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 years and offered them nothing. Syria gave them travel documents but no rights. The Gulf states employ them on temporary contracts and discard them when the politics shift.

And there is no need to rehearse Egypt’s treatment of Palestinians fleeing Gaza during the most recent war – the inflated prices charged at the border for passage, the families gouged for thousands of dollars to cross Rafah, the reports of Palestinians treated not as refugees fleeing bombardment but as customers at a toll booth where the currency was desperation and the markup was obscene. Even in the midst of what the Arab world called a genocide, the nearest Arab state found a way to monetize Palestinian suffering rather than alleviate it.

This is the civilization that produces more UN resolutions against Israel per year than peer-reviewed scientific papers per capita – and sees no connection between these two facts. For seventy-seven years, the Arab obsession with Israel has functioned as the single most effective distraction mechanism in modern political history – a machine that converts every domestic failure into an external grievance, every governance deficit into a Zionist conspiracy, every educational collapse into proof that resistance matters more than reform.

Arab universities teach their students that Israel is the root cause of every regional pathology – underdevelopment, authoritarianism, corruption, brain drain – and then those same graduates board planes to London, Montreal, and Berlin because their own countries offer them nothing: no jobs, no freedoms, no future.

And once settled in the West, they march against Israel on weekends, having fled the very Arab order whose failures they refuse to examine because examining them would require retiring the single most comfortable explanation the Arab world has ever manufactured for its own dysfunction. Israel is not the cause of Arab failure. Israel is the excuse for it – and the excuse has cost the Arab world more than any war ever did, because wars eventually end, but the refusal to look inward has no expiration date.

Had Israel not been born in 1948, the Arab world would have had to invent it. The creation of the Jewish state arrived at the precise moment when Arab nationalism was at its most febrile – a movement desperately in need of a unifying adversary to mask its own internal contradictions, sectarian fractures, and the inconvenient reality that its loudest champions were military despots who had liberated no one but themselves.

Israel became the indispensable enemy: a permanent alibi for every failed state, every starving population, every constitution never written, and every election never held. The rhetoric was too potent, too emotionally profitable, to remain confined to a single generation. It was inherited wholesale by the next, not as a rational political grievance open to negotiation, but as a civilizational spasm – automatic, involuntary, primal, hereditary, allergic to its own interrogation, and immune to introspection. It was treated as an article of faith so deeply embedded in the collective psyche that to question it became its own form of heresy.

The arithmetic is brutally simple. Without the creation of Israel, there would be no Arab Palestinian population as a distinct national category, and no demand for a Palestinian state. The term “Arab Palestinian” did not exist until decades after 1948 – it was a political identity born in reaction, not in history. Before the establishment of Israel, it was the Jews of the land who carried the name “Palestinian.” The identity was appropriated only after it became useful.

Without Israel, the same regimes would have manufactured another phantom – a Crusader ghost, a Persian conspiracy, an imaginary Western dagger aimed at the heart of Arabism – because the function was never about Palestine; it was about deflection. The enemy had to exist so that the dictator did not have to explain.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)