Following Laura Loomer’s lead, the US is repeating an egregious Holocaust-era mistake
We turned away the MS St. Louis — and now we’re turning away Palestinians in desperate need of medical care
Ahmad Abdullah Al-Ghalban, a 16-year-old Palestinian boy in Gaza whose injuries sustained in an Israeli airstrike — which killed his brother — led to the amputation of both his legs and the loss of several fingers on his hand. Since the incident, the Al-Ghalban family has lacked shelter and adequate medical care. Photo by Mahmoud Abu Hamda/Middle East Images via AFP
Hadar Susskind August 21, 2025
As an Israeli-American, I was raised with deep awareness of how the horrors of the Nazi killing machine were compounded by the refusal of countries outside of Europe to see the humanity of Jewish refugees. The United States was no exception. Strict quotas, put in place by xenophobic politicians in Washington, restricted entry.
The case of the MS St Louis is perhaps the most painful example of this callousness. In 1939, the ship sailed to North America from Hamburg, with 937 passengers on board. 28 were allowed to disembark in Cuba. The remainder, most of whom were Jewish refugees who had applied for U.S. visas, were denied entry; the ship wasn’t even allowed to enter American ports. Ultimately, with humanitarian conditions on the ship deteriorating, the St. Louis returned to Europe, where 254 of the passengers were killed in the Holocaust.
In the years after World War II, Americans came to understand that the failure to take in the refugees of the St. Louis was a grave error — an abandonment of the values on which we like to believe that our country was founded. In 2009, the Senate unanimously passed a resolution acknowledging the suffering caused by America’s refusal to provide asylum to the refugees. In 2012, the State Department formally apologized for the U.S.’s failure in rejecting the St. Louis; Bill Burns, who was then serving as Deputy Secretary of State, said that “Our government did not live up to its ideals. We were wrong.”
“And so we made a commitment,” he added, “that the next time the world confronts us with another MS St. Louis — whether the warning signs are refugees in flight or ancient hatreds resurfacing — we will have learned the lessons of the MS St. Louis and be ready to rise to the occasion.”
Well, that “next time” is here, and the U.S. is once again turning its back on its values. The State Department announced on Saturday that it had frozen all visitor visas for people from Gaza — not that many were being granted in the first place. But a small number of “medical-humanitarian” visas were being issued, primarily to critically injured children.
Is cancelling those visas what rising to the occasion looks like?
The U.S. is supposed to be a refuge for oppressed minorities. That goal is a central tenet of the American mythos. It’s a point taught to generation after generation of schoolchildren, beginning with the history of the Pilgrims, who, having broken with the Church of England, came to these shores to escape persecution at home.
There are many issues that progressives and conservatives in this country can disagree about. But providing necessary care and refuge to children injured in Gaza should not be controversial. Denying critically injured kids access to medical treatment in the U.S. isn’t a matter of strategic geopolitics. It’s a test of basic humanity. And our government is failing — which means that all of us are.
The move to stop issuing visas was made less than 24 hours after Laura Loomer, a right-wing Jewish activist with substantial influence in President Donald Trump’s administration, issued a battery of posts on the social media network X asking pointed questions about why some Palestinians from Gaza were being allowed to enter the U.S.
“Who signed off on these visas?” she asked. “They should be fired.”
The organization targeted in Loomer’s tweets, HEAL Palestine, has reportedly brought 63 injured children, ages 6 to 15, to receive medical treatment in the U.S. Videos posted on the group’s Instagram page — some of which were featured in Loomer’s materials — show those children arriving at U.S. airports with horrific traumatic injuries, including missing limbs.
Loomer made the baseless claim that these children are a “national security” concern, and threw around barely coded language calling medical evacuations from Gaza to the U.S. an “invasion.” Her statements directly echoed the antisemitic rhetoric of American politics from the 1930s, and it worked: The White House announced through social media that it would review the procedures that had allowed in a “small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days.”
The reality is that by taking in this tiny number of medical evacuees — all of whom are here on a temporary basis — the U.S. is barely making any headway in addressing the crises afflicting Gazans. Recent testimony before the United Nations’ Committee on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities showed that, on average, 10 children in Gaza are losing at least one limb every day of this war. All told, some 3% of Gaza’s children have become disabled as a direct result of the conflict.
I fear that, by turning our back on these children, we are setting the stage for our grandchildren to learn of the time their country turned its back on innocent victims of a terrible war — just as I grew up learning of the time the U.S. turned its back on the MS St. Louis.
Being Jewish means being called to live lives of moral righteousness, and to atone for our shortcomings to ourselves, our families, our communities and our world. Each year, we must resolve to do better.
Doing better, at this critical juncture, must involve the American people — with American Jews at the forefront — doing everything we can to reverse the Trump administration’s decision. One place for American Jews to start is to get our community leaders, too many of whom have been silent or full of equivocation, to begin speaking up boldly and clearly. We must uphold the basic truth that every child, whether they sailed on the MS St. Louis in 1939 or are trying to fly to the U.S. from Gaza right now, deserves the chance to live.
