Another excellent column from Caroline Glick, on managing the pathologies of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In Geneva this week, under UN aegis and Swiss funding, the “international community” held a donors conference for UNRWA — the UN’s self-appointed wing of the Arab war against Israel. UNRWA is the only UN refugee relief service that has dedicated itself to preventing relief to refugees. This it has done for over 50 years by preventing Arab refugees from the 1948 War of Independence and their foreign-born families from being integrated in the countries where they have lived for generations.

They are restricted instead to the UNRWA refugee camps, which serve as terrorist havens where these people are indoctrinated in the arts of jihad. There they are kept as a weapon for the destruction of Israel, ready for battle as their misery is eternalized.

Although the conference was convened by the UN, one UN member state that no doubt has a thing or two to say about UNRWA was conspicuously absent from the guest list. Israel was not invited to the conference.

During the conference, which was touted as “apolitical,” attendees were regaled by propaganda film after propaganda film, all financed by the generous contribution of the Swiss government.

These films painted a picture of the IDF intentionally seeking to murder Palestinian children and nastily and gratuitously destroying the homes of innocent Palestinians in Jenin, Rafah and elsewhere. In short, it was a blood libel.

While Israel was contemptuously barred from the conference, the Palestinians were represented by a full complement of PLO spokesmen who handed out slick literature to the conference participants.

According to an Israeli journalist who was present, this included, “precise maps of where and how the UNRWA camp residents could take back their homes [in Israel] from 1948.”

Here we see what the Palestinian leadership is about. Its aim is to destroy Israel and its primary resource for doing so is the misery of its people. Yet there is a wrinkle in this tale.

Although the Palestinians are increasingly admitting that their lives under Arafat’s PA have become untenable, they are in no rush to replace him. Opinion poll after opinion poll shows that Arafat is still the most popular leader, followed on now by convicted mass murderer Marwan Barghouti. How do we square this circle?

We can understand this seeming contradiction when we realize that, still today, in the absence of another viable option, the overwhelming majority of Palestinians continues to view the destruction of Israel as their primary goal. While they reasonably seek out ways to improve their lots in life, which necessarily involve combating terrorism and replacing terrorist leaders with regular bureaucrats and politicians, they are neither willing nor able to let go of their strategic goal of destroying Israel. They view propaganda conferences like the one in Geneva as a useful tool in the war even as here, on the ground, they are willing to admit that such libels do not reflect reality.