For years Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza worked in Israel's tourism industry. Moving from the occupied areas into Israel was never easy, but it was at least possible to get across the checkpoints and get a job. The cycle of violence has tightened the checkpoints, isolated those in Gaza and the West Bank, increased unemployment for young Palestinian men and further increased the violence.

Now, instead of having a large class of people willing to work low wage jobs who resided in occupied areas outside of Israel proper, you have a growing number of people who want to do this work and live inside Israel. If the strategy is to wall off the Palestinians and pretend they don't exist, accepting more refugees is one way to facilitate that. Of course, it doesn't help preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state, but having an underclass of African Christians and Muslims might be seen as considerably better than an underclass of extremist Arab Muslims.