Experts have reacted with surprise and consternation to Swiss foreign affairs minister Ignazio Cassis’ comments that the United Nations’ aid work for Palestinian refugees is a stumbling block to peace in the Middle East.

So long as Palestinians live in refugee camps, they can dream of returning home, Cassis said in an interview published in several Swiss newspapers on Thursday, which came after his first official trip to Jordan. Five million Palestinian refugees currently live in such camps, with aid and protection provided by the UNRWA.

“He said that UNRWA had become part of the problem rather than the solution and it supplied the ammunition to continue the conflict. “By supporting the UNRWA, we keep the conflict alive. It’s a perverse logic,” Cassis said. He called for the integration of long-term refugees in their countries of residence.

Ignazio Cassis, having seen for himself the “Palestinians” kept in camps, understood the cruel hypocrisy of the situation: the Arab countries deliberately keep the “Palestinians” in camps, do not allow them to become citizens (save for a brief period in Jordan), nor to enjoy full access to higher education, nor to enter certain professions, all in order to keep them in harshly constrained conditions, prevented from integrating into their host countries, so that their own resentment of Israel is kept at a boiling point, and at the same time, in those UNRWA-run camps, their wretched state is a constant reminder to  the “international community” of the “plight of the Palestinians.”

No one, and especially no one at UNRWA, wants it to be known that the other Arabs are to blame for the condition of the “Palestinians” in the camps.