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By: Karen Bekker
Mohammad Zarqa, an 88-year old Palestinian man from Ein Karem who now lives in New Jersey, inadvertently revealed the crux of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when he told a CNN reporter, as quoted in a May 15 article online, “We will never stop wanting to return.”
Palestinian leaders rejected offers of independence and statehood in 2000, 2008, 2014 and 2020, in part because those offers did not permit them to use the Palestinian refugee issue to turn the world’s only Jewish-majority state into the world’s 57th Muslim-majority state. Of course, it was also Palestinian and other Arab leaders that created the refugee issue to begin with in 1948 when they refused to accept partition of Mandatory Palestine into one Jewish and one Arab state. But CNN’s Alaa Elassar omits both of these facts, in her quest to promote the narrative of a “catastrophe” that the Jews brought upon the Palestinian Arab people. (“From one generation to the next, Palestinians aim to keep the history of al-Nakba alive,” May 15, 2024.)
Like the demand for a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem, the demand for “return” to Israel of millions of descendants of refugees is a non-starter in peace talks between Israel and representatives of the Palestinians. Indeed, Jewish refugees from Arab countries who were expelled in the wake of the founding of Israel, whose descendants now make up about half of the Jewish population of Israel, were long ago integrated into the country, rather than retaining perpetual refugee status and nursing unrealistic hopes of return.
In 1947 a much larger population exchange occurred in India and Pakistan, displacing 15 million people. Europe, too, saw mass expulsions in the wake of Word War II. Yet Elassar quotes a UN official calling the Palestinians “the world’s longest-standing protracted refugee crisis,” seemingly without a trace of irony or of knowledge of these other world events. Again, the vast majority of other refugees resettled and moved on with their lives. That is why only the Palestinian refugee “crisis” lives on.
Though Elassar’s piece is not labelled “opinion,” it contains several unfalsifiable claims based on personal recollections of events that happened many decades ago. Such claims can make for riveting reading, regardless of whether they are true or not. So it is with CNN’s retelling of Zarqa’s account of the events of 1948 in Deir Yassin.
But, as CAMERA has noted before, in 1998, the Telegraph, a British outlet, has quoted another individual who also claimed to be an eyewitness to the events, stating:
The Arab radio talked of women being killed and raped, but this is not true… I believe that most of those who were killed were among the fighters and the women and children who helped the fighters. The Arab leaders committed a big mistake. By exaggerating the atrocities they thought they would encourage people to fight back harder. Instead they created panic and people ran away.
In addition, as CAMERA previously quoted from a 1998 article in the Jerusalem Report:
In a BBC television series, “Israel and the Arabs: the 50 Year Conflict,” Hazem Nusseibeh, an editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service’s Arabic news in 1948, describes an encounter at the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem’s Old City with Deir Yassin survivors and Palestinian leaders, including Hussein Khalidi, the secretary of the Arab Higher Committee (the representative body of the Arabs of British Palestine).
“I asked Dr. Khalidi how we should cover the story,” recalled Nusseibeh, now living in Amman. “He said, ‘We must make the most of this.’ So we wrote a press release stating that at Deir Yassin children were murdered, pregnant women were raped. All sorts of atrocities.”
A Deir Yassin survivor identified as Abu Mahmud, said the villagers protested at the time. “We said, ‘There was no rape.’ [Khalidi] said, ‘We have to say this, so the Arab armies will come to liberate Palestine from the Jews.’”
The events at that location have been highly contested, including in a recent book by Eliezer Tauber. But CNN’s readers would have no way to know that, as Alaa Elassar provides only one version of the story, with no countervailing claims, as if it were a known fact.
Nor is Elassar’s account of more recent events free from distortion. To make her case, Elassar relies on some common red herrings, such as the false claim that “the International Court of Justice says it’s “plausible” Israel is committing genocide,” – a claim that CNN itself has already corrected three times. She also points to comments made by Minister of Agriculture Avi Dichter, who described the war as “the Nakba of Gaza 2023,” though it’s not clear why she would think the Minister of Agriculture would set the agenda for the conduct of a war.
She writes, “Israel launched its war in Gaza after Hamas’ brutal attack in Israel on October 7, in which 1,200 people were killed and hundreds of others taken hostage, Israeli officials say.” (Emphasis added.) She continues, “In the seven months since that attack, Israel’s bombing campaign and ground offensive in Gaza has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. It also has imposed a siege and razed entire communities, rendering nearly 90% of the population displaced and everyone food insecure.” Of course, there has not been anything remotely resembling a siege since October 18, and her dutiful recitation of Hamas’s casualty statistics ignores that 15,000 of those killed have been Hamas fighters.
But most importantly, what she ignores about the current war is the same thing she ignores about the 1948 war: none of it had to happen. Had Israel not been attacked, beginning with Palestinian Arab militias in late 1947, leading up to the invasion by five (not, as Elassar claims, three) Arab armies, and then again on October 7, 2023, none of it would have happened. And, still today, Hamas could end the war in Gaza immediately if it returned the hostages and surrendered.
May 24, 2024 Update:
After hearing from many of CAMERA’s members, CNN removed the false claim that “the International Court of Justice says it’s ‘plausible’ Israel is committing genocide” – a claim that CNN had previously corrected three times. However, they substituted a quote from Francesca Albanese, whose antisemitic comments have made her notorious. When she was first appointed to her position as the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory, the Times of Israel reported:
A review of her past social media posts, media appearances and talks with activist groups found that aside from inveighing against a “Jewish lobby,” she has also sympathized with terror organizations, dismissed Israeli security concerns, compared Israelis to Nazis and accused the Jewish state of potential war crimes. … She rarely acknowledges Palestinian terrorism.
More recently, the U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN Human Rights Council, Michèle Taylor, has said of Albanese, “Francesca Albanese has a history of using antisemitic tropes. Her most recent statements justifying, dismissing, & denying the antisemitic undertones of Hamas’ October 7 attack are unacceptable & antisemitic.”
Although CNN removed the false claim about the International Court of Justice, they have arguably made the article even worse by including the words of someone well-known for her anti-Israel bias.
Karen Bekker is the Assistant Director of CAMERA’s Media Response Team. Prior to joining CAMERA, she practiced law for nine years as a commercial litigator.
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) is an international media-monitoring and educational organization founded in 1982 to promote accurate and unbiased coverage of Israel and the Middle East. CAMERA is a non-profit, tax-exempt, and non-partisan organization under section 501 (c)(3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code. To learn more or receive our newsletters please visit CAMERA.org.
