This paper traces how the George H. W. Bush administration’s support for mass Soviet Jewish immigration to Israel in 1989-1991 inadvertently undermined U.S. claims to neutrality in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Throughout the Cold War, the United States granted presumptive refugee status to the relatively few Soviet Jews whom Moscow permitted to emigrate. In 1989, however, at precisely the moment Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberal reforms triggered the exodus of Soviet Jewry, the Bush administration quietly enacted numerous immigration restrictions that aimed to redirect the flow of Soviet Jewish migration to Israel. Unlike U.S. officials, who conceived of Soviet Jewish emigration purely as a human rights issue, Palestinians interpreted this latest wave of Jewish immigration as evidence that the Bush administration’s claims to impartiality in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process rang hollow. As PLO publications, U.S. government documents, and other Arabic-language materials reveal, the influx of Soviet Jewish immigrants in Israel from early 1990 onward gave rise to a narrative across the Arab Middle East that Palestinians were “paying the price” for U.S.-Soviet détente, or that a new nakba was in the offing. Members of the ruling Likud appeared to corroborate this interpretation, triumphantly declaring throughout early 1990 that the new aliyah would provide Israel with the demographic boost it needed to retain the occupied territories, quell the intifada, and establish a “Greater Israel.” Ultimately, the Bush administration’s failure to anticipate and take seriously these Palestinian grievances laid bare the limits of American pretenses to impartiality in the U.S.-sponsored peace process.