The monopoly on victimhood

In recent decades, an absurd phenomenon has taken shape: the Palestinians have claimed for themselves an almost exclusive monopoly on the status of “victim,” as if there are no other peoples in the world being slaughtered, expelled, and persecuted right now. While Christians are massacred by jihadist groups in Nigeria, and Christian and non‑Sunni Muslim minorities are butchered in Sudan and Syria, the global discourse is obsessively fixated on one single population – the Palestinians – who are not only victims, but also an active and violent party in the conflict, all while enjoying a steady stream of international money.

The paradox is simple: those who continue to fire rockets at civilians, dig attack tunnels, and pay “salaries” to terrorists for murdering Jews are portrayed on the international stage as absolute victims, and any criticism is treated as heresy against the religion of victimhood.

The hereditary refugee industry

In 1948, people spoke of around 700,000 Arab refugees who left, or were made to leave, the territory of the newly established State of Israel. Today, according to UNRWA and academic publications, that number has turned into roughly six million “Palestinian refugees,” an increase of more than eightfold compared to the original population. There is no other refugee population in the world that has grown in this way without its status being resolved or gradually diminished over time.

The reason is clear: UNRWA, the dedicated agency for Palestinians, grants refugee status as an inherited label, passed from generation to generation, instead of seeing refugeehood as a temporary condition that must be resolved through rehabilitation, resettlement, or integration. While the UN’s general refugee agency, UNHCR, defines success as the end of refugee status through citizenship or integration, UNRWA functions as a mechanism for preserving the problem.

Two refugee systems, two standards

The gap between the treatment of Palestinians and that of all other refugees is glaring. UNHCR reports tens of millions of refugees and internally displaced persons worldwide, most of them in “protracted displacement,” yet its declared goal is to move them toward a solution: repatriation, resettlement in a host country, or citizenship where they have found refuge. The Palestinians, by contrast, are deliberately kept in a limbo status: not truly absorbed in Arab states, not encouraged to move on with their lives, but preserved as a living political card.

Many analyses in English put it bluntly: passing down refugee status indefinitely across generations creates a situation in which only one group on earth enjoys an ever‑expanding refugee label rather than a shrinking one. Whereas a Syrian refugee who gains citizenship in Germany ceases to be a refugee, a Palestinian with Jordanian citizenship or permanent status in another Arab country can continue to be counted as a “refugee” for purposes of propaganda and funding.

The economy of victimhood: when the world becomes an ATM

Behind the emotional rhetoric about “Palestinian rights” lies a well‑oiled economy of victimhood. States and private donors pour billions of dollars into the Gaza Strip and Palestinian Authority institutions under noble headings such as “humanitarian aid” and “development.” In practice, a significant share of the money is channeled into governance and terror infrastructures: building offensive tunnels, producing rockets, propaganda, and payment systems for terrorists’ families.

The phenomenon known in the West as “pay for slay” is not a slogan but a policy: the more Jews a terrorist has murdered, the higher the rewards his family receives in salaries and stipends. This is a corrupt incentive structure connecting Jewish blood to a steady flow of money from the world. Instead of poverty and displacement generating a desire to escape the cycle of violence, they are turned into a political currency that must never be redeemed, because resolving it would mean turning off the tap.

While other places are bleeding

The moral stance that proclaims “the Palestinians are the central victims of the world” collapses the moment one looks at the map. Christians and farmers in Nigeria are slaughtered by jihadist militias; in Sudan, brutal civil wars have produced hundreds of thousands of deaths and mass displacement; in Syria, for more than a decade now, there has been a vast campaign of mass killing against minorities – Christians, Druze, Alawites, Shia – alongside Sunnis themselves. These are not “low‑intensity conflicts” but systematic campaigns of slaughter.

And yet, the bulk of “social justice” protests on Western campuses is not dedicated to Sudan, Nigeria, or Syria, but to Gaza and Ramallah. Those who try to speak about Christian victims in Africa or minorities being murdered in Syria usually face an awkward silence, because these realities do not fit the neat narrative in which there is only one villain – Israel – and only one victim – the Palestinians.

Aggressive erasure of every other victim

The Palestinian narrative does not stop at displaying suffering; it tramples every other instance of suffering. The very idea that there are other refugees, other massacres, other peoples robbed of their lands threatens the carefully built hierarchy that places Palestinians as the “ultimate victims.” That is why any attempt to compare, or even to mention other victims, is often answered with demagogic accusations: “whataboutism,” “racism,” “Islamophobia.”

The outcome is that precisely at a time when murderous Muslims are butchering Christians in many parts of Africa and the Middle East, public discourse in the West mobilizes to portray the Palestinians – some of whose institutions share ideological roots with those same jihadist movements – as eternal victims entitled to absolute moral immunity and exemption from responsibility. This is not just hypocrisy; it is a profound moral perversion, in which the only suffering allowed to count as “real” is the one that serves the dominant political story.

The Jews: once again the victims it is acceptable to hurt

Here enters a bitter irony. The Jews, who were the unequivocal victims of a modern genocide, are now cast as the “colonialist aggressor,” while the Palestinians, whose institutions often preserve antisemitism and violence, are painted as the bearers of human rights. When Jews are murdered in terror attacks, the standard response in much of the media and academia is a call for “restraint on both sides,” as though there is no difference between the one who initiates the slaughter and the one who defends himself.

In practice, a disturbing mechanism has evolved: every terror attack that manages to provoke an Israeli military response produces more images of Palestinian “victims,” which then feed more conferences, more campaigns, more fundraising, and more justifications for the next round of terror. There is no peace here and no reconciliation; there is a cycle of violence built on the cynical exploitation of the victim image to generate more power, more money, and more hatred.

The West’s responsibility: stop paying for the lie

Western countries must finally say what is obvious to anyone not captured by ideology: humanitarian resources should go first and foremost to victims who have no voice, no lobby, no dedicated UN agency, and no political dividends from their own blood. Real refugees are those who seek to escape refugeehood, not those whose leaders fight for the right to remain refugees forever.

Continuing to fund a model of hereditary refugeehood, antisemitic propaganda, and terror in the name of “compassion” is a betrayal of the real victims of our time. The Palestinians are not immune to criticism, and the world is under no obligation to go on functioning as the ATM of a cynical elite that turns Jews into victims yet again, while denying shattered nations elsewhere even the crumbs of attention that might have saved them.