Palestinian refugees

Natan Sharansky writes today of one of the root causes of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict - the fact that half a century after Arabs fled Israel in the 1948 war, they're still considered refugees and the United Nations is doing nothing to try to settle them in permanent locations as they do with every other refugee group around the world.

For decades, the international community has actively assisted in building the terrorists' unique system of control -- over where Palestinians live and in what conditions, and over what they think -- by allowing terrorists to turn the refugee camps into the center of the Palestinian war machine. Instead of working to relieve the refugees' misery, the United Nations has dedicated an entire agency, UNRWA, to perpetuating it. For the rest of the world's refugees, the U.N. works tirelessly to improve their conditions, to relocate them, and to help them rebuild their lives as quickly as possible. With the Palestinians, the U.N. does exactly the opposite, granting refugee status to the great-grandchildren of people displaced in 1948, doing nothing to dismantle the camps, and acting as facilitators for the terrorists' goal of grinding an entire civilian population under their thumb. Nowhere on earth do terrorists get so much help from the Free World.

It is not only the refugee camps that the West has helped sustain. For years, Hamas in Gaza -- like Hezbollah in Lebanon, and like the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat -- has been amassing huge stockpiles of weaponry, most of it under the noses of Western observers who are meant to prevent the import of such weapons. It's as if we are telling the terrorists: Go on, build your armies, prepare for war. We understand.

The same can be said about the use of children as human shields. Where was the West when Palestinian leaders were actively transforming their children's classrooms into indoctrination centers for martyrdom?

And so, invariably, the script is played out: Hamas fires its missiles, Israel responds with military force in Gaza, children are killed, their pictures are played countless times on televisions in the West, articles are published saying both sides are evil, and Israel is pressured to stop.

As Sharansky details, everyone knows that the Palestinian leaders have no interest in they type of efforts that the U.N. makes for other refugee groups. They have a vested interest in keeping their own people as permanent refugees so that they have a ready supply of new fighters as well as ready victims for the cameras of the western media to excite sympathy and reflexive condemnations of Israel. Note also that other Arab countries have not assisted in trying to settle in their own countries those Palestinians they supposedly care so much about.

It's been 60 years since Israel's war for independence. Why haven't Arab countries absorbed their brother Arabs into their populations? We all know the answer. They prefer to have the issue to goad western sympathies and serve as a casus belli and an excuse for terror.