatives should be encouraged and expanded, because they represent precisely the kind of culturally aligned, regionally grounded solutions that can succeed where Western democracies have failed.
Jordan has shouldered millions, to the point that it is now demographically Palestinian in all but name. Lebanon, brittle and broken, has hosted hundreds of thousands for decades, though at immense strain. Egypt, by contrast, has consistently refused permanent resettlement, restricting citizenship and framing Palestinian presence as temporary. But the wider Arab and Muslim world has the resources, proximity, and cultural continuity to assume greater responsibility.
For too long, that world has dodged this responsibility, outsourcing it to Europe’s suburbs and America’s cities. That dodge ends now. Because Denmark has spoken. Not in rhetoric but in results. The Danish test was run, the figures recorded, the budget tallied, the verdict written: Never again.
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