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Dear Letter to the Editor:
For nearly two decades the mainstream media has written about “Palestinian refugees” to describe the millions of Arabs living in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Every legitimate dictionary in the world defines refugee as a person who FLED their home because of religious or political persecution. FLED is the operative word.
The 1948 war in which five Arab armies representing millions and millions of Arabs attempted to annihilate the Jewish population (700,000) of the tiny nascent state of Israel ended in 1949. Any Arab refugee from that conflict has to be at least 74 years old or older. Of course, if they were ten years old when they fled, they would have to be 84 today. If they were twenty years old when they fled, they would have to be 94 today. It is unlikely throughout the entire world there are more than ten thousand Arab refugees from that conflict still alive. There may be many many less.
The millions of Palestinian Arabs living in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza described by the mainstream media as “Palestinian refugees” are not refugees… They are residents of where they were born: the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza. They did not flee from anywhere. It is not complicated. IF YOU DID NOT FLEE, YOU ARE NOT A REFUGEE.
The mainstream media as part of its antisemitic mindset attempts to create undeserved sympathy for Arabs who are not refugees by calling them “Palestinian refugees” and at the same time attempts to generate opprobrium against the Jewish people of Israel with the false implication that Israel “created” these millions of non existent “Palestinian refugees.”
It is as ludicrous for the mainstream media to call these residents of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza “Palestinian refugees” as it would be for them to call a Jew born in Ft. Lauderdale or New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago or Boulder in 1970 a “Polish refugee” because his or her Polish grandparents fled persecution in Poland in the 1930s.
The mainstream media’s continued willful blindness to the ONLY legitimate definition of refugee is pure antisemitism and nothing else.
Richard Sherman
Margate, Florida
