by Jacob G. Hornberger

March 31, 2026

It should be painfully clear by now to everyone that the Middle East is consigned to a state of violence into perpetuity. The Israeli government will never accept either a two-state or a one-state solution and is absolutely determined to keep Palestinians living in an open-air prison forever. For their part, Palestinians will never acquiesce to living their lives in that way into perpetuity and, therefore, will resist with periodic bouts of violence against Israelis. Moreover, there will always be people and regimes in the Middle East that will side with the Palestinians. In other words, a state of perpetual, ongoing violence forever.

It’s worth noting, however, that if the American people had retained their system of open borders on which America was founded, things almost certainly would have been completely different. That’s because it is unlikely that the state of Israel, which violently displaced the Palestinians who had been living in the area in which Israel was established, would have been formed in the first place.

One of the principal reasons for establishing Israel was to provide Jews a safe haven or sanctuary that would spare Jews the horrors of another Holocaust, in which an estimated 6 million Jews were killed.

But if the United States had still had its system of open borders, Jews would have had a sanctuary from the Holocaust. They could have left Nazi Germany and Eastern Europe and freely come to the United States, where they would have been assured that they would not be forcibly deported to their country of origin. That’s what open borders means.

Having the United States as a safe haven that would have essentially nullified the Holocaust — or at least significantly reduced the number of Jews killed — would have diminished, if not eliminated, the need for an Israeli state that could serve as a sanctuary from another Holocaust.

But it was not to be. That’s because by the early 1930s, when Adolf Hitler came into power, America had abandoned its system of open borders in favor of a government-controlled, centrally planned immigration system.

In fact, one of the dark aspects of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust is the role that the U.S. government — and specifically its system of immigration controls — played in the deaths of those millions of Jews. Needless to say, it’s not a story that public (i.e., government) schoolteachers teach American students. Instead, it’s a story that U.S. officials at the federal, state, and local levels do their best to suppress.

Keep in mind that the Holocaust didn’t occur until the middle of World War II. During the decade of the 1930s, Hitler was willing to let Jews leave Germany alive. Lots of Americans don’t realize that and are undoubtedly shocked to learn it.

But there was one big problem. Simply because people are free to leave a country doesn’t necessarily mean that they are going to leave, even when they are being brutally mistreated. The reason for that is that they need a place to go. If no country is willing to accept them, then they have no choice but to stay right where they are.

That’s precisely what happened with those German Jews who Hitler was willing to let go. They had no country to go to! That’s because every country used its immigration-control system to keep them from entering that country.

That included the United States, whose federal governmental officials were in some cases every bit as anti-Semitic as Hitler and the Nazis were. When Hitler offered to release German Jews, President Franklin Roosevelt, who is touted as a great humanitarian president, responded that America had a quota system as part of its immigration-control system and that the quota for German citizens had already been filled. Thus, the U.S. government refused to allow any more German Jews to enter the United States. If they entered illegally, the U.S. government would deport them to Germany, much as the U.S. government is deporting illegal immigrants today.

It’s worth recalling what has infamously become known as the “voyage of the damned.” A German ship filled with Jewish refugees approached Havana harbor but the Cuban government was just as anti-Semitic as the U.S. government. It refused to permit the Jewish refugees to disembark.

Thus, the German ship captain, who was sympathetic toward the plight of his passengers, headed toward Miami harbor. But U.S. officials put out orders to the Coast Guard to not permit even one of those Jews to step foot in the United States.

The ship captain reluctantly headed back toward Nazi Germany, much to the consternation and dismay, needless to say, of his Jewish passengers. At the last minute, the British government and some European governments agreed to accept the refugees. Many of those who ended up in Europe later died in the Holocaust.

This entire dark, sordid story is depicted in a movie entitled Voyage of the Damned, starring Faye Dunaway, Max von Sydow, Lee Grant (who won an Academy Award), James Mason, Orson Wells (as narrator), and others.

Under a system of open borders, those German refugees, along with all other German Jews, would have been free to enter the United States, and there is nothing the federal government could have done to prevent it. Moreover, Jews throughout Eastern Europe would have known that the United States was a sanctuary for Jews (and everyone else in the world), which would have given them a country to which they could have gone.

Thus, with a system of open borders, there would have been no Holocaust because millions of Jews would have freely found sanctuary here in the United States. In that case, the driving motivation for the establishment of the Israeli state would not have existed, in which case the Middle East would not be stricken with its decades-long, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual, and permanent cycle of violence.

As a side note, it’s worth pointing out the important lesson this holds for those libertarians who favor an “Ellis Island” immigration system rather than an open-border system. That’s because the Ellis Island system vested the federal government with the power to decide who enters the United States and who doesn’t. In the beginning, the power was used to exclude anarchists and people with tuberculosis. But the Ellis Island power was soon used to keep out Chinese immigrants. Ultimately, it extended to keeping out Jews. Once government is vested with the power to decide who comes in and who doesn’t, the power is inevitably going to be abused.