R – Refugee Issue
Although the mainstream Western media says “the dispute over the fate of the Palestinian refugees remains at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict” (AP, 5/16/14), the historical fact is that what the MSM for once accurately called “the Arab-Israeli conflict” (as opposed to “Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” AP 2/17/14; in actuality, it is “the Arab war on Israel”) generated more Middle Eastern Jewish refugees from vast Muslim lands (800,000 – 850,000), who were forced from their homes, properties and businesses, where many had lived for thousands of years, than Arabs fled what became tiny Israel (470,000- 650,000). As in other wars, both sides had refugees. That Israel absorbed the Arab lands’ Jewish refugees, while descendants of the Arabs who left Israel in 1948 languish in isolation today in “host” countries’ “refugee camps” (some of them in Arab-controlled parts of “Palestine” itself), does not turn a conflict’s two-sided refugee issue into the Western media-purveyed “Palestinian refugee issue.”
*** AP, 2/17/14: “The fate of the Palestinian refugees is one of the most emotional issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”
The AP further wrote in this article (emphasis added):
Israeli leaders have long demanded that the Palestinian leadership publicly renounce the right of return and say refugees should be resettled in a future Palestinian state or offered compensation.
By referring to the Arab-demanded “right of return” as “the right of return,” the AP bestows on that disputed claim the stature of an unquestioned existing right, not of a contested claim. Language like “…publicly renounce the claimed right of return” would have been balanced.