CAMERA’s Israel office yesterday prompted correction of an English-language Agence France Presse article which erroneously reported that all of the Palestinian refugees from 1948 were forcibly displaced from their homes. In fact, the vast majority of the estimated 760,000 Palestinian Arabs who left in 1948 fled, often at the urging of their own leaders. They were not “forcibly displaced.”
The Arab section of Safed, 1946 (Photo by Kluger Zoltan, GPO Photo Archive)
AFP’s usual language on this point accurately reports “more than 760,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes by the 1948 war over Israel’s creation.” (See, for instance, “Palestinian family in Lebanon grieves for dead Gaza relatives,” Nov. 27, 2023. Likewise, AFP’s Dec. 27, 2023 article, “Israel army chief says Gaza war to last ‘many more months,'” which cited “the 1948 war that accompanied Israel’s creation when 760,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes.” (Emphases added.)
Following CAMERA’s correspondence with AFP, editors commendably updated the article, changing the sentence to accurately state: “The majority of the Palestinian population, around 760,000 people, either fled or were forced from their homes during the conflict, in what they call the Nakba or catastrophe.”
The Guardian and Reuters Arabic have previously corrected the identical error after wrongly referring to all 1948 Palestinian refugees as expelled.