There is a cruelty even more refined than bullets and barrel bombs – the cruelty of keeping an entire people suspended in permanent victimhood because their suffering is more useful than their dignity. Palestinians are the only refugee population in human history with a dedicated UN agency – UNRWA – that does not resettle, does not integrate, does not naturalize, but instead perpetuates refugee status across generations like a hereditary curse, so that a child born in Beirut in 2025 whose great-grandmother fled Haifa in 1948 is still classified as a refugee despite never having set foot in the land she supposedly fled.

Every other refugee population on earth – Vietnamese, Afghan, Rwandan, Syrian, Ukrainian – is processed through UNHCR, which exists to end refugee status. UNRWA exists to preserve it, because the Arab world decided decades ago that five million permanently dispossessed human beings are more valuable as a demographic weapon against Israel than as citizens with passports, professions, and futures.

Arab states that thunder about the “right of return” at every General Assembly session are the same states that refuse to grant citizenship to Palestinians born on their own soil, educated in their own schools, and buried in their own cemeteries. Lebanon has held them for seventy-seven........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)